And it's come to this

Is there a grindstone in the house?

Disgraced former UK health secretary, Matt Hancock—emphasis on the cock—has published an account of his time as Kommandant Gefangenenlagers Großbritannien during the pandemic. Imaginatively enough, his opus—or should that be meisterwerk?—is entitled Pandemic Diaries: The inside story of Britain’s battle against Covid. Sounds riveting. (snooze)

But the story got a little more inside than he'd anticipated.

You see, he didn't work on it alone. He's a busy man, and all that writing things shit takes time, so he enlisted reinforcements. A journalist by the name of Isabel Oakeshott, to be precise. Not only that, but a journalist by the name of Isabel Oakeshott, who's a longstanding critic of lockdowns, to be even more precise.

Accordingly, when he handed her a bundle of around 100,000 government messages mocking the prison's inmates and guards, while government ministers and officials were enjoying lockdown-busting parties and snoggage, she passed them on to a newspaper. And now Mr Han(don)cock, who also doubled as minister for extramarital affairs, is sad. He can't understand why someone who was opposed to the lockdowns, wasn't amused by his cavalier attitude to their enforcement. Strange. (shrug)

He has described the leak as a "massive betrayal" used to produce "a partial, biased account to suit an anti-lockdown agenda".

Joshua Nevett and Christy Cooney, BBC News

You know, if it'd been me, I wouldn't have chosen to work with a journalist who was fundamentally opposed to the massively unpopular policies that I'd instituted, and personally flouted. This man is clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Interesting that Oakeshott handed the messages over to The Telegraph, and not the world's most trusted international news broadcaster™. If it'd been me, I'd've done the same.

Further revelations on cockgate. Matt Hardcock suggested using the identification of a new Chongvirus variant to frighten the pants of [sic] everyone banged up in Gefangenenlagers Großbritannien. In one exchange with an aide, he asked When do we deploy the new variant.

It sounds funnier if you read it as a command in a Liam Neeson voice: Release the Kraken!

At one point, Helen Catt, the BBC's political correspondent, quotes Han(don)cock's messages published by the Sunday Telegraph as saying frighten the pants off everyone, and elsewhere as frighten the pants of everyone. So yeah. (shrug)