Discount dining should be on everyone's menu if it helps Derbyshire businesses

The Government’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme is simple enough in principle.

Effectively, it’s like heading out on a dinner date with Rishi Sunak and then going Dutch on the bill.

Though Rishi, prudent chap that he is, has his spending limits.

It’s no good ordering the lobster and Cristal Champagne, then expecting him to meet you half-way on the cost – no matter how dazzling your dinner table repartee.

But the idea of ministers giving discounts on meals out to encourage people to support Derbyshire’s embattled hospitality industry seems like a great one.

Especially at the side of some of their other recent activity (yes, I’m looking at you, Gavin Willliamson).

My only worry is that the food discount scheme, which applies only for those dining on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday in August, will see people who would already be going out for a meal at the weekend just bringing forward their dinner plans.

If you genuinely had concerns about going back into public places because of a deadly pathogen for which there is no known cure – would a tenner off your pub lunch really convince you to venture out?

Yes Rishi is throwing a couple of fivers into the middle of the table, but that’s scant consolation if you worried you’re also on a double date with half the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Whether they were enticed by the dinner discount, or just the delicious food, I’m happy to say there were plenty of people enjoying a meal at our local village pub last Tuesday night.

There was, inevitably, a bit of that modern dance ‘The Social Distancing Excuse Me’, as people negotiated bar areas and restaurant tables while carefully maintaining the requisite space between them. But let’s face it, waiting patiently and ‘no, no, after you..’ are built into our national psyche.

And as restaurants, bars and particularly village pubs play a vital role in many communities, it was heartening to see one so bustling and almost back to normality. Especially when the chips were on Rishi.