There’s nothing new in Matt Hancock’s ritual public humiliation

IHumans are a prurient species and there will always be grotesque spectacles dreamt up to entertain us

t’s tempting to claim that the spectacle of Matt Hancock lying in a box of maggots on I’m a Celebrity … represents a new, voyeuristic low in our culture. This, however, would mean glossing over the past. Humankind as a species has always enjoyed this sort of thing. There is a long and dishonourable history of punishment by humiliation, marked by floggings, pillorying and “shame parades” of naked victims being pelted with fruit.

If anything, Mr Hancock is getting off lightly. Consider that across medieval Europe, nagging or immodest women were sometimes forced to wear painful metal “bridles” or dunked into rivers on stools as punishment. In Amsterdam, tuneless musicians could be made to wear the “flute of shame”, a heavy iron flute attached to a neck shackle. Maoist China paraded pariahs in dunce hats. A Roman sentence that has some aesthetic qualities in common with Mr Hancock’s trials was the poena cullei, whereby patricides were sown into a sack of live snakes or dogs and chucked into the river.

Even the fact that Mr Hancock voluntarily subjected himself to this degradation in return for reward has precedent in the tradition of court fools and freak shows. In the 1990s, televised humiliation centred upon the “gunge” game show, in which contestants had buckets of snot-like slime poured over them. Personally, I preferred Crystal Maze, where the humiliation of the dim-witted was gentler – and less sticky.

Humans, in short, are a prurient species and there will always be grotesque spectacles dreamt up to entertain us. Perhaps there is even some animal instinct driving the disgraced politician’s choice, like the cowering of a dog who has soiled your carpet. It makes me think that we ought to offer erring MPS the option of being put in the stocks. The experience might be cathartic for all.

Ahead of the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th congress, where Xi Jinping unveiled his new A-team of seven men on the politburo standing committee, China-watchers were avidly debating who would make the cut. One China-focused think tank, Macro Polo, invited its readers to enter a pool, like a fantasy football league, to guess the outcome. Yet among 1,008 committed Sinologists, the number who successfully predicted Xi’s line-up was zero. He took them all by surprise.

I mention this because it might help to explain why, in spite of my antipathy to the CCP, I am glad that Joe Biden met with Xi at the G20 and disappointed that a mooted meeting between Xi and Rishi Sunak did not take place. We cannot be sure of the reason – Chinese media contradicted both itself and the UK in its explanations.

Whatever the cause, it is a loss because mistakes can happen when the flow of information between governments is cut off. Nuclear war was averted during the Cuban missile crisis after a secret hotline was established between JFK and Khrushchev. But the secrecy around Xi’s real thoughts and intentions is now far better maintained than the uncertainty around Russia’s current leader, even in a state of war.

If you want to listen to prominent Russians’ criticisms of Vladimir Putin or read accounts from people who have had extensive contact with him over the years, you can find them easily enough. Not so with Xi. Reporters striving to explain his rule cite his speeches, propagandists and the odd bit of testimony from fellow members of the Chinese elite, as they did in a recent Economist podcast series, The Prince.

But it doesn’t amount to much. Even those who used to have the inside track complain that all the old channels have dried up amid Xi’s persecution of rivals. On the Chinese internet, you aren’t even allowed to compliment Xi in the wrong way and sometimes it becomes impossible simply to search for his name. Chinese users resort to referring to their leader merely as “him”.

So we lost a rare opportunity for a moment of unfiltered communication between our leader and China’s. One can only hope that, should another chance arise, our PM will use it to defend Britain’s interests forcefully.