What Did Matt Hancock Buy for £50K in 2020?

"Probably the best value for money food that you can get"

Hancock’s takeaways - a story I must have missed in 2020.

After an investigation by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, it was revealed that in 2020 Matt Hancock spent around £50k on takeaways for his team. For those of us who have worked in big teams on large projects, this figure might not seem that extraordinary but this was for only 10 orders.

For those of you who don’t live in the UK or have been hiding under a rock for the last few years, Matt Hancock was the Secretary for Health and Social Care during much of the pandemic. He was forced to resign after he breached the very social distancing restrictions he had come up with himself by having an affair. “It was just guidance, I never broke any rules”. Shut it, Hancock.

This is the same Hancock that discussed deploying a new variant to encourage behavioural change.

Anyway, before Hancock resigned in disgrace, he was working really, really hard to frighten the pants off of the population and to do so he and his team were working long hours.

It is understandable that the team would need feeding, after all some fool had shut down most of the shops, but how many hipster Filipino meals can one team eat?

In April 2020, nine orders were made totalling £43,348.96 ($55,032). That works out at an average of £4,817 ($6,115) per order. In March, they made another single order for £4,179.72 ($5,305).

By November 2020, the Filipino restaurant, which had only started business in 2019, was forced to close down for good. However, looking at the WayBack Machine we can see that a pancake feast cost £50 ($63) for four people - this was before inflation remember! So either Hancock’s team was around 400 strong, someone was eating a lot of food or there’s another explanation.

When asked, Matt Hancock said “I can absolutely justify feeding people who are working 18 hours a day to keep you and everybody else in this country safe”. However, he failed to ever tell the press how many people he was feeding. "When people are working 18 hours a day, often seven days a week, in the middle of a pandemic, of course I'm going to feed them. It's probably the best value for money food that you can get in terms of allowing people to work so hard to tackle this virus."

There was no hint of shame in his comment on value for money when at the same time the government was resisting funding free school meals.

So what do you think, is that a reasonable amount to spend at one restaurant? I’d understand it more if it was a supermarket order but that is a lot of the same food. But we’ll never know until they reveal how many people it was feeding.

The fact that they won’t disclose how many people it was feeding is an obvious red flag, as is the secret menu.

What kind of restaurant has a secret menu? One with items that it doesn’t want made public.

On a completely unrelated note, when I worked in the City on projects that lasted months on end, which meant working 18 hour days, many individuals in senior positions found that they performed a lot better after a lot of cocaine.

Anyway back to the story. Some have speculated that perhaps illegal substances were on the secret menu but no, not me. The City is a completely different place to Westminster - a whole mile away - so I very much doubt that such behaviour ever takes places. Especially with public funds. But so as to be balanced, I wanted to put forward the conspiracy theorists’ views. I guess the tin-foil hat loons would probably find something dodgy about the name ‘Bong Bong’s’.

Thanks Matt for working so incredibly hard during the pandemic, you deserved every last Filipino crispy pata pancake.