January 28th - Grant Shapps' Travel Dead Cats
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2022
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Grant Shapps has made a number of transport announcements. These have fallen during the ongoing controversy surrounding alleged parties held at 10 Downing Street, leading many to refer to these announcement as convenient 'dead cat' distractions. I go through each of them and what they mean for travellers. From less announcements on trains to updates on testing before travel.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Arise, Sir Grant. If that doesn't happen in the Boris Johnson resignation honours, then frankly, all my faith in the system of political rewards will be shattered, because nobody has done more than the Transport SACCritory to back Boris Johnson. He's done more than the Transport Secretary to back Boris Johnson. |
| 0:22.8 | He's done more than Nadine Doris, the Cautish Secretary. |
| 0:26.5 | He's done more than the leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg. |
| 0:29.7 | And he's even done more than the Tory backbencher who claimed that the Prime Minister |
| 0:36.0 | had been ambushed by a cake. |
| 0:38.7 | Yes, Grant Shaps, enthusiastic backer of Boris Johnson, has also been coming out with some |
| 0:46.2 | exciting announcements, which I believe are known in the trade as dead cats. |
| 0:51.8 | The idea is, you distract people. |
| 0:53.9 | Oh, look over there. What's that? It's a dead cat. Or it's a new |
| 0:57.6 | policy announcement. Let's take the first one, which was rolled out last week. This was, |
| 1:03.8 | you might recall, the business of reducing the number of announcements that happen on trains. |
| 1:11.4 | Now, this is something that could have been done at any time over the past 12 years |
| 1:16.1 | by the first coalition and then the Conservative government. |
| 1:20.6 | But would you believe it's coincided with a time of some psychotrama in Downing Street? |
| 1:27.2 | And therefore, |
| 1:28.3 | crikey, what's going on here? |
| 1:29.8 | Therefore, a time when you clearly need to have some distractions. |
| 1:34.3 | So they got some headlines. |
| 1:36.3 | The Transport Secretary, rather than just trying to persuade more people to travel by train, |
| 1:43.3 | by going out and encouraging to do that was |
| 1:46.9 | filmed on a train without a mask incidentally talking about how this was going to |
| 1:55.1 | improve the life for travellers in normal times I think it would be a kind of one-line |
... |
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