It appears Boris is on course to deal a blow to the campaign of silly season: trying to prevent Geronimo the Alpaca from his death sentence. The Sun in particular has been leading the campaign, splashing this morning on Joanna Lumley’s entry into the efforts to keep the TB-ridden Alpaca alive. On Tuesday Rod Liddle revealed the fate of the beloved animal:

“He’s eight years old and comes from New Zealand. And he’s been under sentence of death for three years. Now all his chances have run out and on Thursday he will face a bureaucrat’s bullet. It is a travesty of the law and should shame the agriculture minister, George Eustice.

When Geronimo arrived in this country he was given tests by the government experts for tuberculosis. But the tests seem to have been botched. They weren’t the proper tests, for a start. Anyway, they showed the alpaca tested positive for tuberculosis.

But that was almost certainly a false positive – 50 per cent of such tests are.”

“We need disease control measures to be applied consistently. That’s why we need to move ahead now, we have done these highly accurate tests, and there are no plans to change that.” 

“We know how distressing losing animals to TB is to farmers – our sympathies are with Ms Mcdonald and everyone with animals affected by this terrible disease.”

Can anyone now prevent the alpaca-lypse?