Grant Shapps just posted a new video to promote his department’s decision to remove some train announcements – and it’s now getting exactly the Twitter treatment it deserves.
The transport secretary – clearly having taken a leaf out of chancellor Rishi Sunak’s book – upped his PR game on Friday in the new one-minute clip.
Suitably filmed on a train, the minister starts the clip by reading from The Daily Telegraph as a series of random announcements are read out.
With cheery whistling music in the background, Shapps then looks straight at the camera and says: “If you travel by train, you’ve probably heard some of these messages, time and again, repeated over and over.”
He claims some of these messages “just state the obvious”, before noting: “Do we really need to be told to put our unwanted newspapers in the bin or that the weather outside is inclement?
“Passengers just need to be treated as grownups and be able to use their common sense because train travel should be a chance to relax, read a book, maybe catch up on some work or even take a nap.”
He says his department have now reviewed the train messages, and “where they add nothing but noise and irritation, we’re removing them”.
He then proudly concludes: “All part of Williams-Shapps plan to improve our railways.”
Didn’t take long before people pointed out that this is hardly the biggest problem with the UK’s travel industry though, especially in a period of staff shortages and climbing train ticket prices...
And of course, there were the inevitable jokes too....