Eat, drink and be merry, now for the hangover

WHATeveR Rishi Sunak’s drinking, make mine a large one. But seeing as he doesn’t touch alcohol, i can only assume he’s discovered some kind of magic teetotal elixir.

either that, or he’s a devotee of one of those New Age cults which promises serenity and divine intervention in exchange for a large financial donation.

Certainly, he has had no hesitation in putting our money where his mouth is. divine intervention would be cheap at half the price.

Thirty billion quid here, £100 billion there, £25billion somewhere else. it soon begins to add up to real money.

dishi’s on a mission to feed the world. He followed up his extension of the free school meals scheme through the summer holidays with a £10off, allyoucaneat deal aimed at encouraging people back into restaurants. do you want fries with that? if Bob Geldof had been given access to the kind of cash dishi’s throwing at his coronavirus recovery plan, he could have fed the world twice over and still had enough left over for a bag of chips and a private jet home.

Forget live Aid, welcome to CovAid. Have some more effing money!

You have to admit Sunak’s confidence and youthful enthusiasm are as infectious as coronavirus. That’s what worries me.

AdmiTTedlY, this Chancellor is a refreshing contrast to his morose predecessors Gordon Brown and, especially, Spread Fear Phil Hammond, who had all the charisma of a poxdoctor’s clerk.

But will his cure turn out to be worse than the disease? The lockdown has already inflicted terminal damage on vast sectors of the economy.

despite his latest, eyewateringly expensive stimulus package on Wednesday, yesterday brought further bad news on the unemployment front.

Another 60,000 people face redundancy after leading companies like RollsRoyce, John lewis and Boots announced severe cutbacks.

RollsRoyce has been crippled by the contraction in the aviation industry. And John lewis is even being forced to shut its modern flagship store in Birmingham’s Bullring shopping centre, following a drastic collapse in retail sales since march.

Neither sector is going to bounce back in a hurry. Airlines are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. even if all the restrictions were lifted tomorrow, passengers would be in no rush to return to the skies.

Some people might put up with wearing masks on shorthaul flights, but who wants to travel on the longhaul transatlantic and Asian routes if it involves being muzzled for anything up to ten hours? And that’s after having to queue at the airport for four hours in advance while health checks are carried out.

High Street retail was in trouble before the corona pandemic. While nonessential stores have reopened, once the initial excitement passed there’s been no great enthusiasm for shopping under strict postlockdown conditions.

Hundreds may have queued outside stores like Primark and Nike Town on day One, but on day Two the streets were deserted again.

it’s been a similar story in the wake of the muchheralded independence day last weekend.

Yes, some restaurants may have been busy and at least the pubs were allowed to open again. Pockets of madness apart, though, there was no great stampede.

i haven’t ventured into Central london yet, but friends and colleagues tell me it’s still a virtual ghost town. Buses are empty and cabs are conspicuous by their absence. The same goes for other towns and cities.

it’s going to stay like this until city centre offices start to reopen, too. While most hairdressers, restaurant and bar staff are back at work, and supermarket employees and delivery drivers have never stopped, white collar Britain is content to stay at home.

Why can’t banks, advertising agencies and other businesses return to normal? Only when their staff are back at their desks and spending money in the shops, pubs, sandwich bars and barbers near their offices will takings start getting back to normal.

Why has the Government inexplicably delayed reopening nail bars, tanning salons and gyms, which provide so much impetus to the economy, particularly in the North?

Too many bosses are still taking advantage of the furlough system to keep employees idle while the Government pays most of their wages. Sunak should never have extended it until October. Now he’s trying a £1,000ahead bribe to entice firms to keep staff on until the end of January. Then what? The main fear is that having, in Boris Johnson’s memorable phrase, ‘spaffed’ the thick end of £300billion against the wall, we still end up with four millionplus longterm unemployed.

As i’ve insisted all along, giving away money is the easy bit. Wait until Sunak has to start clawing the money back through higher taxes and ‘savage cuts’ — whatever he says about no return to austerity. His popularity will plummet like a lead Zeppelin.

When that happens, will the Boys in The Bubble still be enthusiastically hailing dishi Rishi as our next Prime minister?

Or will he be slaughtered as a naive, outofhisdepth Pollyanna who foolishly crashed the economy unnecessarily?

Will he be damned for frittering away hundreds of billions of pounds we don’t have attempting to stave off the worst recession since the 1930s, caused by his own Government’s rabbitintheheadlights reaction to a manageable epidemic which was only ever going to affect a minuscule proportion of the population?

COuld go either way, believe me. Those currently praising Sunak could turn on him in a heartbeat. You have to admire Rishi’s resilience, optimism and unflappability. But so much of what he has announced smacks of gimmickry, designed to feed the daily news cycle.

i don’t doubt he wants to help the hospitality industry. But lopping a tenner off chicken and chips during August is little more than a futile PR stunt.

if restarting the economy hinges upon knocking out subsidised cheeky Nando’s at half price, we’re in more trouble than we thought.

leave aside the contradiction of offering cutprice fast food at a time when the Government is battling an obesity epidemic and the gyms are still shut for now.

Burger King obviously wasn’t impressed. Yesterday, despite the Chancellor generously slashing 50 per cent off the price of a Whopper, the fastfood chain said it would have to close one in ten of its outlets permanently, with the loss of 1,600 jobs.

Rishi may have drunk a magic elixir, but the hangover starts now.