Matt Hancock is either a proposition to be believed or blatantly psychopathic – you must choose

The month was April 2020. No story appeared to be more heart-breaking in a sea of pandemic headlines than the tragic death of 13-year-old Covid patient Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab, forced to die alone in a London hospital due to the cruel and thoroughly inhumane pandemic measures.

It was on one of those tedious press briefings to which we all became hooked that, promising something would be done to ensure no such horror would be visited upon another family, then-Health Secretary Matthew Hancock (who signed the rules off incidentally) burst into tears.

A touching, tender moment of compassion by a fellow human overcome by the tragedy of the situation? Surely! The Christian desire within me to extend charity even to my enemies wanted it to be so. In my gut, though, another thought reared its ugly head – one that has screamed louder and louder for my attention with every public breakdown and self-aggrandising stunt we have subsequently witnessed: “I’ve just seen a psychopath in action.”

 

Although any writer that wants to be read and noticed will employ colourful language, my description of the jungle-trekking , book-promoting, occasional and soon-retiring MP as a psychopath is one I will quite literally stand by. I wasn’t playing to my people or being provocative.

Hancock’s jungle campmates continually insisted that they could not accept him as genuine, yet from what I saw, could never put their finger on why. This makes sense. Hancock skilfully aced his trials. He seemed keen to get on with everyone, encouraging and praising their efforts, and appearing to accept with good grace the flack for his publicly-known errors of judgement.

In short, Hancock was charming, but only superficially so. Psychopaths are not crazed, murderous monsters. They are self-serving, calculated, cold and lacking in empathy. They have no sense of right and wrong, and view other people primarily as objects to be recruited in service of their goals.

 

One of the great inefficiencies of psychopathy, however, is the aforementioned lack of empathy. Empathy refers to the ability to intuitively understand another person. Have you ever opened up to someone you almost immediately felt had known you all your life? If yes, then the chances are that you met someone very high in empathy. If they desire your good, they can be a tremendous source of blessings. If they don’t, they can shatter you or have you dancing to their tune very rapidly indeed.

Why won’t you see it coming? Because the charm was genuinely constructed around an understanding of you. An empath reads you like a book, carefully noting the intricacies of all the chapters and weaving the plot masterfully together. This teaches them exactly what to say and how to act, regardless of whether their purpose is malignant or noble.

A psychopath, entirely lacking such empathy, has to learn the art of charm by mirroring. This is more like an impressionist closely watching her target character until she has perfected her ability to emulate them. The psychopath learns by careful observation what works and mimics it. Because they lack interest in the target and can’t read them well enough to know how to push all the right buttons, they instead strategically plot the behaviours to display for best results: compliments, tears, jocularity or whatever else. This allows them to get so far, but the charm is thoroughly shallow.

A contrived example of this mirroring technique can be found in the awful televised debates we are subjected to during elections and party leadership campaigns. Someone, at some point, seems to have decided that all politicians must use first names regularly. Not to pick up and mention the name of a barracking audience member in one’s reply, or address the host by name at least once in every response, is a grave sin indeed. Yet we all find it intolerably jarring and plainly unnatural. We are having something mirrored back to us, rather than organically reproduced through genuine connection, and we know it.

 

This is why, if my hunch is correct, so many people seem to find Matt Hancock deeply inauthentic without being able to specify why. Without the genuine emotional intelligence of an empath, Hancock must draw on a general playbook, which will always be comparably lacking in fine-tuning. Perhaps he cries a bit too much, praises too warmly or emphatically, misunderstands complaints against him or shows excessive desire to emerge exonerated from any challenge. Perhaps he shows too little nuance in his understanding of how the rules of the game differ from context to context, for example believing that society’s general affirmation of romance and following one’s heart can be recruited into a defence of canoodling with his lover behind his wife’s back in defiance of restrictions he sincerely told us were necessary for saving lives.

The point is, subtle as all these signs are, people get a gut feeling. They are pretty good at seeing a mask, and can spot a fake from the real deal of a genuine meeting of minds.

I have no idea what Matt Hancock’s ultimate goal is: it could be celebrity, money, a sweet consultancy job that requires he appear unblemished from the hour of great national need. It doesn’t matter. What I can say, though, is that I see a man hellbent on self-advancement. That in itself does not make him psychopathic. What points so clearly to psychopathy is the limited kit of blunted tools he’s using for the job, with no evidence of there being any capacity to sharpen them or get something better. Matt Hancock is either a proposition to be believed or blatantly psychopathic – you must choose.