Be careful what you wish for. Matt Hancock has always been one of life’s more Tiggerish characters. A hyperactive man-boy whose enthusiasm and bumptiousness – combined with a gift for telling people what he thinks they want to hear – far exceed his natural talents. As sycophancy seldom goes unrewarded in Westminster, Hancock has managed to rise entirely without trace. First as a junior minister, then as culture secretary he contrived to leave no discernible mark and now finds himself in the thankless task of health secretary.

Bullshit only gets you so far when you come up against squeezed budgets and an ageing population and reality is now beginning to bite. Hancock has aged several years in the past few months and now looks all of 18. His appearance on Tuesday before the health and social care select committee to face questions on his department’s Brexit preparations will have done nothing to reverse that process.

Everything was absolutely fine, Hancock began, nervously fiddling with his “NHS Prefect” lapel badge. It was fine because the government was certain that it was going to get a good deal and that’s what he was primarily focusing on. But as a responsible minister it was only right to be making contingency plans for a no-deal Brexit and he could assure the committee that if everyone did exactly what they needed to and nothing went wrong then everything would still be fine.

Hancock’s contingency plans clearly hadn’t extended to listening to what any of the senior NHS managers and pharmaceutical manufacturers had just told the committee only minutes earlier, as all of them had predicted utter chaos if the UK left the EU with no deal. Committee chair Sarah Wollaston gently picked him up on some of their more pressing concerns. The country was desperately short of refrigerated storage facilities and it would take at least a year to build the required amount. Which would be at least six months too late.

“Um … er … um,” Hancock mumbled, trying to locate his inner uselessness. We were only 10 minutes in and he was already sounding as incoherent as the prime minister on one of her average days. Perhaps it’s contagious. Um … er … um … it was like this. The experts were basically wrong on how long it took to build a refrigeration unit and besides, if the worst came to the worst, he was going to requisition a load of old fridges that people had taken to the dump.

That was only the beginning of the insanity. Anyone with a hint of self-awareness might have cut his losses at that and let his senior civil servant do all the talking from there on, but Hancock doesn’t even know how little he knows. So he quickly went on to explain how he wouldn’t be offering any financial compensation to any small drug companies for their contingency planning because he couldn’t trust them not to cheat the system. So as the honest ones would go bust while the frauds stayed in business, he could kill two birds with one stone and refuse to deal with any of them.

Hancock was equally insistent that six weeks of stockpiled medicine was all that was required. But what if supplies weren’t so easily resumed? After all, the UK would have no control over whether EU countries chose to treat us as a third country and refused to recognise the regulatory framework for our medicines.

Easy, declared Hancock confidently. We would either beat the blockade by “The Great Folkestone Airlift” or we would just buy up loads of dodgy drugs off the dark web. Some of them had to be more or less OK. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t hurt for patients to stockpile their own drugs by raiding a few pharmacies. And don’t forget, that if the prescribed medicines weren’t available they could always try something else. A change was as good as a rest.

On and on it went. There was a plus side to everything. Brexit was just a question of finding the right mindset. If hospitals were to run out of food, then it would be a great way of dealing with the country’s obesity crisis. And there was no need to worry about a shortage of EU nationals working in social care through their failure to meet the minimum income to be allowed into the country, because we would be welcoming people from all over the globe who also wouldn’t be allowed in because they didn’t meet the income threshold.

It was genius of sorts. A new challenger to Chris Grayling for a place in the pantheon of the new idiocracy. A man in search of synaptic connection. Hancock’s NHS. First you Brexit, then you die.