Mick Lynch and the RMT risk becoming villains with the Christmas rail strikes

If strikes were won and lost in the media then Mick Lynch and the RMT would by now be celebrating an inflation-busting pay rise and a general job well done.

Successive transport secretaries since the hapless Grant Shapps have been outplayed by Lynch like a South Korean defender faced with a goal-hungry Richarlison. Mark Harper, the current secretary of state is a former chief whip and knows a thing or two about the art of the possible, but even he has been outclassed. Those few Tory ministers, such as Chris Philp, brave enough to go head to head with Lynch in a TV studio has been publicly humiliated, and called “liar” to their faces.

However, the rail dispute has been a long one, and now, at such a sensitive time of year when people need to see loved ones, there’s a danger that the RMT will turn into the kind of villains the public love to hate. The extension of the industrial action to Christmas Eve is a sign that the union may risk drifting away from the kind of public support it needs to succeed. It would be quite the PR disaster if Lynch managed to make himself and his people even less popular than the train companies and the Tory government.