Martha Hancock: who is Matt Hancock’s wife Martha Hoyer Millar - did they split after Gina Coladangelo affair?

Earlier this month, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock surprised many by participating on the 2022 series of I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!

Hancock is perhaps most known for supervising healthcare during the Covid-19 pandemic, but he was forced to leave office in 2021 after it was revealed that he was having an affair with his staffer Gina Coladangelo, contravening his own social distancing guidelines in the process.

Not only did his amorous actions trash a once promising political career (Hancock is now just a lowly backbencher, the Tory whip since removed for his involvement on the hit ITV reality show), it put an end to his 15-year marriage with Martha Hancock.

But who exactly is Martha Hancock - who has surely now reverted to using her maiden name, Martha Hoyer Millar - and are the pair still legally married?

Here is everything you need to know.

Who is Martha Hancock?

Despite her former husband’s high-profile political career, little is known about Martha Millar, who has managed to keep out of the spotlight. An osteopath, she met Hancock while they were both students at Oxford University in the late 1990s.

Gina Coladangelo, the lobbyist and aide with whom Hancock had an affair which led to the end of his and Millar’s marriage, told a BBC Radio 4 profile of the politician that the two met at Oxygen FM, an Oxford University student radio station where she was a news reader and he was a sports reporter.

She is the granddaughter of the 1st Baron Inchyra, while her great-grandfather was the 1st Viscount Camrose, a newspaper tycoon who co-owned The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph.

Millar has three children with her ex-husband - a girl and two boys - the youngest of which was born in 2013.

Is she still married to Hancock?

The legal marital status of both Millar and Hancock is unclear. We do know the couple separated after 15 years of marriage following the revelations of Hancock’s affair with Coladangelo. On her Twitter account, Millar has previously ‘liked’ tweets about divorce, which suggests the pair are currently going through the legal process.

We also know that Hancock is still dating Coladangelo, and when his affair was first revealed by The Sun, he is reported to have told his wife there and then that he would be ending their marriage.

Hancock promptly moved out of the London home he shared with Millar and into his West Suffolk constituency home. Later that summer, Hancock was seen gathering more of his possessions from the London house, with Millar passing items to him so the disgraced MP could not cross the threshold.

Millar appears to have turned against the Conservative Party since the split, and has liked multiple tweets celebrating Boris Johnson’s demise.

Asked about his affair with Coladangelo on I’m A Celebrity by fellow campmate, comedian Babatunde Aleshe, suspended Conservative Party MP Hancock repeated the refrain he has previously used in interviews that he “fell in love”.