Eat out to help out

Not sure if you cast your mind back to the summer of 2020, when the first lockdown had ended as that first wave had flattend to an almost straight line, but the then Chancellor and now PM invented a scheme to get the nation out and eating.

And socially mixing.

Which never did seem like a good idea. Indeed, I was working in Southampton, and the crowds filling each and every bar and restaurant so they could get a bargain meal part=paid for by the State meant thables were rammed.

I was so shocked, that for the last night I insisted we ate sitting outside so not to be in a closed space with others, and when back I isolated for ten days lest I pass on the virus to someone I love.

That eat out to healp out was more than that, it was a series of nationwide super-spreader events, that helped feed the second wave was already clear, and something I wrote about many, many times then and since.

Tufton Street resident, Isabel Oakeshott, who recently helped ghostwrite Mat Hancock's fincationalised account of his time as Helath Secretary, used tens of thousands of Whatsapp messages leaked to the Torygraph to push an anti-lockdown narrative.

Although clearly a politically cycnical act by her, in that these were edited messages and replies, many it would seem taken out of context, it is clear that at the time, evidence was already being uncovered of how bad eat out to help out was, even if in public Sunak denied that this was the case.

None of these people are likeable, and that they seem to be trying to bring down each other would seem to be a good idea, the leaking of material out of context to create a narrative that is embedded before the inquiry sits, using the same material that the inquiry would also use.

Hancock thought the signing of an NDA by Isabel Oakeshott meant that his mesages wouldn't be leaked, thinking that one of the most vocal of lockdown critics wouldn't use material he supplied was very foolish. Oakenshott herself betrayed a source, even if it was Hancock to get a story which has dominated the press for days now. One thing is her time as a "journalist" must now be at an end as who would trust her to be discreet?

Meanwhile, eat out to help out might have, probably did, contribute to tens of thousands of additional deaths and hundreds of thousands of additional infections, at a time when there was no vaccine, when we thought that catching COVID might very well be a death sentence.

There is no doubt Sunak deserves to have his role in this examned but that should have been at the right time with the unedited use of the evidence, whatever we may think of his actions, he deserves to be treated fairly.

What then of the Torygraph, the once great paper of record, now used by Tufton Street or Johnson to further their careers or ideas? No one trusts it any more, either, I would hope.