Mark Francois changes his tune on NHS workers after dismissing their fears over Brexit

Mark Francois claps for carers outside his home in Rayleigh. Photograph: Facebook. - Credit: Archant

STEVE ANGLESEY on how Mark Francois has changed his tune on NHS workers after dismissing their concerns over Brexit.

MARK FRANCOIS

The Brexiteer posted a video of himself clapping for the NHS while wearing a rugby shirt decorated with horizontal black and white stripes – no doubt his neighbours thought, ‘Hamburglar has let himself go’. A reminder of how highly Mark values the NHS can be found in the January 31 episode of Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine Show, in which he was reminded that the Royal College of Nurses, the Royal College of GPs, the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal

College of Radiologists and the British Medical Association had all said the service would be damaged by Brexit. Francois’ reply? ‘That’s an opinion, and at the end of the day there’s one way to find out, isn’t there? Let’s try it.’


Have your say
Send your letters for publication to The New European by emailing letters@theneweuropean.co.uk and pick up an edition each Thursday for more comment and analysis. Find your nearest stockist here or subscribe to a print or digital edition for just £13. You can also join our readers' Facebook group to keep the discussion and debate going with thousands of fellow pro-Europeans.

BORIS JOHNSON

During his deeply confused Sunday night broadcast on May 10, as the prime minister explained that the new Covid Alert Level would be measured out of five, his social media people helpfully tweeted that ‘Covid Alert Level = R (rate of infection) + Number of infections’.

Since the ‘R’ had already been revealed to be 0.6 and the number of infections measured on that day stood at 219,183, this meant that the Covid Alert Level was an impressive 219,183.6 out of five. That’s numberwang, and maths even Priti Patel, with her three hundred thousand and thirty four, nine hundred and seventy four thousand coronavirus tests, knows don’t add up.

With geniuses like this at the helm, hard to believe we’ve got this whole thing so badly wrong, isn’t it?

JIM DAVIDSON

The comedian for whom the term ‘different times’ was invented has flounced off Twitter (‘There are some angry, jealous lefties on here. Doing my head in. God help this country’) after his hopes for Boris Johnson’s big lockdown speech were ridiculed. ‘I hope Boris lets us be sensible,’ he began, before calling for the prime minister to ‘open the golf courses, the marinas. Let’s all be careful but start living again’. Alas, once again, the downtrodden marina users of Britain find their dreams in tatters.

Meanwhile Twitter users will just have to learn to live without Jim’s pithy analysis of current affairs, which recently has included his verdict on government advisor professor Neil Ferguson’s lockdown breaches with a married woman: ‘A man has to shag.’

ROGER HELMER

The former MEP, famously photographed ‘resting his eyes’ in the EU parliament chamber, fears his countrymen are sleepwalking into disaster. ‘They say that 75% of Brits favour continuing the lockdown, and favouring lives ahead of the economy. I fear they haven’t fully grasped the appalling consequences of the lockdown for jobs & prosperity,’ he tweeted. Does this remind any readers of something else that happened recently, when the percentage in favour was much smaller – 23% smaller, in fact – and those opposed were told to shut up and accept the will of the people? Helmer later tweeted, ‘Actually, I think Covid-19 is a Remainer plot. To kill off most of the old people who voted Leave.’ If so, a ballsy move by the conspirators to launch in Wuhan, some 5,500 miles from the UK!