U.K. Civil Service’s short-lived but viral tweet.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson did not provide further details on the £1 billion widening of the A66 across the Pennines in northern England at the Downing Street coronavirus briefing on May 24. Nor did he follow up on another of yesterday’s announcements by transport secretary Grant Shapps that the U.K. would be following France in providing £50 bicycle repair vouchers.
Those two omissions could form part of the explanation for a snarky, career-ending, short-lived tweet sent out from the official UK Civil Service Twitter feed.
The tweet—which quickly went viral—was posted shortly after the end of the widely-derided briefing by the Prime Minister, who backed his chief advisor Dominic Cummings for having good “instincts” in breaking both lockdown and quarantine during a 260-mile drive from London to the north east England cathedral city of Durham.
The message—“Arrogant and offensive. Can you imagine having to work with these truth twisters?”—was removed within about 10 minutes of first appearing, but not before it had been “liked’ by more than 30,000 Twitter users.
During the briefing the Prime Minister was asked about evidence that Cummings had been seen in Barnard Castle during the height of the lockdown, which would be a clear breach of the government’s guidelines, guidelines in part developed by Cummings who has contributed to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) coronavirus crisis meetings.
Johnson did not provide an answer to the question.
Barnard Castle is situated on the A67, close to the A66, and any improvement to this cross-Pennine route would no doubt aid any lockdown-breaking journeys in any future killer pandemic.
However, it ought to be noted that the widening of the A66 has been promised by numerous governments since the 1970s.
