PM’s circus has drowned other news
TWO people died in Cornwall this weekend. A teenage girl was killed after a RIB overturned and she was trapped underneath it. Three other people were rescued in the same incident near Wadebridge.
In a separate incident, a man died after being pulled from the sea at Treyarnon near Padstow. A third person was pulled unconscious from the water by surfers at Porthtowan in another near-tragedy on Cornwall’s coast.
A beautifully sunny bank holiday weekend coincided with the easing of lockdown restrictions, meaning thousands of people headed to the coast.
I was among them. I knocked off work early last Friday and took my kids to the beach. We tried to fly a kite, the kids jumped in the sea and we ate takeaway fish and chips from the local cafe.
There were dozens of people on the beach, windsurfers out riding the waves and people swimming. There were people queuing outside the café. It was almost like a normal sunny Friday night.
But it’s not normal, is it? And as the lockdown restrictions ease, it’s increasingly clear that there’s not enough thought behind how to reopen the country and still keep people safe.
The government told people they could travel as far as they wanted to exercise. They could spend day trips out as long as they didn’t meet other families. They could go to the beach and crash around in the sea and go out in their boats and on their surfboards and in their kayaks. And so they did.
But where was the infrastructure to deal with a surge in beachgoers? Where were the lifeguards?
There were no lifeguards, because none of the 1,600 lifeguards who would usually be in place on the beaches around the coast in May half term had been trained.
My trip was relatively uneventful, but that wasn’t the case for the poor families of those three people in Cornwall, nor those involved in more than 120 callouts for RNLI lifeboats over the weekend.
It should be an absolute scandal that two people lost their lives but these tragedies have gone largely unnoticed because 450 miles away, Boris Johnson’s Chief Adviser went to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight and the PM said it was OK.
I think the behaviour of Dominic Cummings should absolutely be scrutinised and challenged and he deserves every single one of those calls to resign.
I think his 250-mile drive from London to Durham with his family to ‘seek childcare’ was a flagrant and arrogant disregard for the government rules he himself had helped to create.
They’re the actions of a man who thinks he’s above the law because he has friends in high enough places to protect him.
And the Prime Minister’s efforts to defend the indefensible and coerce his ministers into doing the same is utterly reprehensible.
What he’s done has made a mockery of the rules around lockdown and made everyone feel as though there’s little point left in trying to stick to them.
But the media circus around his actions, that the Prime Minister has only served to fuel, has sucked the oxygen out of any other news this week.
And it’s smothered a debate that should have taken centre stage around how to protect people, not just from Covid-19, but from the risks associated with reopening the country.
This weekend, only 16 beaches in England will be patrolled by lifeguards. It’s expected to be the hottest weekend of the year. While restrictions remain in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that prevent travel to the beach, there is nothing to stop every person in England from flocking to the coast.
With little sign that the din around Cummings is abating, one can only hope that enough people will hear local warnings and we avoid a repeat of last weekend’s tragedies.
One can only hope that enough people hear local warnings