A new government transport policy is almost literally straight out of The Thick Of It

A new government policy about rail announcements has been ridiculed for being almost exactly like something out of comedy The Thick of It.

In a tweet, Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps made an announcement that he will be getting rid of unnecessary train announcements as part of the “Williams-Shapps” plan.

Shapps himself featured in a clip announcing the news, acting as a passenger on the train obscured by a newspaper.

He revealed himself and announced: “We’ve reviewed messages that are played on the tannoy system and where they add nothing but noise and irritation, we’re removing them.”

Unfortunately for the transport secretary, it didn’t take Twitter users long to draw comparisons between the announcement and a real scene from the British government sitcom The Thick of It.

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Chief Westminster Correspondent for Byline Times, Adam Bienkov, helpfully pointed it out in a tweet by posting a video of the scene.

Bienkov wrote: “OMG. They've actually just done The Thick of It.”

In the scene, a fictional political adviser tells a minister he needs a policy in his back pocket “just in case”.

Remarkably similar to Shapps’s new proposal, he suggests that the policy is “tripling the number of quit carriages on intercity trains”.

The UK Train Drivers' Union, ASLEF, responded to Schapps’s tweet, writing: “Tbh we'd rather see you get rid of the announcements where you cancel investment and infrastructure projects.”

Someone else wrote: “Absolutely pathetic announcing this as some sort of game changing policy.”

Another person said it’s “gold leaf salt bae of government policy”.

One Twitter user mused: “I dread to think how much money they wasted on this Partridge-esque shite.”

Someone else commented: “Imagine rising to the top of politics and having such little imagination that this is one of your policies.”

Another, joked: “I love these parody accounts.”

That's Grant Shapps well and truly told.