The Standard sent a reporter along to write about the first performance of the Lockdown Files Live on Saturday, in which I interviewed Isabel Oakeshott on stage about working with Matt Hancock on the Pandemic Diaries, why he shared over 100,000 WhatsApp messages with her, and why she then decided to turn them over to the Telegraph. To break up the interview, two gifted actors read out some of the more embarrassing exchanges, with Adam Drew playing Hancock and Adrian McGlynn playing Boris, which the audience found very entertaining. We’re doing it again on Tuesday night at the Hippodrome in Leicester Square, for which a handful of tickets are still available. Only £25 for two hours of rock solid entertainment in the West End, which must be the bargain of the century! There’s also a very nice bar. Click here if you’d like to buy a ticket.
Here’s how the Standard piece begins:
It’s past 9pm on Saturday night in Westminster, and Matt Hancock is shouting “we didn’t break the f**king law, OK!” Well, an actor playing Hancock is shouting, as he reads out real messages from the former health secretary when his Covid guidelines-breaking affair with aide Gina Coladangelo was discovered in 2021.
It’s part of a new live show put on by Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist Hancock fell out with when she leaked his pandemic WhatsApps to a newspaper earlier this year.
For most of the show, Oakeshott is interviewed on stage by fellow lockdown sceptic Toby Young at the UnHerd Club near Parliament, in front of around 100 people. She and Young decided to do a live event after he was one of the few people in the media to defend her decision to reveal the messages. Young then suggested getting actors to read out Hancock’s WhatsApps, to add some fun to proceedings. Hancock himself hasn’t been that keen on the idea.
Oakeshott tells Young how she came to write a pandemic book with Hancock, and stands by her actions, saying they were in the public interest. She says she wouldn’t be able to do that now, as most MPs have switched on auto-delete on their WhatsApp conversations. “Maybe that’s just for me”, she jokes.
In between the chat, the actors do their thing, dressed in ill-fitting suits. Highlights include chats with then PM Boris Johnson about exceptions for grouse shooting, and a cringe-inducing monologue where Hancock justifies wearing a wetsuit for a photoshoot in Cornwall. The group will perform again tomorrow, at the Leicester Square Hippodrome, usually the home of strip show Magic Mike. Hopefully, no one books their hen do on the wrong night. If they get the backing, they’d like to do a verbatim play.
Adrian McGlynn, who plays Hancock, is an amateur actor and retired director of a horse-racing company. He was in the same year at Eton with David Cameron, while his partner is former BBC radio star Sarah Kennedy. McGlynn is an anti-lockdown advocate, and says he isn’t doing an impression of Hancock. “I don’t look anything like him,” he says, but does try a few verbal tics (“Lots of ‘ers’ and ‘umms”), and some mannerisms. “He looks around a lot, as if he’s looking for praise or applause… nose up in the air a little bit,” McGlynn says.
“I have nothing but contempt for our former health secretary, so I do it with much glee and no fear,” he says with relish. “I’ve been shaking my head in disbelief at his arrogance and total immunity from self-awareness”. Meanwhile, actor Adam Drew gives an on-the-money impression of Johnson.
Worth reading in full.
If you’d like to buy a ticket for Tuesday night’s second and final performance at the Hippodrome, click here.
Stop Press: The Telegraph has just released a video about the Lockdown Files. You can watch it here.
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This would make a cracking film!
Yes it would. I suggest that in the interest of diversity his love interest should be played by not terribly white luvvy artiste Adjoa Andoh.
Hancock is far too easy a target
A bit player in a much more far reaching shitshow, many of the protagonists of which are still very much in place
Easy, but nonetheless worthy target. He’s on the hook, let him hang there.
My worry is that it will lead a lot of people to miss the point. It will turn into “let’s bash Hancock” or “let’s bash Johnson”. You and I and others here know that the entire establishment in the UK and most rich world countries are guilty, but that’s not in the mainstream. Our current PM voted for all the shit too.
Let’s take Johnson as the more heavyweight of the two and bash Hancock with him. :->
Both Hancock and Johnson are guilty so let them have it. Ideally, Whitty and Vallance and Farrar and Michie and the complete gang down to Doctor Hillary would also experience their careers coming to a sudden an ignoble end but one has to start somewhere.
My worry is that it starts and finishes there. I know almost no-one in my private or working life who is remotely interested in any of this.
Unfortunately tof I have to concur.
Wait and see. Two years ago, Hancock and Johnson were having lively office parties while so-called freedom day had been postponed by a month to gain some time to vaccinate more people which was said to be urgently necessary. That was six months after the 15 million shots to freedom headline the mail and long after 15 million shots had duly been put into other people’s arms. While the 19th of June went ahead, Johnson would later again be talked into introducing a mask mandate in November and reportedly, we came very close to another We hate Christmas! lockdown in December. At lot has happened since then which seemed impossible at the time.
Hancock becoming the nation’s laughing stock is also useful in another respect: He still has a lawsuit from Bridgen coming for his ridiculous antisemitism claims on Twitter.
I wish I had your degree of apparent optimism. If there was going to be outrage at the folly and evil of the covid policies, we would have had it by now. I mentioned the “when shall we deploy the new variant” WhatsApp message to a friend of mine. She was mildly interested for a few minutes, then moved on. I am quite sure she has not given it another thought since I mentioned it.
Trouble is, people are ‘memory holing’ the trauma. In essence, New Year’s Eve 2019 is followed by New Year’s Day 2023 in many people’s minds. A friend of mine died tragically in 2016. His brother had it in his head that it was five years ago, not seven. That’s happening a lot with people when you talk to them… We’re still angry and fighting the future. Many people are returning to docile everyday lives… until next time we get locked up.
Exactly.
Whilst I fear you are correct, we must not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the very good.
It would be ideal if we could have a Nurenberg trial with Fauci, Gates, Tedros, Farrar, Trudeau and a hundred more with their lives literally hanging on the verdict.
Sorry, won’t happen.
If we can at least ensure that some of the contemptible worms like Handycock get driven as far as possible from the levers of power and the teat of taxpayer’s money, it will be a result.
It’s not even good. Net result is that people have a scapegoat and move on, put the whole thing to bed. IMO. Obvs I have no sympathy for Hancock.
That’s what they’re going to do in any case. Hancock’s and Johnsons’s fate may at least serve as a warning to future enablers: The bucket of shit everyone keeps passing on will always stop somewhere and it could well be you. There’s also still the looming threat of a remembrance-day style annual COVID celebration which will be much less unbearable when a few overly smug political figureheads are missing from it.
A tiny percentage of the guilty have been removed, and for largely unrelated reasons. Sunak voted for it all and he is still PM. Vallance and Whitty and Van Tam et all were all applauded. So was Ferguson. June Raine. There’s no warning to enablers.
auto-delete of messages. I find the practice repugnant. Understanding of history requires that records are kept. The same is done by corporations to prevent litigation archeology.
What I really want to know is why Whitty changed his mind, seemingly on a dime, from ‘lockdowns are harmful, masks don’t really work, don’t rush vaccines cause there could be side effects’ to what we eventually got. That would be newsworthy.