Who forecast a mass outbreak of virtue-signalling celebs?

Brendan O'Connor

Gary Lineker after Leicester won the Premier League. The BBC presenter has been taken off Match of Day presenting duties after criticising the British government's immigration policies

March 12 2023 02:30 AM

Everyone was up for getting onboard with a weather event. In a fragmented, tetchy world, weather is one of the last great communal experiences — one of the few ways we can get back that old pandemic feeling of ‘all being in this together’.

For the punter, any suggestion of a weather event is a win-win scenario. Either we get a weather event that we can all enjoy together, or we get a blame game about why we overreacted — something we can also all enjoy together.

It’s a win for the media too, who get an urgent breaking news story that people actually care about, rather than more makey-uppy crises. Weather was probably the only thing last week that beat the Burkes for clicks.

And for the Government, the weather is that rare type of story they might actually be able to win. Because it will inevitably blow over without doing too much damage, and the Government will still be there.

There was an edge to some of the weather people as they took up their positions on every single show. They were keen to stress uncertainty. They were keen too, to stress that the Met Éireann app offers a hyper-local view of the weather.

This was a way of stressing that the weather would be different in different places, which was a way of stressing that people should not get up and look out the window and because it’s fine in their parish, tweet that it’s a lovely day and ask why we always overreact to the weather — when other countries get worse weather than we do, and they don’t grind to a halt.

The Government might have hoped the weather event would take off a bit more, to distract from the storm over the ending of the eviction ban.

The ending of the ban came as a bit of a surprise to a lot of people — but strangely, even though it was their idea and it’s been coming for months, the Government seemed the most surprised by it.

Equally, they should have been able to predict the vehemence of Mary Lou’s reaction to it. Since Holly Cairns suddenly popped up and declared herself the voice of Generation Rent, Sinn Féin is clearly rattled that someone else might look more changey than their own front bench.

They’ve been government-in-waiting for so long that they’re in danger of looking like part of the tired establishment. So Mary Lou surpassed herself on the eye rolling and the Jesus-Mary-and-Josephing.

But the problem underlying the whole thing was that while the specific eviction ban storm may pass over eventually, there’ll be another extreme housing event following close behind.

The housing problem is not just the weather anymore, it’s the climate.

So it’s fair to say nearly everyone breathed a sigh of relief when an unexpected breezy front blew in from England at the weekend in the form of the Gary Lineker Match of the Day saga — heralding a mass outbreak of virtue-signalling celebs and the grinding of the BBC to a halt .

That’s long been our favourite kind of collective-experience news story, one that allows us to reflect on the fact that, while we have our problems, at least we’re better than the Brits.