Heatwave is no crisis but that hasn’t stopped BBC and Nanny state going into overdrive – we need to get a grip
HOW will the BBC’s angry birds cope when arch-villain Boris Johnson is gone? How will they fill their bulletins without anti-BoJo bile?
Having spent the past three years blaming the PM for more or less everything, they simply can’t kick the habit.
Even as he ticks off his last days in office, the Beeb was at it again this weekend, attacking the PM for leaving the nation to frizzle alive while he guzzles iced champagne and caviar at Chequers.
Boris allegedly “raised eyebrows” by failing to chair a Saturday Cobra crisis meeting on the heatwave sweeping Western Europe.
Instead, they reported, he was kicking up his heels at a “farewell bash” in his sumptuous Chequers country estate.
Radio 4 quoted with approval Labour claims that the PM was “partying while Britain boils”.
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Reporter Ben Wright suggested it was “some sort of shindig” for Tory supporters.
“So a fairly small gathering,” he added, unprompted.
Partygate will never die as long as we have the Beeb — and indeed all the major broadcasters — to keep it alive.
Boris might be reminded of US President Richard Nixon as he was hounded out of office over the original, Watergate.
“As I leave you, I want you to think how much you’re going to be missing,” said Nixon. “You don’t have me to kick around any more.”
Ah well, Auntie, there will be another Tory PM along in a minute.
But why should any Prime Minister be chairing a summit about weather?
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In the great drought of 1976, Labour PM Jim “Crisis? What Crisis?” Callaghan didn’t chair emergency meetings.
He merely urged people to share a bath and ordered junior minister Denis Howell to perform a rain dance. It worked!
Finger-wagging
It is absurd even to call this a “crisis”. Most people are actually enjoying a long- awaited blast of sunshine after a miserable Covid winter.
True, this is a “Phew! What A Scorcher” event, with temperatures heading for a record 41C — uncomfortable but quite common in, say, Sicily, Spain and Australia.
People there carry on pretty much as usual.
In Sydney a few years ago, it was 43 degrees as my wife and I walked across the Harbour Bridge.
It would be unpleasant if this heatwave continued for long, but even Met Office scaremongers admit it will last only a few days.
There will be a concern if temperatures rise still higher, more frequently and for longer — as climate change lobbyists say is certain.
But while this week’s high temperatures may not constitute a “crisis”, that hasn’t stopped the Nanny State going into overdrive.
Finger-wagging health and safety advisers tell us to stay in the shade, carry a bottle of water, don’t travel by Tube.
Luckily, striking Underground staff will make sure of that.
Teachers’ unions predictably want to shut down schools, sabotaging another chunk of our children’s education.
And those much-missed health bureaucrats, starved of TV exposure since Covid, are queuing up with life-or-death warnings about hats and deep water.
Predictably, there is a clamour to “save” the sacred NHS, whose annual winter crisis has expanded to fill the whole year.
Ambulances are queueing at A&E. Hospital beds are full.
“We are already literally in the grip right now of a summer crisis that’s worse than any winter crisis in the last decade or so,” Sunday Times health editor Shaun Lintern tells the BBC.
Is this true? Can it be worse than peak Covid or the 2018 Beast From The East flu epidemic, with patients waiting in ambulances and hospital corridors crammed with dying patients?
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Bring back those Nightingale pop-up wards. Where is the Beeb’s Clive Myrie, chanting “We’re all scared”.
And if it is true, could it by any chance be down to a failure by NHS management to use its £190.3billion budget efficiently, rather than Boris starving them of taxpayers’ cash?
Could we perhaps have hired more nurses on £25,000 a year rather than the scores of diversity and inclusion managers on £80,000.
Or maybe cut the estimated £2billion a year wasted on over-prescribed drugs and overpriced loo rolls, wheelchairs and crutches?
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Or the £2.1billion for negligence claims and compensation?
You’ll miss all this, won’t you Boris?