Day: 24 May 2020

The Observer drops the second shoe in the Cummings scandal on its front page – the news that he visited his parents in Durham again in the middle of April after staying with them at the end of March. How do they know this? Thanks to an eagle-eyed member of the public: Robin Lees, 70, a retired chemistry teacher from , says he saw Cummings and his family walking by the Tees before getting into a car around lunchtime on 12 April.Lees said: “I was a bit gobsmacked to see him, because I know what he looks like. And the rest of the family seemed to match – a wife and child. I was pretty convinced it was him and it didn’t seem right because I assumed he would be in London.”He added: “I went home and told my wife, we thought he must be in London. I searched up the number plate later that day and my computer search history shows that.” I find it incredible that this man is so unashamed about being a tell-tale he actually flaunts the fact that he plugged Cummings's number plate into Google on his computer. If Mr Lees had been born in East Germany rather than England, I have little doubt about which state agency he would have worked for. Keir Starmer ...

by Guy de la Bédoyère Before we can undo Lockdown Land we must try to understand why it has proved so appealing to so many people. I’ve done a number of jobs over the last 40 years, but by far and away the most full-on was retraining as a secondary school teacher at the age of 49. In some ways it was a superb experience, but in other ways it was a nightmare. The job was never done – there was always something else. Whatever one did it was never quite good enough. Targets were replaced by new targets. In short, it was like trying to climb up a glass cliff with melted butter in my hands. In the event I lasted nine years, but for much of that time I was acutely conscious that had anything happened – like an accident – to take me out of work for several weeks or months, I’d almost certainly never be able to climb back on the travellator and resume my duties. That was a job in education, but it could be matched by so many other jobs where the sheer momentum is what keeps it going: from the commuting, right down to worrying at the weekends, the relentless and merciless pressure of performance management and the status that becomes tied up ...