GMB hosts revisit the excruciating moment Matt Hancock 'blubbed' on air

Matt Hancock may have earned himself a bronze medal in I’m a Celebrity, but he won’t be winning any acting awards any time soon.

That is according to the presenters of Good Morning Britainwho, on Monday, revisited a notorious 2020 interview with the then-Health Secretary, and were left fuming at his performance.

The two-year-old clip saw the West Suffolk MP appearing to break down in tears as he learned that a man called William Shakespeare had become the UK’s second recipient of a Covid vaccine.

“It’s just been such a tough year for so many people,” a sniffling Hancock told GMB’s Susanna Reid and her now-ex co-host Piers Morgan at the time.

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Cut back to the present day, and Reid and her colleagues pulled no punches when discussing the eyebrow-raising moment.

They were rewatching the clip in honour of the imminent release of the former minister’s new memoir Pandemic Diaries: The Inside Story of Britain’s battle against Covid.

In the book, which is out on Tuesday, Hancock relives his televised break-down, claiming he “completely lost it”.

Reid read out excerpts from the diaries, which detail how Hancock’s lover-turned-girlfriend Gina Coladangelo had told him to “relax” and stop being so “buttoned up”.

“What she did not mean,” the GMB host quoted, “Was that I should lose it altogether which is unfortunately what happened. I was on my own in a dark windowless booth answering questions when they played a video of Margaret Keenan getting her jab [...] Suddenly I completely lost it, blubbing away, battling to regain my composure as tears streamed down my face”.

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Reid admitted she thought he was laughing at the time, while fellow commentators Andrew Pierce and Kevin Maguire pointed out that his face looked pretty dry to them.

“He’s a bad actor. He fabricates situations. He’s been told to be emotional so he pretends he’s emotional and I agree, it sounds like he’s trying to suppress a laugh. Maybe he was laughing at us all with that little act,” Maguire, associate editor at The Mirror, said angrily.

Reid continued to read Hancock’s account: “'For Christ’s sake, pull yourself together,' I told myself desperately. Then the camera was back on me, my microphone was live, and my watery red eyes were there for all to see.

“Gina said at least I’d shown how I felt.”

This was met with rumbles of “he’s a fantasist” and “all about him” from the GMB couch.

Well, at least those presenters showed how they felt, too.

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