‘Travel corridors’? The transport secretary might as well have opened up Narnia and the Moon

The Man Who Pays His Way: A well-intentioned letter to Grant Shapps

Dune roaming: sand sculptures in Namibia (Simon Calder)

Dear Grant Shapps,

You don’t have my phone number, but I guarantee that several of your hard-working officials do; we talk often, usually (at my behest) at unsocial hours. The reason I mention it: every Thursday, just before 5pm, my colleagues and I stop what we’re doing and gather, virtually, around your Twitter feed for our now-familiar teatime quarantine bingo. 

Small bets are exchanged on which countries might join the UK’s no-go list, and – more excitingly from a travel perspective – which may gain exemption from the government’s abiding principle that arrivals from abroad are suspect and must self-isolate for two weeks.

Before your latest performance, my prediction to colleagues was: “South Africa is the only one I can see coming off the list, 5-1 that Jamaica might, and a couple of minor and irrelevant surprises.”

Well, you certainly surprised me this week. I was initially thrilled to learn, in your Trumpian capitals: “ISRAEL, NAMIBIA, RWANDA, SRI LANKA, URUGUAY, BONAIRE, ST EUSTATIUS & SABA, THE NORTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS and THE US VIRGIN ISLANDS have been ADDED to the #TravelCorrdor [sic] list.”

These were both major and minor surprises. But from the holidaymaker’s point of view, it turns out all are supremely irrelevant.

May I lead you through the welcome offered by the tourism authorities in some of those countries?

“Entry to Israel will be refused to non-citizens or non-residents of Israel arriving from anywhere in the world.”

“Entry to Sri Lanka is currently prohibited for all non-nationals, and the government of Sri Lanka is not currently issuing visas to travel to the country.”

“Borders are currently closed due to the presence of the coronavirus,” says Uruguay’s tourism ministry.

I have no idea what the rules are in the Northern Mariana Islands (nor, indeed, their southern archipelagic counterparts) but that is because they are meaningless: I can find no way between the UK and the scattering of isles in the western Pacific that does not involve a private jet.

The Caribbean locations you mention (the Dutch isles of Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba and the US Virgin Islands) are accessible by scheduled flights, but only by transiting an airport such as Amsterdam or San Juan, Puerto Rico against Foreign Office advice – and triggering self-isolation on return to the UK.

Mr Shapps, the most significant additions to the travel corridor list are Namibia and Rwanda. The government has insisted for the last eight months that all of Africa is “unacceptably high risk”. Finally, the Foreign Office has stopped pretending that you or I are at significant risk of contracting coronavirus in Rwanda – which has a rate of new infections one-250th of the UK’s.

But neither country is quarantine-free. While Rwanda does have a direct link from Heathrow to the capital, Kigali, it stops en route at Brussels in both directions – trashing the no-quarantine rule. And the usual route to Namibia is via South Africa, which has opened up to British visitors but which is still on your no-go list.

If Qatar Airways (or Emirates, or Etihad) had a nonstop flight from its hub in the Gulf to the capitals, Kigali and Windhoek, that would indeed be fine. But sadly there are no such direct flights until 29 March 2021.

Transport secretary, you may have thought you were removing the need to self-isolate for arrivals from a couple of African countries, but you were not. I could have told you all of this at 4.30pm on Thursday, and saved you a tweet that might as well have read: “OK to go to NARNIA and THE MOON.”