Poor Zarah Sultana. The Coventry South MP was on her way to a leftist meeting in Leeds from London when she ran into trouble on the tracks. She publicly apologised for her forced absence from the meeting after her train was stranded for several hours. Zarah went on to explain how the incident served as 'another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership'. She accompanied her tweet with a selfie...
Unfortunately for Zarah, things were about to get more than a little embarrassing.
Step forward 'Cameron' from the LNER rail network, whose train on which Zarah was stuck. He apologised for the delay, which was due to damaged overhead cables near Stevenage. Then came the gotcha moment: "On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018."
The DfT is the Department for Transport. So, in actual fact the train upon which Zarah was making her case for nationalisation was actually owned by the government!
Cameron's tweets in response to Sultana drew an impressive response of almost 9,000 likes, almost half the total that she had received on her initial tweet (which is still live, despite the embarrassing faux pas). The story even made the newspapers, including the Daily Express, Independent, Daily Telegraph and her local rag the Coventry Telegraph.
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