Matt Hancock, the former Health Secretary, has signed up for this year's I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!.
As a result of his signing up to the popular reality show, Hancock has had the Tory whip suspended with immediate effect, according to Chief Whip Simon Hart.
While the likes of Mike Tindall, Chris Moyles and Olivia Attwood had already been announced as celebrity contestants, Hancock joins the star-studded line-up as an extra campmate.
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He’s unlikely to enter the camp Down Under alongside the ten starting campmates on Sunday (6 November) and instead will arrive as a latecomer.
An insider told the Sun: "Matt is a sensational signing for the show as producers love a star with a story to tell - and they always hope they'll spill the beans round the campfire.
"He's the latest in a long line of figures from the political sphere, including MP Nadine Dorries, Stanley Johnson and MP Lembit Opik.
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"There's been a question mark over who the twelfth campmate would be, partly because negotiations over Matt going in were so top secret. It seems Matt was a last-minute signing."
Tyla has approached ITV for comment.
Hancock served as a government minister throughout the pandemic, leading the country's health policies.
But after initially attempting to cling on to his job following news of his affair with aide Gina Coladangelo, he was eventually forced to resign.
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However, speaking to Dragons' Den star Steven Bartlett on his Diary of a CEO podcast shortly after the scandal, Hancock insisted he hadn’t flouted his own Covid guidelines in the pursuit of ‘casual sex’, saying he had ‘fallen in love’ with his co-worker.
When footage emerged of Hancock and Coladangelo kissing in an office on 6 May 2021, official government guidance was still urging people to stay two metres apart and ‘avoid face-to-face contact’.
Hancock told Bartlett: "I resigned because I broke the social distancing guidelines. By then they weren’t actually rules, they weren’t the law. But that’s not the point.
"The point is they were the guidelines that I’d been proposing. And that happened because I fell in love with somebody."
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On the I’m A Celeb front, many of this year’s famous contestants have already landed in Australia, including the show’s hosts Ant and Dec.
The former was spotted enjoying a stroll in the Australian sunshine with his wife on Halloween and days earlier lapped up the rays on a beach with Dec.
The pair are no doubt enjoying the warm weather, with the show having been filmed in Wales for the past two years due to the pandemic.
Topics: TV And Film
Aisha Nozari