Football mad
OUR Covid quarantine rules are now in disarray.
Are they even remotely based on risk any more?
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There are ten pointless but mandatory days in solitary for double-jabbed Brits returning from an amber-list country.
But if you’re powerful enough and lobby hard enough you can get that lifted for thousands of random people.
So, along with Uefa VIPs, 2,000 foreign fans will flock to Wembley next month without a moment in quarantine.
This concession will, heartbreakingly, come too late to help the visiting Germans next Tuesday.
We can only hope and pray they are not left dispirited by what may prove a partisan crowd
But as the rules are then relaxed for incoming foreign fans to see 22 blokes play football, school heads are scrapping tearful kids’ sports days after overzealously misinterpreting existing Covid rules, leaving parents outraged.
The public — with Angela Merkel now demanding Brits must all isolate for a fortnight in any EU country despite most of us being double-jabbed — are rightly furious and confused by it all.
Cabinet Minister George Eustice admits it “looks inconsistent”.
That’s not the half of it. It’s a shambles.
PM’s been ad
THE old Boris Johnson could be trusted to scoff at a “meat tax to fight climate change” idea and kill it stone dead.
But the days of him batting away the nanny-state meddlers are over.
Punitive levies on burgers or bangers are so obviously a recipe for public discontent and Tory election disaster.
But then the PM has already swallowed the crazy idea that curbs on TV or online ads for some treats, including jam and mince pies, will cut obesity.
When they fail to trim a single child’s waistline, will he and the zealots who have captured him apologise?
No. They will claim their new law is too soft and expand it.
More food chains (and broadcasters) will lose millions.
More workers will lose their jobs.
This ban will be as ineffective as the sugar tax before it and the outlawing of some two-for-ones next year.
Public health minister Jo Churchill cheerily boasts that it will all “help wipe billions off the national calorie count”.
The estimate, in fact, is just four calories a day on average per child.
That is a crumb, 1/20th of the “jam ring” Boris scoffed at a Batley biscuit factory last week.
A negligible sliver of the 1,600-2,200 calories a child needs.
Multiply it by ten and it is still negligible.
Boris rightly used to believe exercise, better education about diet and portions and a bit of self-control was the key.
Siren voices around him prefer to argue we are all blameless, helpless, brainwashed dupes of predatory food giants from which they must save us.
Now that is junk.
They really should stop advertising it.
