Matt Hancock has said the affair that ended his ministerial career was not about “casual sex”.
The former health secretary insisted that he fell in love with Gina Coladangelo while they worked together during the pandemic.
Hancock was forced to resign in the summer of 2021 after footage from inside his department, leaked to The Sun, showed him embracing the married aide, in breach of the social distancing guidelines in place at the time.
The rules stated that people should stay two metres apart and not mingle with anyone outside of their household bubble.
The rules were finally relaxed on May 17 - 11 days after the footage of the pair was filmed - when England moved to stage 3 of the lockdown roadmap.
But Hancock told the Diary of a CEO podcast that he did not break the law because it was only guidance that people from separate households should stay apart.
He said: “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.”
Hancock handed in his resignation on June 26, 2021 following a furious public backlash to the leaked video.
He said he took the decision to quit after people he respected contacted him reminding him of things they had not been able to do, such as visit dying relatives.
Asked by podcast host and Dragons Den entrepreneur Steven Bartlett whether it had been the worst time of his life, Hancock replied: “Going through that is undoubtedly the hardest thing I’ve ever done by a long, long way.”
But he stressed that his relationship with Coladangelo, who was a non-exeutive director in the Department of Health at the time, was serious and that he had known her “for more than half of my life”.
“I haven’t had casual sex with anybody,” he said. “I fell in love with somebody.”
The former health secretary said he had brought Coladangelo, who worked with him on student radio at Oxford University, to his department, where they spent “a lot of time together, ironically, trying to get me to be able to communicate in a more emotionally intelligent way”.
He added: “And we fell in love. And that’s something that was completely outside of my control.”
He said he regretted the pain it has caused the pair’s spouses and their six children and the “very public” nature of how their affair was revealed.
“Of course, I regret the pain that that’s caused and the very, very, very public nature,” he said. “Anybody who’s been through this knows how difficult it is, how painful it is doing that in public is incredibly painful, but I fell in love with someone.”
Hancock went on to say that he did not “miss the job as much as I expected” and was “enjoying the freedom of being on the back benches”.
He also backed the prime minister, saying he had “big things on his plate” but had got the response to the Omicron variant right.