I WANT to applaud the excellent film and media happening produced by the award-winning Led By Donkeys, which was projected onto the castle ruins at Scartop in Barnard Castle one night at the end of June, and subsequently broadcast on social media already reaching more than one million views and rising.

The ten-minute film is a simple timeline documenting the deadly failures of Boris Johnson and his now infamous top aide, Dominic Cummings, with regard to the coronavirus pandemic.

The film opens with New Year’s Eve fireworks and China’s announcement on the same day that a new virus has been identified in Wuhan.

There follows a sequence of news clips, footage of government press briefings and Boris Johnson’s gaffes, statistics and comparisons with other countries, scenes from ill-advised big events such as the Cheltenham races, pronouncements and warnings from the scientific community, all narrated by the former news presenter, Gavin Esler. The film ends with the shocking news on May 5 that the UK has the highest death toll in Europe.

This condensed version of a four-month period in our collective history is only part one, for as we later discovered, Dominic Cummings made a controversial and illegal trip to Barnard Castle on Easter weekend, hence the choice of location by Led By Donkeys, who have previously projected truth-telling films onto the White Cliffs of Dover, the Houses of Parliament and vans parked outside 10 Downing Street, as well as plaster hoardings across the country with images and quotes exposing the lies and xenophobic rhetoric of the Vote Leave campaign.

I look forward to part two wherever and whenever that will be screened.

Julie Ward, former Labour MEP, Barnard Castle