The fact Boris Johnson had to be shamed by footballer Marcus Rashford into feeding England’s 1.3 million free school-meals pupils during the holidays is a damning indictment of an out-of-touch PM.
We congratulate the England and Man United star, who used his own early experience of hardship and his current celebrity to be a powerful voice for the dispossessed.
Yet it shouldn’t take Rashford or Labour leader Keir Starmer or Tory rebels or teaching unions or the Labour Government in Cardiff or the SNP Government in Edinburgh, to force Johnson to do the right thing.
Time after time, the first instincts of this Prime Minister, including over the treatment of NHS and care-home workers during the coronavirus crisis, are wrong.
The latest humiliating U-turn is welcome, but how much longer must the country endure in Downing Street a man clearly out of his depth? Rashford showed the decisive leadership completely lacking in the PM.
Raid on aid
Threatening to snatch food from the mouths of the world’s hungry illustrates how much Boris Johnson doesn’t really care about the poor.
To rubbish our nation’s globally admired £14billion aid budget as a “giant cashpoint in the sky” was a PM stirring up hatred.
The Foreign Office taking over the Department for International Development is another mistake that’ll cost Britain influence and undermine our international standing.
Nobody pretends every penny was spent wisely, but the same can be said about a Government headed by a PM knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
It’s kicking off
The referee’s whistle restarting the Premier League tonight is also the sound of the move towards a new normal.
Slowly but surely, the country is returning to something like the nation we knew before lockdown – even if stadiums are crowdless.
