When news broke on Saturday night that the government had removed Spain from the safe travel list less than 24 hours after its own transport secretary, Grant Shapps, had arrived there on holiday, many people laughed.
It was intimated that, perhaps, in the higher echelons of government, that being the echelon directly above Grant Shapps, somebody was possibly trying to make him look a bit of a wally.
But Grant Shapps doesn’t like to be laughed at, as he has learned from extensive experience, so “friends of” Grant Shapps (who we should at least consider the possibility could be Grant Shapps himself, acting under a different identity), have been anonymously setting the record straight.
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It’s just unfortunate that the newly straightened record is even funnier than the first one.
It would appear that Shapps would like it to be publicly known that, no, no one thought it would be funny to impose quarantine on him the second he left the country.
And no, officials in the Department for Transport did not start demanding anyone who’d been to Spain would have to keep out the office for two weeks on their return, at the precise moment they knew their boss had landed in Spain.
Actually, what happened is that Shapps knew on Friday that it was almost certain that come Saturday it would be announced he would be subject to quarantine, but proceeded with the family holiday anyway, because it would have been “wrong to act on privileged information”.
The Shapps defence is that it can’t be one rule for one and another for another. It’s not for a transport secretary to encourage people to go on holiday to Spain one day, then bail himself the next, because he knows what’s coming when they don’t.
But it must be particularly galling for Shapps, and indeed the wider Shapps family, that there in fact appears to be one rule for all the rest of the government, which is not to bother with the rules, and another for Grant Shapps.
Does he feel in any way, you know, victimised, that he has to abide by the rules and quarantine his whole family to stop the government looking bad, when his only other memorable contribution to five months of coronavirus crisis was to spend a full, agonising weekend on every politics show there is, trying to explain that, actually, yes, it’s fine to drive to Barnard Castle when you can’t see – but only if your name’s Dominic Cummings.
Or if your name’s Michael Gove, of course. The government appears to have learned its lesson the hard way over Pret-gate, when takeaway restaurants like Pret a Manger were briefly exempted from mandatory mask wearing after Gove was caught not wearing his while picking up a sandwich.
Since the quarantine restrictions were imposed on Spain, the Spanish tourism board has lobbied hard for them to be eased on the Balearic and Canary Islands, where infection rates are low. So far the government has refused, which is said to be on the basis that Gove is shortly off to Ibiza and doesn’t want to look like exceptions are being made for his benefit, yet again.
First it was merely the health of sandwich sellers that had to be put at risk. Now an entire island economy (that’s Ibiza, to be clear, not the UK. Gove has already had his way with that one.)
Still, we must hope Shapps is enjoying his holiday, and his unplanned bonus time off on return. His superiors have announced there will be no entitlement to statutory sick pay or other benefits for anyone who followed the government’s advice and booked a holiday and now can’t go back to work when they get back.
But this kind of thing is unlikely to affect Shapps. It’s only people who have a job you can’t do from home that have to worry about that, not, you know, the transport secretary.
It is also arguably somewhat fortunate that the government’s transport secretary is on holiday, and therefore cannot be expected to explain the new advice on what to do if you booked a holiday to any of the many destinations served by the “air bridges” Shapps and others were so keen to show off about.
That advice appears to be very much of the “Danger: rocks may fall from above” variety. Life’s a lottery. Be lucky. Stay, or go and hope for the best.
We also hope he gets to claim off in lieu the day he’s spent generously setting the record straight. Oh, sorry, no, that was a “close friend”.
