I want May’s deal – a second referendum will decide nothing
Matt Hancock owes his rise in the Tory ranks to George Osborne, the PM – and his own dyslexia
‘Microsoft spellcheck saved my degree and when I first had a job that squiggly red line never meant more to anyone’
Asimple spelling error nearly ended Matt Hancock’s political career before it had even started. Although now touted as a future prime minister, when he was a young campaigner for the Conservatives in Guildford he wrote a disastrous election leaflet.
Instead of writing that candidate Nick St Aubyn wanted to “unite” the community during the 2001 election, a
22-year-old Mr Hancock wrote: “I want to untie the community”.
By the time he had spotted the clanger it was too late and the leaflet had already been dropped into 50,000 letterboxes. St Aubyn went on to lose the seat by 538 votes.
Now Health Secretary and seen as one of the rising stars of the party, Mr Hancock still winces at the memory but is finally talking about his dyslexia because he does not want others growing up thinking they are “useless” like he did.
“I wish I had been diagnosed earlier,” reveals the Oxford and Cambridge graduate, who was first tested for the learning difficulty at university.
“At school, I just thought that I wasn’t very good at reading and writing.
“I felt a sense of injustice. We’d have a class discussion and then I couldn’t get it down on paper. And my spelling was terrible. But I didn’t have any kind of diagnosis and the way I coped with it was by doing maths-based subjects.”
A-levels in maths, physics, computing and economics followed for the Chester-based grammar schoolboy but it was only when he started writing essays again, as a Politics, Philosophy and Economics student at Exeter College, Oxford, that a tutor suggested he get tested.
“Because he pointed out that I could talk and I could argue, but then when it came to writing the essays it was terrible,” revealed the 40-year-old father of three, whose osteopath wife Martha is also dyslexic.
“It was like one of these things that was obvious as soon as you say it. It was like a crossword puzzle… not that I can do crosswords.”
Technologically savvy, Mr Hancock, who has his own eponymous smartphone app, used computer training courses to “reconstruct how you write” but admits: “My reading is still slow. Microsoft spellcheck essentially saved my university degree and then, when I first had a job, that squiggly red line never meant more to anyone… although I’ve made some spectacular mess-ups.” It is worth noting that Mr Hancock, who joined the Conservatives in 1999, still graduated with a first and went on to study for an Mphil in economics at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
Having worked as an economist for the Bank of England before becoming economic adviser and later chief of staff to George Osborne, Mr Hancock was just 31 when he was elected to the safe seat of West Suffolk in 2010.
From there he swiftly rose through the Tory ranks, serving in a number of ministerial positions before being promoted to culture secretary in January 2018, and replacing Jeremy Hunt as Health Secretary last July. His promotions by Theresa May came as a surprise to some because of his connections with the Cameron regime, and specifically the former chancellor, who famously once declared he would like to see the present Prime Minister “chopped up in bags in my freezer”.
Unlike his former mentor, Mr Hancock remains resolutely loyal to Mrs May, insisting that “changing the leader doesn’t change the arithmetic” and warning that a general election risks handing Jeremy Corbyn the keys to No 10 and “killing Brexit altogether”. “I want to leave the EU with the Prime Minister’s deal,” he says, adding in the spirit of a pragmatic Remainer: “A second referendum won’t decide anything”.
Although coy about his own leadership potential, saying “that will be for others to judge”, Mr Hancock insists his dyslexia has been an advantage in public life. “People who are dyslexic tend to think laterally and make connections that otherwise aren’t there. You have to use short pithy words rather than long ones because you can’t spell the long ones. I love the Churchill phrase, ‘The short words are the best and the old short words are best of all.’ It does focus me on the big judgments, which actually is what a ministerial job is about.”
A fierce advocate of “digital solutions”, Mr Hancock resists being described as a “geek” but confesses: “I’ve always loved a good bit of new
technology.” Growing up in a family that ran a software company meant his first job was “decoding the Y2K bug in my family business’s software”.
He says: “In those days you could get under the bonnet of the computer and it was very raw. Back then we were pushing the boundaries. And I hope that I carry a bit of that into what I’m trying to do in government.”
The unashamed free-market capitalist is also carrying the baggage of the Nineties recession, which nearly bankrupted his parents. Rather than turn him against Thatcherite economics, it did the opposite.
“The business nearly went under because a big client couldn’t pay the bills and that episode – when we knew we were going bust by the end of the week unless the cheque arrived – is burned across my heart.
“I still can remember and hear – I’m hearing it now – the sound of the letterbox in the house we lived in, because we knew a cheque needed to arrive that week and every day when the post arrived we’d run to the front door to see if it had come. It did arrive and we were lucky. But we faced losing everything. So I understand very viscerally the risks people take and the emotional resilience needed to build a business and provide prosperity.
“That’s absolutely at the heart of what I believe in. We’ve got to win this argument for free markets once again. You don’t make people better off by taxing more, which is what the Left are trying to say.”
Speaking at Fairley House in Lambeth, a fee-paying school for dyslexic children, Mr Hancock insists equality of opportunity is another major driver.
“I believe very strongly that everybody has a contribution to make. Not everybody thinks this in politics. The job of the state is to help people to do that but also to go out of their way to allow them to succeed. It is only the Conservative Party that offers people the prospect that they will do everything they can to help you to get on in life.”
Although Mr Hancock “doesn’t really talk about my kids” (he has a daughter and two sons), he does reveal that dyslexia helped him and his wife “bond”.
Like most political families, the couple split their time between a house in north London and their constituency home in Little Thurlow. And like most parents, he does worry about screen time.
“Especially social media because by its nature it’s social and so people feel left out if they’re not on it. But we, as a society, can and must make sure that the technology works for the benefit of us, rather than be captured by it.”
Convinced the Conservatives can reunite once Brexit is delivered, he says: “We need to be patriotic, not nationalistic, unifying, not dividing, not populist but based on a realistic progress for this country. That not only appeals to the centre Right, but the centre of British politics.
“There’s a gaping hole in the centre of British politics that we can and must fill.”