The notion the government might support or even encourage “normative” families as a building block of civilisation is “so offensive… so wrong” says Matt Hancock, the former Conservative government minister who was the chief cheerleader of Britain’s coronavirus lockdowns.
Matt Hancock, the George Osborne protégé who was the United Kingdom’s health minister during Covid whose zeal for imposing lockdowns on the country was only matched with his lust for breaking them to cheat on his wife of 15 years, has responded with anger at the idea the Conservative Party might stand for conservative ideals.
The ex-Conservative minister invoked the King, whose marriage had publicly failed at the time of the death of his first wife in 1997, as proof the government shouldn’t support traditional families whatsoever. Hancock said, per the Telegraph: “I don’t want to hear it again… It is so offensive and it’s so wrong. I mean, tell that to the King! He doesn’t have a normative family and he is absolutely a strong basis for society.
“…And don’t try to give any impression other than it is a completely fringe view within the Conservative Party.”
The remarks are by no means unusual for the man who — were he not presently suspended from the party for appearing on a reality television show (without permission) in an obvious stunt to grow his personal brand with young voters — would normally be called a ‘top Tory’. Indeed, a considerable part of Hancock’s present total input into politics is now urging the Conservatives to resist the temptation of actual conservatism and to shift left.
This, Hancock says, is necessary to save the party because becoming centrist is the only way to win elections, quite beside the point that the party is already trying this — putting it politely — a burning wreck at the polls for doing so and research shows old fashioned ideas like low taxes and border control to remain stubbornly popular.
He said at the liberal think tank Bright Blue on Wednesday: “We need to have credible policies that address the issues that younger people care about… My view is that those of us who believe in a liberal-conservative agenda have got to stand up to the Conservative Corbynistas who just want to divide people.
“… I call them Conservative Corbynistas because it’s essentially the same, instead of concentrating on the politics of progress, of the people, they preach the same sort of cancel culture and virtue signalling that they say they abhor on the left.”
Suffice to say, Matt Hancock has — in terms of the whole view of the British people — a very particular, niche opinion of what Conservatism is and means. While everyone is entitled to their own eccentricities, the problem for ordinary voters is Hanock’s views are absolutely normal for the people who have led and run every ‘Conservative’ government in the United Kingdom for the past 13 years.
The cutting remarks this week insisting there’s nothing Conservative about the family came after a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in London this week of Tory MP Danny Kruger, who joined fellow lawmaker Miriam Cates MP in making a case for the British tax system to stop penalising traditional families.
He said:
The normative family – held together by marriage, by mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children and the sake of their own parents and for the sake of themselves – this is the only possible basis for a safe and successful society.
Marriage is not all about you. It’s not just a private arrangement. It’s a public act, by which you undertake to live for someone else, and for wider society; and wider society should recognise and reward this undertaking.
The comments triggered outrage from some quarters, reports note, with those professing to be members of non-traditional families expressing outrage online.
Kruger himself has expressed concern that some had “deliberately misinterpreted” what he had said, “as some sort of attack on people who live in different ways”. This was not the case, said the MP.
Kruger told a podcast: “By normative, I don’t mean the only one, or the model which people should be required to adopt. The fact is if you have a society that has sufficient numbers of marriages, then that society will be stronger.
“There will be opportunities for people to have all sorts of different family models, all of which can be totally successful… it is unpleasant to suggest that only straight, married families are a place to bring children up. We all know very successful families which don’t conform to that norm.”
Underlining his idea, Kruger continued: “I do not think it is right that we can just be neutral and say that it does not matter what kind of models of family that the government supports. It has to, more or less, take decisions. At the moment we incentivise family breakdown rather than family stability, so that’s the point I was making”.
Underlining the sway the Hancock view on the family has over the Conservative Party, Prime Minister and party leader Rishi Sunak rushed to distance himself from Kruger’s remarks.