Matt Hancock has been called a “love rat” by The Sun after he quit as Britain’s health secretary and also dumped Martha, his apparently blameless wife of 15 years, after the newspaper posted intimate CCTV footage of him with a work colleague, Gina Coladangelo.

Britain is no stranger to political sex scandals, starting with the famous “Profumu affair” of 1961 when John Profumu, minister for war in Harold Macmillan’s cabinet, admitted he had lied to Parliament when he had denied sleeping with a pretty 19-year-old girl, Christine Keeler. That provided material for movies and plays because Christine, who swam naked in a pool in a country mansion where guests included Pakistan’s Ayub Khan, was also linked to a Soviet embassy attaché. The Profumo scandal helped bring down Macmillan’s government in the 1964 general election.

This time, too, a Pakistani figures in the gathering drama but he is the upright former chancellor Sajid Javid, who has replaced Hancock as health secretary. He is happily married with four children to an Englishwoman, Laura King.

Six decades on from the Profumu affair, Britain is a sexually liberated country but the media, especially the tabloids, still gets censorious with errant politicians.

These are a sample of front-page headlines in the big selling Sunday papers — “Hancock quits his job — and his marriage. Ditches ‘crestfallen’ wife and tells friends he’s in love with aide” (The Mail on Sunday); “Hypocrite Hancock quits over snog video. Left wife of 15yrs after affair revealed” (The Sun); and “Minister ended 15-year-marriage just hours before affair exposed” (The Sunday Times).

Hancock has been accused of “hypocrisy”, even by fellow Tory MPs, because he had breached the “no hugging” rule that he had urged the nation to observe even with dying relatives and at wedding and funerals.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who does not like sacking ministers, said he was “sorry” to see Hancock go but he had no option.

In his resignation letter, Hancock said: “I want to reiterate my apology for breaking the guidance, and apologise to my family and loved ones for putting them through this. I also need to be with my children at this time.”

He conspicuously failed to mention his wife whom he has known since their Oxford days as he has Gina.

On Thursday at 6pm when The Sun gave him advance warning it had incriminating footage of him with Gina, Hancock rushed home to tell his wife their marriage was over. One report said that “Hancock even woke up the couple’s youngest child, aged eight, to break the news he was leaving”.

Martha is friends with Gina but had no idea their affair, which began earlier this year, had become serious. According to Tory sources, Gina, who has three children with her husband, now wants to set up home with Hancock.

As a keen cricket fan, Hancock is actually quite well known in Indian circles in London. For example, when the then high commissioner in London, Ranjan Mathai, hosted a garden party for members of the touring Indian cricket team in 2014, Hancock posed for a group photograph flanked by Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Virat Kohli.

Javid resigned 16 months ago as chancellor after Boris’s then all-powerful strategist, Dominic Cummings, ruled he would have to merge his political advisers with the team at 10 Downing Street.

Back in 1983, Cecil Parkinson, whom Margaret Thatcher was grooming as her successor, resigned as secretary of state for trade and industry, after having a daughter, Flora, with his secretary, Sara Keays. He never acknowledged the child.

In 2002, Edwina Currie, a former Tory minister, published a “kiss and tell” account of an affair with John Major between 1984 and 1988. He was the one who succeeded Thatcher as Prime Minister. He was no longer seen as

“the grey man” of British politics.

In 1985, the Liberal party leader, Paddy Ashdown, who admitted an affair with his secretary, Tricia Howard, thereafter earned the nickname “Paddy Pantsdown”.

Secret camera flurry

Boris’s cabinet ministers have demanded urgent security sweeps of their offices after Hancock was filmed with a CCTV camera hidden inside a smoke detector, The Sunday Times reported.

Government security officials are understood to be inspecting all ministerial offices for bugs amid fears that foreign governments could obtain information from private meetings.

Allies of Hancock say he was “stitched up like a kipper” and had no idea there was a camera recording him in a passionate clinch with Gina on May 6. The camera is understood to have been put there in recent months.

The working assumption of security chiefs is that a government contractor obtained access to a feed from the camera and either downloaded it or filmed the monitor with his phone to pass to The Sun newspaper.