A PUB boss has slammed customers who didn’t turn up for their Christmas dinners despite making a booking.
The Salty Dog Hotel and Bistro in Bangor, Northern Ireland, fumed that nearly a quarter of their customers for the festive feast were no shows.
It comes ahead of Boris Johnson’s D-Day talks on Covid later today as publicans urge him to resist a New Year’s Eve-wrecking lockdown because of the Omicron variant.
But a string of hugely positive studies show Omicron IS milder than other strains, with the first official UK report revealing the risk of hospitalisation is 50 to 70 per cent lower than with Delta.
Covid booster jabs protect against Omicron and offer the best chance to get through the pandemic, health officials have repeatedly said.
Trending In The News’s Jabs Army campaign is helping get the vital extra vaccines in Brits’ arms to ward off the need for any new restrictions.
The pub Tweeted: “Thanks to the 20 per cent of customers who didn’t turn up today and didn’t bother telling us.
“You lost your deposit and a delicious Christmas lunch, but we lost a lot more.
“We have never in ten years had Christmas Day no-shows.”
Currently the PM is battling calls for new restrictions which would ban indoor drinking in pubs.
Instead, he is leaning towards guidance urging people to be careful over how many others they meet.
But he will make his decision only after a crunch meeting with medical advisers Professor Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance on Covid hospitalisation rates today.
The PM and his advisers will trawl through new numbers on the rates in London — dubbed Omicron ground zero and seen as the canary in the coal mine for Covid.
As the clock counts down to New Year’s Eve, Government insiders reckon it is growing less likely Parliament will be recalled early to vote on a new lockdown.
Instead, the PM is expected to stick to his plan to roll out boosters at lightning speed.
Desperate publicans yesterday wrote to the PM and Chancellor Rishi Sunakurging against new lockdown measures.
The pair were warned a return to the rule of six, table service only or the closure of indoor hospitality would leave many on the brink of closure.
Christmas takings are already down around 40 per cent on pre-pandemic levels — and a bad New Year’s Eve could push many over the edge, pubs warned.
The letter, organised by the Campaign for Pubs and signed by publicans across the country, said: “We are on the brink — in many cases literally on the verge of being unable to carry on, of walking away and of going under.”
It partly blames the Government’s “confused messaging”.
UK Hospitality head Kate Nicholls said: “We urge the PM to stick to current plans. There is still much we don’t know about Omicron but we do know the economic and social hit lockdowns and restrictions have so caution is right.”
