RULES ARE ONLY FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE, THINKS BORIS

IN MAY 2020, the police were flying drones over country parks in the North West and harassing people who held takeaway coffees while walking in pairs, claiming that the cups showed they were holding a party, rather than simply chatting.

Yet 55 minutes after Tory

Minister Oliver Dowden declared in Parliament that people could meet only one person even in the open air, the wine glasses and sausage rolls were being laid out at 10 Downing Street for a Bring Your Own Bottle party attended by Boris Johnson and his wife along with 40 others.

Johnson (pictured) issued a carefully lawyered non-apology apology for that in Parliament last week but it seems that he then stepped into the Commons tearoom, away from the cameras, and cynically told MPs he had done nothing wrong.

Meanwhile a woman in Hackney was fined £12,000 for holding a party with 40 attendees. Her mistake was that she wasn’t a Tory MP. As usual, it’s one set of rules for us and another set for them.

But that’s the Tories all over. Rising energy prices and the cost of living crisis will not affect Boris, who bought wallpaper for £840 a roll and got a businessman to pay for it while denying knowledge of the arrangement. Rules are only for the general public, people like you and me.

● THE Government told us we should test ourselves using the 15 minute lateral flow test before meeting family over Christmas. It was good advice. Yet many pharmacies had been out of stock of the test kits for much of the week before Christmas, leading to many if not most pharmacies being unable to hand out a single test kit if you visited them to get one.

The sole wholesaler received millions of them on Christmas Eve – and promptly went on holiday for four days. Presumably the wholesaler increased its profits by not paying staff extra to work over Monday, December 27 and Tuesday, December 28 bank holidays which occurred in lieu of Christmas Day and Boxing Day because they fell at the weekend.

What was the Government doing about this? They seem to have been asleep on the job, or more likely they were spending their time on what really matters to them – heaping yet more pressure on the NHS, prioritising the interests of Tory MPs over public health, and infighting over who will replace Boris as Prime Minister, and which faction they need to ingratiate themselves with in order to progress their careers.

Harry Dobson