Hancock's Critics are Envious Cretins

Our country is addicted to suffering

Hypocrisy and envy are Britain's national sins. When evidence of Matt Hancock's sexual indiscretions came to light last month, the country was outraged, not by the Health Minister's infidelity to his wife, but by the idea that he should break the same arbitrary rules which he himself imposed upon the rest of Britain. 

Commentators were quick to point out the distinction between the behaviour which they themselves had undertaken following the orders meted out to them by the Conservative government, and the behaviour of Hancock himself, trotting out, more often than not, a photo of a suffering elderly relative of theirs for greater moral impact:

Emma Webb @Emma_A_Webb

Here’s a photo of my 93 year old grandma, locked inside her care home. When this photo was taken, we were trying to explain to her why we couldn’t give her a hug.

“It's one rule for them and another for us!” was the general outcry. “Hancock can rub his secretary up in the break room, and Cummings can swan about an empty village, but the rest of us have to toe the line, it seems." 

Well, yes. You are the plebeian muck stupid enough to vote, to be ruled, and to follow the arbitrary restrictions imposed upon you, and they are the ones who make them. You are the one who watched the birth of their child through double glazed glass from the hospital's flowerbed, who told their ageing, demented mother that a hug would murder her, who called up their sister on day one to tell her that rubbing down everything that enters the house with white vinegar and baking soda — something which doctors had spent seven years trying to dissuade her from — might actually be a good idea after all.

The mutual understanding between an effective government and its citizens is that certain laws are just not to be followed. Or, if they are to be followed, they are only to be followed by the idiots unaware of this unspoken social contract. The entire body of British common law, from which not a single article has ever been removed — only ever added upon, modified, or metastasized — consists of piles and piles of laws of which it would be impossible to simultaneously comply with without their either contradicting each other or impeding the normal economic or social activity of the country. Anyone who complied with all of the Covid-19 regulations is a fool, and anyone who did not and who now criticises Hancock is a hypocrite. Hancock did with his restrictions what ought to have been done with them: he ignored them.

But this moral outrage is not about protecting the public. It is about the perverse masochism which riddles this country and always has: the desire to demonstrate how much harder-off you are than your neighbour. You are worth nothing in this country unless you have made yourself suffer first. “I worked my fingers to the bone for fifty years;” “I never took a handout from anyone;” “I didn't see my children for months in order to protect them.” You are a cretin.

It would not be half as bad if this cult of suffering did not demand that others suffer too. As a young man my parents decided that, as they had suffered to bring me into the world and raise me, I ought to learn the value of work, though it brought me little to no economic liberty or advantage. Indeed, it did not. The only company willing to hire me was a factory which produced music records, and which was isolated from any public transport links. As I had no means to arrive by my own means — not knowing how to drive, nor owning a car, nor yet possessing any aptitude in cycling — it was necessary that my parents pay for me to be carried to and from the factory in a black cab, the price of which exceeded what I took home in earnings.

I had the fortune of being able to convince the boss, a short Kentish man and recovering alcoholic, that he let me read during my work hours. My job was to place one vinyl record after another onto a machine's conveyor belt where they would be shrink wrapped. It was a job which required no thought and little else beyond a repetitive motor movement of my left arm. With the right, I would press a paperback book down on the small work surface which extended out from the machine and I would read. I spent this time memorising the majority of Houseman's A Shropshire Lad, alternating this rote-learning with study of Antonio Gramsci's prison notebooks. 

Besides this latter work stirring resentment in me, (though more toward my colleagues than my superiors) this activity of reading did not impede my productivity one bit. On the contrary, having this extended period for which I was obligated to remain stationary in one place meant that I was reading more than I ever would have had I been left idle at home. My reading, and especially the rote learning of poetry, I took to be even a nutritious activity, furnishing my mind as I was with at least some beauty. 

A rather haggard woman who worked alongside me and who may have lived a good sixty years, but who more likely had lived a rather bad forty, objected to this little privilege which I had talked my way into. "Why should he be allowed to read when we are not?" she complained, as if she would have read Proust if only given the chance. The other girls (for I was the only male) from whom my reading had at first only received indifference, now took umbrage as well. The problem was not that they were suffering more for my reading, but that there was one among them who was not suffering sufficiently. A formal complaint was filed and I was stripped of that one pleasure which sustained me.

It was to this short anecdote that my mind turned when Hancock began to be harassed by the public. I am perhaps in a better position to understand him than most. Like him, I used the advantages available to me to make the best of a bad situation. I, too, was betrayed by envious cretins incapable of doing the same. Had Hancock chosen not to have carnal relations with his secretary, would the suffering of his critics and their geriatric parents be any less? Is their suffering greater for his pleasure? No. But the green eyed masochist will persist.