“WHAT I’m really looking for is a little forgiveness,” simpered Matt Hancock as he munched a camel’s penis.
Well, he won’t get it from the hard-pressed West Suffolk voters he deserted in return for £400,000 in hard cash.
Nor, probably, from his wife Martha and the three children he ditched after being exposed by The Sun as a buttock-clenching hypocrite.
And certainly not — if there is any justice — from the millions he forced into catastrophic lockdown and who must now pay the price in Thursday’s slash-and-burn emergency Budget.
Forget for a moment the £50billion black hole which allegedly opened under Liz Truss’s well-intentioned but disastrous mini Budget.
This is eclipsed by the price demanded from young and old, now and for years to come, for locking down the nation and its lifeblood economy for weeks on end during the Covid pandemic.
Read More on Matt Hancock
Covid cost around £410BILLION, or £6,100 for every man, woman and child in the UK, to support the NHS, buy protective clothing, find a vaccine and provide job-saving furlough.
“We hurled money at it . . . hurled money,” wails a former Chancellor.
Yes, we are also paying higher energy bills for war-mongering Kremlin thug Vladimir Putin.
And as ex-Health Secretary, Hancock cannot be blamed for the whole spending splurge although billions were squandered in waste and fraud on his watch.
What he can be blamed for are the endless lockdowns which split bereaved families, wrecked a generation of children’s schooling and left Britain’s economy in tatters.
It was Hancock who pursued Communist China’s decision to incarcerate the nation — right up to the moment he was caught on camera devouring special adviser Gina Coladangelo.
And it was Hancock who personally blocked all attempts to relax lockdown rules despite a clamour of protests from fellow Cabinet ministers and independent scientists.
There were other villains, of course, not least the socialist-dominated Sage group of so-called experts who got just about everything wrong.
But we will all pay this week as Chancellor Jeremy Hunt lays out the wreckage of our economy.
Millions of small firms and restaurants face ruin because they can’t find staff.
Yet 600,000 people of working age have quit emp- loyment since lockdown, Mr Hunt told Laura Kuenssberg yesterday.
Most now live on employment-related benefit paid from other workers’ tax.
“We will be asking everyone to make sacrifices,” he added ominously.
That means billions more in stealth taxes, billions off pension savings and billions less in public spending — except, of course, for the sacred but badly-run NHS.
Softest targets will be hardest hit. Middle earners — traditional prey of the Labour left — will be sucked dry by allegedly low-tax Tories.
Mr Hunt deplores the Liz Truss mini-Budget.
Yet only this summer he launched his own bid to be PM with an identical promise to “cut taxes and go for growth”.
Will we see other U-turns on Conservative policy — a softer line on Brexit, perhaps?
The Kuenssberg panel was stuffed with seething Remainers yesterday, left-wing economist Paul Johnson, historian Simon Schama and Roula Khalaf, editor of the Brexit-bashing Financial Times.
All grabbed the chance to blame Brexit — not lockdown — for our plight.
Mr Hunt is also a Remainer — and lockdown champion — and his defence of the Leave vote was lukewarm.
The final shape of Thursday’s crisis measures will be decided not by this Chancellor. It will be dictated by the PM and First Lord of the Treasury, Rishi Sunak.
Mr Sunak is a Brexiteer. Thursday’s announcements will nail his colours to the mast.
Right-wing Tory MPs and ministers will be watching like hawks.
But Rishi will be looking over his shoulder at another predator . . . the Reform Party, whose major stakeholder is former Ukip leader Nigel Farage.
Reform leader and TalkTV star Richard Tice is mopping up Boris-backing, Brexit-supporting Tories looking for somewhere to lodge a protest vote.
Read More on The Sun
Farage left front-line politics for a TV career after Britain quit the EU in 2019, but he is tempted by some easy pickings.
If Rishi is to stop Nigel coming back to bite him, he must prove on Thursday the Tory party hasn’t turned left.
POSTURING police have transitioned from a national laughing stock to full-blown public menace.
We can scoff at oddball terror chief Matt Jukes, the Met’s so-called “HeForShe Gender Equality Lead”, who dressed up in a hot ’n’ cold Menovest for Menopause Awareness Month.
But the arrest and detention of two innocent journalists for reporting on M25 eco-loonies takes police misrule to a truly sinister new level of totalitarianism.
Democracy cannot survive without free speech. Neither have a chance without a free Press.
We used to complain about “a few bad apples”.
Now we have to search for the good ones.
