Ouch! Have I Got News for You’s brutal joke about Hancock WhatsApp ‘betrayal’

Former health secretary had called the leak a ‘massive betrayal’

The joke writers at Have I Got News for You have shared a brutal dig following the publishing of Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages.

On Thursday (2 March), the former health secretary broke his silence after messages were leaked to the Daily Telegraph by Isabel Oakeshott, the journalist who helped him write his pandemic memoir.

Hancock stated that he was “hugely disappointed” by what he said was a “massive betrayal and breach of trust”.

A post on the official Twitter account of the BBC comedy show Have I Got News for You on Thursday took aim at Hancock over the scandal.

“As Matt Hancock describes leaking of text messages as ‘a massive betrayal’, his ex-wife says she knows the feeling,” the post read.

In summer 2021, just before he resigned as health secretary, Hancock left his wife of 15 years, Martha Hancock, for Gina Coladangelo, the aide he was pictured kissing at work in a breach of his own social distancing guidelines.

Hancock and his wife had been married since 2006 and have three children together.

Matt and Martha Hancock (Getty)

Coladangelo was also married when her affair with Hancock began – to Oliver Tress, founder of Oliver Bonas.

Hancock previously said that telling his wife about his affair was the worst conversation of his life.

One of the most shocking revelations to come out of the WhatsApp leak to date is an exchange between Hancock and former education secretary Gavin Williamson, who wrote to his fellow Tory minister that teachers “really really do just hate work”. Read more here.