St Leonards ‘beach boogie’ dancer furious after spending night in cells on same day as Downing Street party

Debbie Cutting was ordered to pay £199 for breaching an order to control Covid after she was caught running an outdoor ‘beach boogie’ session near Azur Marina Pavilion, on St Leonards seafront, in January last year.

The 55-year-old says she is furious about the reported lockdown parties in No 10 Downing Street and Whitehall engulfing Boris Johnson’s Government - and says those who took part should be “humiliated in front of a magistrate”. Police are looking into 12 events for alleged breaches of lockdown rules, including three the PM reportedly attended and one in his flat. One gathering in No 10 took place the same night Debbie was held in custody in Hastings before being driven in a Serco prisoner escort van 36 miles away to Brighton Magistrates’ Court.

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“I think it’s absolutely appalling to think everything I went through, they were probably partying at the same time,” she said. “I was getting death threats for dancing while all the time they were having cheese and wine parties. There were people isolating who couldn’t see their families or go to funerals at the time. I’m not a political person, but each member who went to those Government parties should go to court and be humiliated in front of a magistrate. They should all be taken to the police station, booked in, given a charge sheet, given a court date individually and fined. I’m not saying more than the public. They should be treated exactly the same - or if they’re not prepared to do that - all these people who breached Covid rules should get a reimbursement of their fines.”

Debbie, from St Leonards, says she started running her daily ‘beach boogie’ sessions near Azur in 2020 as a “support group” to help people coping with loneliness during the pandemic. She said they were “socially distanced in a huge space breathing the healthy sea air” - and despite the police coming down several times to move them on, she decided to carry on running the aerobics sessions.

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On January 5 2021, Mr Johnson announced a national lockdown and instructed people to stay at home to control the virus. He said exercise was permitted outdoors, but only with those from your household or one other person from outside your household.

The next day, Debbie says she was dancing with five other people on the seafront when six police officers arrived. She refused to comply with requests to move on and cease the gathering, and was arrested for failing to comply with Covid rules. “I knew what I was doing, and I wasn’t going to give up something that wasn’t hurting anybody else and had become such a good support group to not only my mental health and fitness but to a lot of other people,” she added. “They did give me the chance to go home, but I said, ‘no, you will have to arrest me’. I knew what I was doing. I don’t want people to think I was that little innocent person. I knew my journey. I’d made that choice.”

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She said the officers took her to Hastings police station, told her to change into a grey tracksuit, searched her, and then kept her in a cell for three hours. She says she was released on bail, with the conditions she didn’t sing or dance in public, play music in public, or go to “Azur Marina Lower Promenade”.

She Googled where the Lower Promenade ended, and on January 14 was sitting with a friend near Hastings & St Leonards Sailing Club, eating a chocolate croissant, when two police officers turned up and arrested her for breaching her bail conditions. She was taken to Hastings police station and kept in a cell overnight. “Being slightly claustrophobic, it was my worst nightmare being kept in that cell. It was horrible,” she said. The next day, she was driven in a prisoner van to Brighton. She was handcuffed to two Serco officers and appeared before magistrates. She pleaded guilty to breaching an order to failing to comply with a direction in relation to events/gatherings in England in order to control Coronavirus, and was ordered to pay an £80 fine, court costs of £85 and a victim surcharge of £34.

Debbie, who continues to run her ‘beach boogie’ sessions every day near Azur at 11am, added: “I always knew I’d be arrested for crimes to the dance floor, but not quite in the way I was.”