An anti-Brexit passenger confronted Tory politician Michael Gove over his “lies” at a Greek airport after she suffered a 30-hour delay. Candida Jones, a former Labour councillor who works for a Labour peer, said months of chaos for UK holidaymakers was “compounded” by Brexit.
The 50-year-old challenged the “tanned” sacked Cabinet Brexiteer for 15 minutes in the bag drop queue at Athens International Airport on Sunday night. Ms Jones, from South London, had been due to return to Gatwick on Saturday - but Easyjet postponed her flight until 10.35pm on Sunday due to disruption at airports.
It’s thought Mr Gove, who was travelling alone after his divorce, was not on the same plane or stuck in the same delay. Ms Jones claimed Mr Gove, who she described as “polite but very passive-aggressive”, insisted the delays were not caused by Brexit.
Undeterred, she challenged him to name “opportunities” of leaving the EU - to which he replied agricultural reforms and the vaccine rollout. Ms Jones, who was on holiday with her husband and three children, Mirror Online : “I said ‘come on, this is just ridiculous. There’s nothing about being an EU member that in any way impeded us from doing the vaccine rollout sooner’.
“I said ‘you are are a smart guy, and know what you are telling me is not true, and you have got to stop treating the British people as if we’re stupid.” She also challenged him over the £350m-a-week Vote Leave bus in the 2016 referendum and tried to “run through some of the other lies”.
Ms Jones’ encounter spread like wildfire when she tweeted about it on Saturday evening. She said: “Almost 30hr delay to our @easyJet flight now.
“I’m told the problem’s a lack of staff due to the pandemic compounded, in the case of the UK, by #Brexit. So it’s at least some consolation to find arch Brexiteer @michaelgove caught up in the same s***show #BrexitChaos #BrexitShambles.”
One follower on Twitter quipped of the upbeat Brexiteer: “He will be denying he is queuing.” Ms Jones, who landed at 2am on Monday, insisted she was polite and did not raise her voice against Mr Gove - but said as a “public servant” he had to be held to account.
“He said, I’m on my holiday and this is not the appropriate place for this conversation - that was the gist. I said yes, and I’m on my holiday and I’ve spent 30 hours trying to get home!”
She said Mr Gove told her words to the effect of “I thank you for the opportunity of hearing your views but I don’t think you and I are going to persuade each other.” Their conversation eventually tailed off.
Ms Jones said every foreign trip she’s taken this year has been disrupted since Brexit and Covid, while her 17-year-old daughter can no longer live freely anywhere in the EU. She admitted it’s “impossible for anyone to quantify” how much airport delays are due to Brexit, compared to post-Covid staff shortages.
But she insisted several public figures have been “pointing the finger squarely at Brexit and saying the issues in the UK are compounded by Brexit.” An ally of Mr Gove said of the encounter: “He was polite as always”.
Bizarrely it is the second time Ms Jones has had a run-in with a Tory politician in Greece. In 2008 she wrote an article called ‘How George Osborne ruined my day at the beach in Corfu’.
She said families “complained loudly that this was an inappropriate place to bring a motorboat”, to which Mr Osborne told the crowd: “It’s a pier, that’s what it’s for!”
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