An A-bomb in Wardour St: Don’t panic!
KEEP Calm and Carry On? There wasn’t a great deal of Blitz Spirit on parade in London on Friday when a Twitter- inspired mass panic broke out over an alleged terror attack.
Thousands of Christmas shoppers and commuters went into full headless chicken mode over reports of explosions and ‘shots fired’ at Oxford Circus Underground station. Scotland Yard’s 999 switchboard was swamped.
Police responded with commendable speed. Armed officers were on the scene in a heartbeat, helicopters hovered overhead and sirens wailed. Department stores, restaurants and pubs locked their doors as those fleeing the scene sought refuge.
Social media fed the confusion. At 5pm, a pop singer called Olly Murs tweeted his eight million followers: ‘Everyone get out of Selfridges now gun shots!! I’m inside.’
Eight minutes later, he updated his anxious fans: ‘Evacuating store now!!! F***ing heart is pounding.’
From his frantic tone it seems the store wasn’t the only thing he was evacuating. But Murs wasn’t alone. Even those running for their lives found time to reach for their mobile phones and update their status.
‘Guy with a gun on Oxford Street near Oxford Circus I’m in the middle of it. Currently taking cover in French Connection,’ posted another Twitter user, with 7,999,999 fewer followers than Olly Murs.
Within minutes, Facebook was alight with photographs of friends and relatives missing, presumed dead — the instant electronic equivalent of this column’s popular Portashrines. Pray4AuntieDoris. By 5.39pm, however, police were able to reassure everyone that there was no evidence of any terrorist activity. And half an hour later, it was all over.
Everybody back on the Tube.
THE Twitter storm had evaporated almost as quickly as it had erupted. Olly Murs was safe. Thank God, we were worried sick.
It turns out the catalyst was (might have been) a bad-tempered scuffle between two men on a Victoria Line platform — the sort of thing which happens on the Underground every day of the week, especially at rush-hour.
Both handed themselves in to police and neither was charged. Thankfully, apart from a few cuts and bruises, no one was hurt in the stampede. But someone could easily have been killed.
The cost in terms of lost business, wasted police time and human misery is incalculable. An ugly rumour, tweeted round the world in a millisecond brought chaos to the busiest shopping street in one of the world’s most bustling and prosperous capital cities.
Look, I don’t blame anyone for legging it in the wake of the very real and devastating terror attacks in London at Borough Market, Westminster Bridge and elsewhere in the past year. Self-preservation and the herd instinct always kick in.
The police are to be congratulated, not criticised, for their exemplary response. Even though I have my reservations about the need for officers to hide their faces behind balaclavas, which only heighten the sense of terror, the speed with which they were on the scene in force was impressive.
The only thing missing was the press conference to announce that this was nothing to do with Islam.
What’s worrying is that a few wild tweets can create such mayhem. What if there had been a genuine emergency on the other side of London?
ALL it takes today is a false alarm to spark widespread panic. As Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope might have observed, this is The Way We Live Now.
The purpose of terrorism is to spread fear and despondency, and disrupt the way we go about our daily lives. In World War II, the German bombers were aided and abetted by Lord Haw-Haw’s wireless broadcasts, designed to frighten and unsettle the civilian population.
Today, the narcissists of social media perform the same function. Who needs Lord Haw-Haw when you’ve got Olly Murs? To be honest, I wouldn’t know Olly Murs from Ollie Beak, Pussy Cat Willum’s sidekick on Five O’Clock Club with Muriel Young, Wally Whyton and Bert Weedon — a teatime TV show from my childhood.
Why do eight million people feel the need to follow his every utterance? And why did he think it necessary to pour petrol on the flames of fear and chaos?
Is he really vain enough to believe that in the middle of a terror attack there are people who actually give a damn whether or not Olly Murs is trapped in Selfridges?
It’s not just celebrities, either. As I have observed frequently, everyone has to be in the movie.
What kind of imbecile takes time out of running for their life to post ‘currently taking cover in French Connection’ on the internet? Or rushes to put photographs of ‘missing’ friends and relatives on Facebook within a couple of minutes of hearing about a possible terror attack in the West End? This is #MeToo gone mental. Just as well Twitter wasn’t around in 1978 when The Jam brought out a single called A-Bomb In Wardour Street. Someone might have thought the IRA had acquired nuclear weapons and the streets of Soho would have resembled Pamplona during the bull run.
The BBC is currently showing a series about the effects of bombing during the Blitz. Contrary to accepted wisdom, it wasn’t all Keep Calm And Carry On, even though the threat from the skies was considerably more deadly than we face from the Islamist enemy within.
But just think how much worse it would have been if Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army had had a mobile phone and a Twitter account.
Don’t panic!