Hancock: Half-Human, Half Wit

It is stating the obvious that few politicians inhabit the world as we know it, but in Health Secretary Matt Hancock, it seems the British Parliament has been infiltrated by an authentic, off-planet alien life-form, a thing so clearly other than human that every member of our species recoils at the mere sight or sound of it. In a spirit of inquiry, therefore, we shall attempt to unmask the beast within our midst.

As befits the star character in a sci-fi horror movie, the ugliness of the Hancock is both visible and implicit. The repulsion we feel in its presence is both physical and spiritual, a response we cannot oppose or control. Like when you realise the mayonnaise on your forkful of lettuce is actually a puddle of slime excreting from a still-wriggling slug. 

And yet, almost against our will, our attention is hypnotically drawn to the dull, glowering eyes of the Hancock, hung as they are in permanent exhibition above and astride his ever-twitching snout. There is an abiding fascination in the study of vulgar, alien species, and an inevitable enthusiasm for details of their evolution. So I will, dear reader, attempt to meet that need. In the process, you will learn why it is that people unfortunate enough to find themselves in the same room as the Hancock are invariably struck by how small it is, compared to its apparent stature on television.     

Like the slug it resembles in so many respects, the Hancock has always done its best to hide its true nature from the human community to which nature decrees it will never belong. In support of that deception, it was forced to deploy all the animadversion and cunning required of a species capable of inter-planetary travel. Accordingly, for several years following its arrival on earth, the monster Hancock attempted to conceal its alien origins beneath the harlequin silks of a racehorse jockey in the town of Newmarket.  

To achieve this, it was obliged to adopt the petite, human-like form common to that profession. Racehorse-riders, however, must restrict their body weight to less than ten stone, a challenge met only by a gruelling see-saw of starvation and saunas. This daily torment takes a dreadful toll on its practitioners, making jockeys conspicuously aggressive, bad-tempered individuals, incapable of forging relationships any more complex than beating a dumb animal with a whip. 

Not being a product of Eton, the newly miniature Hancock was ill-prepared for such torture. Indeed, it is likely the punitive regime of crash-dieting and extreme sweating impacted even more heavily upon the alien intruder than it would on the average equestrian dwarf. Under the expert scrutiny of its Newmarket peers, the Hancock failed to convince in the saddle and was soon obliged to assume a new  disguise.

The existential threat to Britain had been -temporarily- postponed. Undaunted, the thwarted space-invader dropped from public view, and laid itself low in the murky underworld of Oxbridge education, where abject  failures are welcomed like new fags at a Harrow pyjama-party. Below the radar, like a lurking shark, the Hancock thrived. In a calamitous social whirl driven by porcine zealots like Davy Cee (Cameron) and 'fat-blond' Johnson, the presence of one more tiny mutant went unremarked. Perhaps for the first time in its earthbound existence, the Hancock relaxed. Emboldened by its singular and popular mediochrity, the logical next stop for the parasitic shape-shifter was to sink into the bleak, amoral cess-pool known as 'banking'. 

The Fingal finger of finance beckoned, and in short order the hog-face from space had descended to the sewerish depths of the Bank of England, where it squatted -grateful and mute- at the feet of fellow traveller Theresa May. Before you could say "quantative easing", the creature now calling itself "Mini-Matt" had mastered the crucial technique of transferring wealth from humans to the lizard-people. 

By the spring of 2010, its time had come. In a manoeuvre as brilliant as it was diabolical, the Hancock re-incarnated, with a triumphant return to the surface, at the one place on earth where a reptilian brain and a taste for sadistic cruelty would pass completely unnoticed: the headquarters of the UK Conservative Party. 

For the UK's premier predatory alien, all the stars were aligned: the public were too busy building their Facebook profiles to pay attention, Davy Cee had become PM, and faster than a Parliamentary researcher's blowjob, the Hancock found itself  installed as Secretary of State for "Digital, Culture, Media and Sport." Quite why any of these four qualify as legitimate business for government control is not clear, but as the workload required would be way beyond a team of 50 working round the clock, one assumes the Hancock was simply assigned a quiet office where nobody would bother him.

By 2019 the pug-nosed starchild had somehow weaselled his way into the strategically more dangerous  post of Health Secretary, at which point he became loudly obsessed with the idea of enforced vaccinations for whatever chemical soup Big Pharma was serving that week. Despite the Hancock's complete ignorance of anything whatsoever to do with medical practise, it swiftly unleashed an endless series of unfounded claims regarding the unlimited improvements that could be made to the desperately unhealthy British population if they would just shut the fuck up and accept compulsory needlefuls of wonder drugs on command.

The advent of the 2020 pandemonium    pandemic pantomime supplied the very opportunity for which the alien invader had been preparing these long twenty years. Discarding the last trappings of its human guise, the monster dropped all pretense and revealed its true, hideous nature, warts and all, to a chosen few members of the cabinet at a specially convened meeting of the Tory Trotters, the legendary pig-fanciers club which has for centuries met deep in the labyrinth of tunnels beneath Big Ben. But the Hancock had miscalculated. Cries of disgust rent the foetid air as men and women alike raced for the exit, shocked to the core at the spectacle of the gurning, slobbering thing that stood wobbling on the table before them, clad only in the leatherette jock-strap traditionally worn by males on the sweltering surface of the dark planet it once called home.  

On strict orders from the Prime Minister, every Honourable member of the House was then required to enter the tunnel (where the extra-terrestrial was now detained) and to walk in single file past an unbreakable  plate-glass window  through which the desperate, mewling creature could be observed at close quarters. An emergency meeting of COBRA was called (the top secret collection of ornamental snakes beloved of the 1922 comittee) and it was decided by a unanimous vote that the Hancock really was a bit of a bounder and should jolly well not get any more chocolate-creams from the tuck shop.

As darkness fell on the palace of Westminster, a shadow was falling across the nation itself. From Lamps End to Johnny Goats, the chimes of midnight rang with the voice of a thousand carriage clocks, while the creature beneath Big Ben lay prone and foaming on its marble plinth, belching fumes of cordite and brimstone, and slowly -oh so slowly- began uncoiling the pulsing, crimson proboscis with which it would-

[TO BE CONTINUED]   

Ian Andrew Patrick  

(is suffering severely from stress-related literary excess but will return to the serious business as soon as possible)