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Dua Lipa’s NHS hypocrisy

Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

Last night the great and the not-so-good of Westminster piled into London’s O2 Arena to attend the Brit Awards, the UK’s first major in-person ceremony of the Covid era. Special advisers, Cabinet ministers and ordinary backbenchers were among the 4,000 in attendance to trial how live events might work after the pandemic, with no social distancing or face masks for attendees including Liz Truss, Thérèse Coffey and James Cleverly.

But the Tories in attendance were presumably not cheering when British singer Dua Lipa collected one of her two awards of the night and dedicated it to British nurse Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, declaring: 

There’s a massive disparity between gratitude and respect for frontline workers because it’s very good to clap for them, but we need to pay them. So I think what we should do, is we should all give a massive, massive round of applause and give Boris a message that we all support a fair pay rise is for our frontline.

Lipa got a standing ovation from the crowd and the usual plaudits on social media. But is she really the best role model to talk about what’s right for the NHS? Back in the first lockdown she was telling her fans to follow official health guidelines, posting on Twitter ‘PSA – Stay at home’ with a broken heart emoji in April 2020. 

She then spent the following months jet-setting all round the world, posting pictures from an array of locations including St Lucia,  Pennsylvania, New York, Los Angeles, Palm Springs and Mexico while her boyfriend Anwar Hadid faced criticism after claiming that he would ‘absolutely not’ get the new Covid-19 vaccine. Media outlets reporting fan criticism on Lipa ‘needless’ travel did not get a response from the star’s representatives.

Given

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