‘Responsibility for lowering Covid-19 transmission has fallen to low-paid hotel workers’

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

(Image credit: A man draws his curtains at the Radisson Blu hotel after arriving at Heathrow)

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1. Has anyone bothered to think about the staff working at quarantine hotels?
2. Whatever you think of Harry and Meghan, their media critics are far worse
3. Wanted: new clichés for our brave new world
4. Just booking a holiday has made me feel so much better
5. Biden repeats Obama’s mistakes by dissing Israel

By The best columns

published 17 February 2021

1. Has anyone bothered to think about the staff working at quarantine hotels?

Zoe Gardner in The Independent

As most of the country works from home during the third lockdown, “responsibility for lowering Covid-19 transmission across our borders has fallen to low-paid hotel workers, security staff and cleaners”, says Zoe Gardner in The Independent. With many migrant workers in the hotels hosting quarantined travellers, the policy advisor to the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants argues that “we need cast-iron assurances that all staff working are protected with full sick pay if they need to isolate and access to all benefits and financial support, regardless of their immigration status”.

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News that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are to be interviewed by Oprah “has caused the bed of some commentators to be completely shat”, writes Marina Hyde in The Guardian. “We’re a country where the guys leading the media charge against Meghan are so emotionally warped”, she continues, “that the only way they can begin to release their feelings of social, racial and sexual resentment is by using a 94-year-old woman’s feelings as a proxy”. These “self-appointed ‘defenders of the royal family’s honour’ may want to have a good, hard look at themselves,” she adds. “No matter how ridiculous anything Meghan and Harry ever do is... it will never, ever be even a hundredth as ridiculous as the behaviour of those foaming at the mouth about it.”

“Grim milestones - how I have hated what they represent. But no less have I hated the cliché”, writes Matthew Parris in The Times. As the numbers of infections and deaths fall, he asks if “new clichés” could be introduced. “Merry milestone would be insensitive but how about a ‘heartening’, ‘welcome’ or ‘morale-boosting’ milestone”. As the vaccine rollout hastens the return of normal life, we need “new clichés, please, for rosy-dawning salvation”.

“So, I threw caution to the wind and booked a holiday for July at my happy place on the Med,” Allison Pearson tells readers of The Telegraph. “The point of booking a holiday is not that you expect it to happen – it’s that you have something to look forward to,” she says, evoking “imaginary mojitos” and other fantasy fun. “Take my advice and book a holiday immediately (checking the cancellation policy obviously)”, she advises. “It’ll do you the world of good. If it turns out you aren’t allowed to go, well, you get your money back and the next holiday you won’t be going on is totally free.”

Why hasn’t Joe Biden, who has been “in office nearly a month”, talked to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yet? That is the question on Michael Goodwin’s lips in the New York Post. “He’s talked to at least a dozen other heads of state since taking office, including those in Canada, Mexico, China, Russia, and Germany. So Putin and Xi yes, but Netanyahu no.” Goodwin predicts Biden may be following in the footsteps of Obama, who “signed the ridiculously one-sided nuclear pact” that “paved the way for Iranian nukes”.

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