Monday 30 August

Not for the first time, key issues dominating the news and causing distress and anxiety bear a common imprint – government incompetence. Afghanistan, Covid and climate change have all been aggravated by the government’s approach of too little, too late, zero planning and with only days before schools reopen, there’s still no effective guidance on Covid safe practices eg ventilation and whether to vaccinate 12-15 year olds.

As the tragic events in Afghanistan continue to unfold following the deadly terrorist attack and the US drone strike, the crisis has given rise to numerous views as to what went wrong, what could have been managed better, and more fundamentally whether the West should have gone in there in the first place. Some commentators say 20 years is nothing in terms of changing such a country and that a much longer investment was needed, others feeling that trying to introduce Western democracy to this intensely tribal and fragile country was always flawed, if not hopeless. What must have been an additional blow for desperate Afghans was President Ashraf Ghani fleeing at the earliest opportunity, called a ‘mistake’ by the Taliban. The US withdrawal and how it was done certainly scotched Joe Biden’s ‘America is back’ mantra and the myth of the ‘special relationship’ between the US and UK.

Although it would be true to say the whole world was taken aback, even blindsided, by the speed of the Taliban takeover, especially given the numbers, (80k militants versus 300k US trained soldiers) it doesn’t excuse governments not having seen the writing on the wall the minute the US announced its withdrawal. Ministers’ excuses have been generally pathetic, along the lines of ‘no one saw this coming’.  But the sheer impact of this lack of anticipation and planning has been made much worse by the emergence of contributory factors like Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab remaining on holiday (having been given permission by his boss), the lie about the phone call to the Afghan government opposite number and failures in the system for rescuing Afghan citizens who worked for the UK. A tearful Defence Secretary Ben Wallace admitted that some would unfortunately be left behind, later getting flak for euphemistically describing the situation as ‘sub-optimal’ and a ‘matter of deep regret’. What seems particularly unforgiveable and incompetent is that fleeing British embassy staff left behind on their desks details of Afghans for the Taliban inevitably to find.

General Lord Richard Dannatt, former head of the British Army, has added his voice to others criticising the government for its inaction, thrown into sharp relief by the contrast with France, which started taking its people out in May. ‘Dannatt said it was ‘unfathomable’ that the UK government appeared to have been ‘asleep on watch’ when it came to ensuring the safety of Afghans who helped soldiers and officials. Amid bitter recriminations between government departments over who was to blame for leaving behind thousands of people with links to the UK, Dannatt questioned why ministers had not engaged earlier on the safety of Afghan allies, given that the issue had been raised repeatedly by senior army officers.

Demanding an inquiry, Dannat said: ‘On the particular issue of those who we knew were in danger, people who had worked for us, interpreters, former locally engaged civilians, this issue has been in the media…. This issue has been on politicians’ desks for two to three years and, certainly, it’s been there during the course of this year … Back in July, 45 senior officers wrote to the government … saying there are people we are concerned about and if we don’t do the right thing, their blood will be on our hands’.

https://bit.ly/3yr11p1

As the country’s collapse is on the cards due to widespread hunger, homelessness and a crashed economy, prompting calls for major humanitarian aid, questions continue to be asked about how it came about that the Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister and various civil service departmental heads were on holiday at the same time. There’s a clear sense of entitlement here and zero sense of urgency, eg Raab and his stay in a Cretan 5 star resort.  But surely, those occupying such key positions need to understand that there are limits to their holiday entitlement – when crises occur they need to be back at base, not trying to defensively bat them away from the beach.

For once ministers were subjected to challenging interviews on the BBC, Raab desperately trying to claw back some semblance of authority by constantly repeating that no one could see it coming and playing the old ‘speculation in the media’ card:  ‘I am not going to add to speculation in the media – the idea I was lounging on the beach is nonsense’. Ministers can’t keep repeating that they did as much as they could when shocking revelations emerge, such as the huge backlog of 5,000 unread emails from MPs and charities notifying government of urgent cases of Afghans in fear of Taliban reprisals needing rescue from Kabul. No wonder some newspaper headlines have screamed ‘Asleep at the wheel’. The government suggests that numbers left behind could be around 1,100, but the whistleblower who alerted the media to this catastrophic procedural vacuum believes it could be many more because these people have families but also because of the unread emails. ‘They cannot possibly know [how many people have been left behind] because they haven’t even read the emails. Even among those who’ve been registered, many have been left behind. But there’s also a much, much larger group of people who just haven’t been dealt with at all’. The government almost boasts about bringing 15,000 out and while this is an achievement, some estimates put those left behind as close to 9,000.

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A Radio 4 Any Questions listener tweeted: ‘Trump’s unilateral “deal” with Taliban should have been a signal to prepare for an orderly withdrawal. Biden’s decision to carry through with the US withdrawal should have meant plans were stepped up. Instead, Johnson just had an “it’ll be all right on the night” approach’.  Despite the Taliban’s declaration that they’re not the same as 20 years ago, evidence on the ground suggests there’s been no change. Besides accounts of massacres, summary executions and unmarried women being handed over to fighters, numerous desperate Afghan teachers, women’s rights workers and others likely to be targeted by the Taliban have spoken to UK media outlets – heartbreaking to listen to. One wanted his family to be given safe passage to the UK, saying ‘I know I will be killed’.

As to the cynically framed rhetorical question about an alternative approach, one tweeter had had some substantial suggestions: ‘What more could the UK government have done? 1. Recognise it has never been only “interpreters” 2. Start evacuating them in 2015 3. Really think about Trump’s unconditional withdrawal, then Biden’s acceptance of it 4. Start withdrawing far more under ARAP, early’. Another added: ‘Create safe routes to asylum, scrap the Nationality and Borders Bill, don’t criminalise refugees and show them compassion’.

What’s been striking is the hubristic and deluded stance of the US and UK governments, implying they have some power in this crisis and some clout with the Taliban when they actually have very little. Joe Biden described the US service personnel as ‘heroes’, insisted they would not be deterred by terrorists: ‘We will not forgive, we will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay’. Meanwhile, the UK government believes that because Afghanistan is 75% dependent on foreign aid, this automatically gives the West leverage, when the complex means of aid distribution and desire not to disadvantage the Afghan people mean this surely can’t be taken for granted. Yet the government still affects a high-handed and faux authoritarian attitude. A Radio 4 listener tweeted: ‘We will judge them on their actions not their words’ says James Cleverly about the Taliban. ‘If they act like a proper government, then we will engage with them Shame the UK electorate didn’t apply the same criteria to him and his cronies’.

An interesting article focuses on what a Taliban government could look like, quoting leadership sources as suggesting there will be a 12-man council, including offering ‘some pliant members of the former U.S.-supported government the ministries of their choice as they strive to form an administration that is acceptable to the international community’. This sounds like they’ve more than understood the need to at least appear acceptable to the West. The article reckons that the main four men mentioned ‘represent one of the world’s biggest criminal and terrorist cartels…. The Taliban make billions of dollars each year producing and trafficking heroin and methamphetamine, as well as smuggling mining assets including marble, lithium, and gemstones’. It also suggests that this and discontinuing the presidential role will lead to problems and ‘open the door to factional struggles’. We will see.

https://bit.ly/2WyQM4C

A Radio 4 profile of Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is useful listening – politicians who find leaders like Putin and Xi Jinping challenging will no doubt have to step up to an even more demanding plate. ‘He says very little, he’s very secretive, we really don’t know what he believes in….’ observed one contributor. Regarded as a ‘skilled political operator’ and now thought to be a linchpin for bringing different factions together, he has been active since before the Taliban last took control in 1996 with its ‘draconian’ laws and punishments and suppression of women’s rights. It will be interesting to see what further insights emerge about him.  

https://bbc.in/3mHhtPK

Meanwhile, Covid hasn’t gone away despite the widespread focus on holidays and world events. On Wednesday 149 deaths were registered, 141 of deceased having been vaccinated once, a situation we would not have anticipated months ago. Despite the Office of National Statistics reporting that the number of weekly deaths is at its highest level since March for the third week in a row, there seems no sense of urgency about addressing this. There were 571 deaths in England and Wales registered in the week ending August 13 mentioning Covid-19 on the certificate. That was up from 527 the week before, and 404 a week earlier. These numbers (people testing positive – 35,847; admitted to hospital – 859; patients in ventilation beds – 957), are substantially attributed to the Delta variant, which apparently doubles the risk of hospitalisation. Meanwhile, those opposing reintroduction of any restrictions, like the Covid Recovery Group’s Mark Harper, continue to spin the outdated narrative which paints the vaccine as almost a silver bullet.

If some people and politicians are too sanguine about this, health professionals are not, reporting themselves ‘braced’ for a surge of cases after the Bank Holiday, due to packed beaches and music festivals, etc. Newquay in Cornwall has been badged England’s Covid capital and a local director of public health said: ‘The lifting of restrictions and the successful vaccination programme has caused people to drop their guard against Covid, adding to a really high pressured situation for Cornwall’s health system. Living with Covid is not the same as pretending it doesn’t exist, and I think that’s what has happened. It’s not just younger people, that’s a general picture for people who have been told that all gloves are off and they’re taking that at face value’.

An interesting article about the profiles of patients dying (about a hundred a day) suggests key differences between now and the second wave in January. One relates to the age factor: at the height of the second wave in January, when the under-65s accounted for just 11% of deaths but recently it’s been about 25%. Deaths amongst the over 65s have now fallen. ‘If vaccine coverage was equal in all age groups, experts would expect to see the same proportion of almost all deaths from Covid in elderly people. But the younger age groups are not vaccinated at the same rate as older age groups and this is resulting in a relative increase in younger people dying’. I’d have thought the rise in younger people’s deaths was also attributable to a persistent number of antivaxxers (at least two high profile cases in the media this week, both being parents leaving young children behind) and far greater attendance at crowded events such as festivals.

Scientists also suggested that men were more at risk and warned that cases will rise as schools return. Teachers and others have been very concerned that with only a few days to go before the school term starts, they have received no guidance about Covid safe practice and a decision about vaccinating teenagers still hasn’t been taken. Needless to say, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has assumed the usual ministerial ostrich-like stance, brushing off these concerns and adopting a wing and a prayer approach. He told the Financial Times: ‘We don’t want to see the same level of disruption … My hope is that, combined with the mass testing we’re doing, children aren’t going to be in the situation of having to self-isolate’. Is his ‘hope’ enough?

https://bit.ly/3DsLVmI

A key point made by one article and the central theme of this blog (the anxiety caused when we cannot trust our leaders, who abdicate their role as psychological ‘containers’) was the unacknowledged role of distrust in governments in vaccine hesitancy and refusal. ‘What all these doubters have in common, whether they’re from Kansas or Khartoum, is that they don’t believe the state has their interests at heart. The trust has gone’. For example, sceptics reportedly see ‘outrageously profitable’ healthcare and pharma companies spending huge amounts on lobbying, leading to suspicions about profit motives behind the developments. Maybe this alone wouldn’t be that damaging but coupled with many governments’ incompetence in dealing with the pandemic it makes for a powerful influence. ‘You might, if you lived in the UK, doubt the government’s assurances that the vaccine had been rigorously tested, after seeing senior officials appear to make up pandemic policies as they went along, dragging the nation with them through U-turns and lockdowns whose rules they did not follow themselves. State failure breeds paranoia. And when trust in government breaks down, people turn to personal vigilance. This climate of hesitancy and wariness is heightened by poorly regulated media that trade in falsehoods. In the UK, for example, a misleading report about ethnic minority people being excluded from vaccine trials was resolved only with a short correction in a footnote. Vaccine rejection doesn’t happen in a vacuum…. it’s a measure of how political systems work. We should spend less time haranguing anti-vaxxers for their stupidity and more time scrutinising the systems that have lost their trust’. Hear, hear.

https://bit.ly/3DsLVmI

Naturally, this time of year has put the knotty issue of PCR tests further the spotlight, and it seems that for some time some rogue operators have been given a home on the government’s website, companies which charge excessively, don’t return results in time or worse, not even sending the tests for analysis, obscuring additional charges and customers even being sent the wrong results. This is unacceptable anyway but especially because customers are spending hundreds of pounds on tests to take families on holiday.

After Health Secretary Sajid Javid said ‘rogue’ companies could be removed from the list of approved suppliers (but how did they get onto it in the first place?) the regulator, the  Competitions and Markets Authority, came on stronger and said they could face enforcement for breaching consumer law. But could is the operative word – this laissez faire approach means all kinds of unethical and unfair practices can slip through the net in all fields. Another reason why this is an intolerable situation is the knock on effects on the struggling NHS – it has to step in when such companies don’t deliver. Isn’t it interesting that some entrepreneur hasn’t created an app to review and rate PCR tests?

https://bit.ly/3yuAAPa

Climate change is another thing that’s not gone away, of course, and many are concerned that the clock is ticking in the lead up to COP26 and there’s been little planning as to how to dramatically reduce emissions. Extinction Rebellion has been active again, disrupting traffic in central London and elsewhere. Although it’s annoying to have journeys interrupted it doesn’t seem to have been universally grasped that this is the only way protesters have found to puncture people’s complacency. A wag tweeted: ‘Who knew saving the planet would be so inconvenient?’

One woman was astonished at what she experienced as police brutality, ripping apart women who’d glued themselves together so that bandages were needed afterwards. ‘I’m a white middle-aged woman; I’ve not experienced police violence before … now I have direct experience of police violence. The public need to know that women and mothers trying to protect their children are being violently attacked by our state police. We pay their wages and they basically attacked us for trying to protect all life on earth’. How the Met from its parallel universe put it was that ‘officers intervened when protesters were building a structure at Oxford Circus. Some individuals have glued themselves to the structure, specialist officers are working to support their removal’.

https://bit.ly/3yx9ze5

It seems clubbers at the Pipe in Aberdeen got even better value than expected on Saturday night when Michael Gove, tipped to replace Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab at the next Cabinet reshuffle, joined them for several hours. The Guardian revealed that ‘arms aloft, suit jacket on, Michael Gove has been filmed giving it his all in an Aberdeen nightclub after reportedly trying to avoid a £5 entrance fee by stating that he was the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster’. Which was the most embarrassing, I wonder – Gove’s ‘dad dancing’ or trying to wriggle out of paying to get in? ‘His hands flailed wildly, and occasionally swung in time to the music, in the clip filmed by a fellow clubber. Friends of Gove denied that he had attempted to avoid paying’.

https://bit.ly/38nvt8Y

Finally, the biblical expression ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ must have come to archaeologists’ minds when they found the remains in Pompeii of a ‘remarkably well preserved’ fast food joint which ‘closed for business’ (that’s one way of putting it) almost 2,000 years ago. Excavators made the discovery in 2019 and it opened to the public last week. Experts believed it served hot meals made from pork, goat and even snails, typically purchased by poorer Pompeii residents who had no kitchen of their own. Will future archaeologists be excavating a McDonalds  at some point, we could wonder…..

Sunday 15 August

Last week’s news, much of it a continuation or repetition of what we’ve seen before, served as a timely reminder of what an uncertain world we’re living in, this naturally impacting on our mental wellbeing. As we move closer to the global climate change conference, COP26, experts and politicians deliver ever starker messages but often with no actual plan to reduce emissions as radically as global policies dictate. Boris Johnson wants to be seen as a world leader on climate change, but there’s a lack of urgency and the absence of a plan has partly been attributed to two opposing factions within the Conservative Party. There are the ‘blue environmentalists’, including his wife Carrie Johnson and there are the sceptics, including some climate change deniers, who worry about the cost to consumers. Other groups outside the Conservative Party with a powerful agenda are the ‘climate change warriors’ and the ‘Labour net zero pragmatists’. The dire climate emergency raises a conundrum which will surely test the capacity of COP26 deliberations – how much individual responsibility can governments expect their citizens to take when some regimes like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia at the G20 deliberately prevented a decision to end fossil fuel subsidies? And what can individual countries achieve when China’s emissions are 28% of the global total and are continuing to increase? There’s the intrinsic challenge that these forums like COP26 take place on the global stage, far removed from the localised government mechanisms which actually get things done. In the Financial Times Philip Stephens said ‘the gap between the soaring rhetoric of international conferences and policy inaction at home will have to be bridged, and soon…… Look at the weather’.  

Just before the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy minister Kwasi Kwarteng gave a car crash interview on Monday’s Radio 4 Today programme, consisting largely of sound bites and clichés which didn’t add value to the discussion. His perpetually languid and disengaged manner doesn’t help. Meanwhile, evidence of climate change is undeniable, many parts of the world experiencing unprecedented levels of flooding and wildfires. At least there’s a glimmer of hope that the IPCC report has been described as a massive alert that the time for climate action has nearly gone but crucially not gone yet.

https://bit.ly/3CLo8Op

The situation in Afghanistan is surely another lesson, as if we needed one, on the folly of Western intervention in such countries. More specifically, Western intervention without a genuine plan for sustained support for the Afghan government and the people. Having taken so many other cities and areas, the Taliban are now ‘at the gates of Kabul’ and unlikely to be halted now. It’s striking how hard some politicians and generals have been working to try to justify the last 20 years, whereas many, especially those who have lost family and friends there, feel it has been a waste. The main justification seems to be that during this time we have seen very little Al-Qaeda terrorism here but what about the Afghans? Those interviewed express despair about the return of the Taliban, pointing out the difference between their new propaganda and what’s actually happening on the ground. A sceptic tweeted: ‘The Taliban has changed – its PR is better’. Another said: ‘Western leaders are saying “but we educated millions of girls in Afghanistan” over the last 20 years. How does it help to now abandon 20m women to the Taliban and condemn them to a life in the Middle Ages’? It was heartrending to hear an Afghan woman say that the Americans had shown them a beautiful world and now President Biden had abandoned and betrayed them.

There’s also the key issue of the former interpreters: some have been welcomed to the UK but there are still many others there at risk of Taliban persecution and elimination. Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy said there needs to be some genuine UK leadership on this (and what about the massive cut in foreign aid recently decided?), but it seems the complexity of the situation and the summer holidays are slowing down a considered response. At least Boris Johnson has recalled Parliament for Wednesday, though it seems he did initially resist this. The BBC also reported that Afghan students offered scholarships by the UK government won’t now be able to take up those offers because of paperwork not being completed in time by the British embassy there. Surely there must be a way around this.

Regarding the speed at which the Taliban has effectively toppled the Afghan government, one commentator interestingly attributed this partly to this government not being perceived as truly Afghan, having been built up from returning exiles. Former Tory MP and Afghanistan expert Rory Stewart tweeted: ‘At the centre of this is the most astonishing failure of intelligence + analysis from the US and its allies. The US presence was small, sustainable and vital to the country. It was removed in an utterly reckless fashion – as this shows with no understanding of the impact’.

https://bit.ly/3g3QXMm

As in previous years, there’s the usual August debate about exam results but this year, with two years of pandemic-related challenges, there’s rightly been a sharper focus on inequalities within the system, grade inflation and, because of teacher assessments, many more qualifying for university places than before. Labour has said that this makes Education Secretary Gavin Williamson’s position untenable, but needless to say, both he and Schools Minister Nick Gibb carry on regardless, not even acknowledging the problems.

‘Asked whether private school teachers had been too generous in their grading, Keir Starmer said the attainment gap appeared to be to do with a ‘lack of a coherent framework to do the assessment provided by the government. Some were testing very often and some not very often…It led to the widening and now yawning gap between private and state schools. The hallmark of this government is wherever there is an inequality they can make it bigger and they are very busy doing that’. It’s not only Labour calling for Williamson’s sacking – he’s apparently held in very poor esteem by Tory MPs and the Cabinet, but it’s not clear that   those touted as a possible successor (Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi and Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch) would be much of an improvement.

https://bit.ly/2VTofGE

Meanwhile, as the gap between private and state schools comes under yet more scrutiny, an interesting article by Brooke Masters in the Financial Times, featured in The Week, aims to demonstrate how private schools have lost their grip on Oxbridge. Admissions tutors have moved towards a more inclusive policy, focusing more on state school pupils who have worked hard to overcome barriers, rather than simply privileging public school products from wealthy backgrounds who have also been groomed for the interview process. These parents who have shelled out thousands over years trying to ensure Oxbridge for their offspring find themselves in a new moral conundrum. Whereas many will publicly espouse the need for equality of opportunity, when it comes to this situation they see what they had assumed for their children as being under threat. One ‘grouchy’ father was heard to ask a school head to explain how he would protect the boys there from ‘social engineering’. A firm sense of entitlement accompanies this level of spend over years. ‘I feel genuine sympathy for anyone concerned for their child’s future, but complaining about a loss of privilege comes across as tone deaf’.

We’re told that since 1981, annual applications to Cambridge rose from 5,000 to 20, 426. It’s now four times harder to get a place than when these parents were applying and the pandemic has exacerbated the situation because of teacher-assessed grades leading to hundreds of extra students. I feel sorry for the children of these parents who went to Oxbridge themselves, expecting their sons and daughters to follow suit but without understanding what has changed. But rather than parents engineering their children’s futures, a healthier approach is for those students to determine their own future. One sixth form college principal has long tried to convince parents that Oxbridge entrance isn’t the be all and end all: ‘Things have changed very dramatically in 30 years… for parents it’s about learning to let go a bit and learning to let students drive the process… our job is to walk alongside them. It’s not to go in front and drag them’.

The shocking shooting in Plymouth raised a number of issues which need closer scrutiny, such as what seems a dereliction of duty in the police reissuing the gun licence to this disturbed man after it had been removed following Jake Davison’s involvement in an assault. We know how depleted police forces are but this is surely an area of their work they cannot afford to carry out negligently. Three other key issues are Davison’s association with the incel movement (which not everyone is yet familiar with), whether this should be treated as a form of terrorism, and yet another situation in which inadequate mental health services have played a part.

‘Davison had shared hate-filled views on Reddit forums used by incels – men who express hostility and resentment towards those who are sexually active, particularly women. Earlier this year, authorities in the US warned that attacks linked to the incel movement were on the rise, and authorities around the world have begun to treat the ideology as a more serious terrorism threat.

‘The condition of Davison’s mental health has been questioned, with one person familiar with his family claiming relatives had requested help from mental health authorities. Writing on Facebook, the neighbour said: “His family [pleaded] for help to the mental health team, the NHS basically said that they are short-staffed and that was it. The family even asked for the police to come out to see him as he was talking and acting strange but they didn’t do a welfare check’.

https://bit.ly/3g7gUur

A useful article describes what ‘incel’ culture is and how it could be on the rise. ‘Incels are men who describe themselves as “involuntary celibates”. Laura Bates, author of Men Who Hate Women, said: ‘In other words, they’re not having sex and they want to be. They see women as completely commodified and dehumanised sex objects [that] are there purely for male sexual pleasure. And they blame women for the fact that they’re not having sex’. Bates estimates that the incel community in the UK could be as large as 10,000, with hundreds of thousands more worldwide and that the movement is actively grooming and recruiting young men.

https://bit.ly/3xOfhrx

The policy of ‘living with the virus’ is being manifested in various ways, especially the normalisation of substantial numbers of new cases and of daily deaths (around 90 each day). One of the key disillusionments of recent times must be the realisation that vaccination doesn’t prevent us getting Covid and doesn’t prevent hospitalisation. When the vaccines were first developed we didn’t have the lethal variants to contend with, but now we hear that the double jabbed only have a 59% protection, down from 83% earlier this summer, due to the Delta variant. The decline in protective antibodies after the second job has strengthened calls for autumn booster jabs, although no decision on this has yet been taken. This and related decisions must be taken soon since experts are advising the government that vaccine-resistant variants could ‘set us back a year’. Various scientists and commentators (including Dominic Cummings) have urged the government to produce a Covid risk assessment strategy relating to contingency plans, but so far we’ve mainly seen reactive short-termism.

‘Stephen Reicher, Professor of Psychology at the University of St Andrews, said: ‘It very much makes sense to be prepared. Scotland is setting up its standing committee on pandemics. It will be interesting to see what emerges on a UK level. In the longer-term we need a systematic inquiry into what went wrong (and right) so we are prepared and also so that we can institute systemic changes to protect us. The pandemic has been like a barium meal which has exposed so many deficiencies in our society. We can no longer pretend we are not aware of them. This has been a deafening wake-up call. Let’s make sure we don’t press the snooze button’. Government sources have said Public Health England and other bodies are monitoring the situation ‘through rapid surveillance and genomic sequencing of the virus’ but it could be argued this already doesn’t reflect the urgency of the situation.

https://bit.ly/3sjCAse

We heard this week that Baroness Dido Harding will be stepping down from her role as chair of NHS Improvement in October in the wake of her unsuccessful attempt to become the next NHS England Chief Executive. Well overdue, some may say. In another embarrassing but not surprising revelation, the government has also admitted that it had the data on deletions and disabling of the NHS Covid app amid the ‘pingdemic’, but refused to release the figures. The Department of Health and Social Care again demonstrates how it takes us for fools, in trying to suggest that the release of such information was not yet in the public interest, also declining to say when this time might come.

https://bit.ly/3yPO8WE

Meanwhile, for those travelling abroad, there’s been increasing disquiet about profiteering by the companies (over 400 according to Transport Secretary Grant Shapps) offering PCR tests. The Competition and Markets Authority has now entered the fray, concerned about pricing and test results being delayed or not returned. The CMA is providing data for the Department of Health and Social Care to act on. As a reminder and to see the contrast with other countries: ‘PCR tests are needed to travel to some overseas holiday destinations and on return from amber and green-list countries. Similar tests for days two and eight after return to England listed on the government’s website can cost more than £300 or as little as £20. On average, prices in the UK are £75 for a single test, compared with about £40 in France and Greece’. Some travellers have found that the cheaper tests listed on the website aren’t available when they come to book them, prompting questions about the authenticity of the apparently low costs. This situation again throws up inequalities, with only those able to afford these tests able to go abroad. Even a Tory MP observed: ‘It’s almost as much as the holiday that they’re having to fork out in Covid tests which means for a vast majority it’s a no go. I couldn’t afford to with a family of five’.

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Meanwhile, the ‘staycation’ industry continues at pace despite the UK’s unpredictable weather and amid complaints about crowds, inflated accommodation prices, shortages in shops and queues for restaurants and cafes. But not everywhere – after this summer there will no doubt be positive accounts of less popular holiday spots, some quite off the beaten track. Anonymous street artist Banksy is also doing his bit for the British seaside, as he tours the UK in his campervan, his works already appearing in Lowestoft (Suffolk), and Gorleston and Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. I wonder how many media outlets already have a team combing the roads and resorts for the elusive artist.

‘In one work on the concrete sea-defence wall of a British beach, a rat lounges in a deckchair, sipping a cocktail. In another, sticking to the seaside theme, a mechanical claw dangles above a public bench – as if anyone who sits there is about to be plucked up like a prize in an arcade game. Another shows a giant seagull hovering above a skip full of oversized “chips”. A fourth shows three children in a rickety boat. One looks ahead while another is busy bailing out water with a bucket. Above them, appears the inscription: “We’re all in the same boat.”On the roof of a bus shelter, a couple also dance to the tune of a flat-capped accordion player, in a black and white painting evoking the faded, down-at-heel feel of many of the country’s once-prosperous seaside resorts’. It will be exciting to find out what further works appear and in which resorts.

https://bit.ly/2VS39sk

Prince Andrew is once more in the news since his legal team has not responded to lawyers representing the woman accusing him of sexual assault when she was a teenager, Virginia Giuffre. The main lawyer, Daniel Boies, has said that Andrew cannot ‘hide behind castle walls’ and that his client had ‘tried every way she can to resolve this short of litigation’. Apart from the hiding not being good for the Prince himself, it gives a poor impression of this country and of the Royal Family.

 ‘The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages. Giuffre accuses Andrew of sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The lawsuit said that 20 years ago, ‘Prince Andrew’s wealth, power, position, and connections enabled him to abuse a frightened, vulnerable child with no one there to protect her. It is long past the time for him to be held to account’. If he doesn’t respond to this current request, he will anyway be drawn back into these accusations because the delayed trial of Jeffrey Epstein consort Ghislaine Maxwell will take place in the autumn.

https://bit.ly/3CRmb3d

Again, mental ill health hits the news, from several different sources. Besides the failure of services in Plymouth to respond to the alerts regarding Jake Davison, the Guardian tells the story (and this will be the tip of the iceberg) who had to give up their jobs to care for mentally unwell children because of service failures. One mother had to give up her work as a much-needed ITU nurse to care for her daughter. ‘Leese is one of many parents who are the collateral damage of the funding crises in children’s mental health services (Camhs) and the special needs education (Send) system. The Observer revealed last month that up to half of all children and teenagers referred to mental health, learning disability and autism services in 2019-20 were left without proper support. But the effect on parents is often overlooked – forced to abandon their careers so they can look after their children full-time and fight endless battles with cash-strapped bureaucracies for the most basic support’.

One of the shocking things is how much money these parents have had to spend on assessments and legal fees in order to get their children’s needs met. ‘Ruth Cliff has spent £20,000 in two years on legal support and private assessments for her 17-year-old adopted son, draining her savings and sending her into debt. Her son, who has ADHD, hasn’t attended school since March 2019. She had to go to her GP three times just to get a Camhs referral’.

But on top of all this what a lonely place for the parents to be in, their own mental health also compromised. ‘As a parent of a child who struggles with mental health and with special educational needs you basically have to become the expert, not only of your child and their needs, but also of what needs to be put in place to support them..It doesn’t seem that services that are supposed to help will willingly help – you literally have to fight every battle to get them to help you’. Needless to say, Department of Health and Social Care issues statements about how much it’s ‘invested’ but it’s never enough or in the right places. A distressed and sceptical parent said: ‘I watched them in the Commons saying by 20-whatever year it was they’re going to have this, this and that done, and how much progress they’ve made. And it was like, if you think you’ve made progress for the pathway into assessments then come to my house and see the state of my child, because I can tell you that you haven’t. I would welcome any of the health ministers into my house to look at my child, to spend a day in my shoes, so they can see they’ve not changed anything. Nothing has changed’.

https://bit.ly/3sjeSMy

 Meanwhile, counselling and therapy, which many initially seek through their GP, have moved substantially online and via apps, a trend reinforced by the pandemic but one which started with the ill-conceived (in the eyes of some) IAPT (Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies) programme, which privileged short-term work and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy when what many need is relational therapy which goes to the roots of difficulties. There’s no doubt the programme has broadened access to therapy but it has also unhelpfully removed elements of the special relationship between client and therapist. It was appealing to politicians and policymakers because it appeared to deliver ‘treatment’ at much lower cost and achieve success rates, but now we know how these figures have been fabricated.

‘Elizabeth Cotton, a former psychotherapist working in the NHS, is an academic based at Cardiff Metropolitan University whose recent research is focused on the “Uberisation of mental health”. She carried out a series of surveys (including three about the impact of Covid on working life in mental health) and has published them under the title The Future of Therapy. We speak on Zoom, of course, and I marvel inwardly at how we have taught ourselves to communicate in this new land, our own faces hovering meanly to the right. “Essentially,” she says, her argument is that “an industrialisation has taken place, a downgrading of therapy, which opens the doors to digital providers, and what is emerging now is the Uberisation of mental health services.” Cotton shows how the original intentions of IAPT have been undermined and explains how figures are manipulated.

She stresses that there are still good therapists and services. ‘But the model is designed in a particular way, to downgrade the service. To shorten the interventions, to reduce the number of highly trained clinicians that you need to take on a supervisory role rather than a direct clinical role. To reduce expectations. To reduce what people think is a treatment’. The NHS has a major conundrum to wrestle with, on top of very inadequate investment in mental health, despite what some disingenuous ministers maintain: it tries to help a greater number of people, though waiting lists are often still long, but often at the expense of choice of treatment and work which can genuinely help them, resulting in revolving doors and people having to seek help privately, which not everyone can afford. ‘The gold standard of therapy remains two people in a room, one talking, the other listening. In Britain right now, that level of care is reserved for the very wealthiest and the very sickest, while those in between have traditionally relied on luck and compromise’. While the new digital approaches will help some, many will not experience them as helpful, leaving patients to finance the work themselves or continue as best they can. The frustrating irony is that for years counselling and therapy professional bodies have been urging the NHS to recruit their qualified and experienced members to meet the need but this hasn’t happened.

https://bit.ly/3iNlnnX

Finally, on a positive note, related to the earlier piece about addressing educational inequalities, it’s good news that another 30 black students will get £20k a year scholarships to Cambridge, thanks to rapper Stormzy. Having started with two students a year in 2018, it’s now ten for the next 3 years, enabled via a partnership with HSBC. The star said: ‘I hope this scholarship continues to serve as a small reminder to young black students that the opportunity to study at one of the best universities in the world is theirs for the taking’.  

Sunday 8 August

Although we’ve now officially entered the ‘silly season’ regarding news, there’s plenty of it and, more insidiously, ‘living with Covid’ seems to have been conflated with normalising the damning statistics (92 Covid deaths on Friday and 31,808 new cases), not to mention the terrible health, financial and societal side-effects. Our Prime Minister continues to shame this country, first refusing to accept Nicola Sturgeon’s invitation to meet on his visit to Scotland, his ‘crass’ joke about Margaret Thatcher giving a “big early start” to green energy by closing coalmines, and by demonstrating yet again what’s now trending on Twitter – #oneruleforthem. He has refused to self-isolate after having been in close contact with a staffer who tested positive, although Downing Street denied this, of course. Anneliese Dodds, Labour party chair, said it was clear Boris Johnson ‘hasn’t learned anything from what happened last time he tried to cook up a reason to be above the rules everyone else has to follow…Senior Conservatives are really taking the public for fools. This is yet another example of one rule for them and another for everyone else’. It’s not surprising, then, that we hear Johnson’s approval rating has dropped to its lowest level since October 2020, now -16, according to the Observer poll Opinium.

https://bit.ly/3s01w7M

While the Prime Minister is at Chequers again for the weekend, COP26 supremo Alok Sharma has attracted flak for jetting around the world in his diplomatic mission to get a global climate deal agreed, although this has been defended by some experts and campaigners. The timing is important as Monday a ‘landmark report’ will be published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ‘Details are still under wraps, but the Guardian has confirmed that the warning from the IPCC will reinforce how vital it is to try to prevent temperatures from reaching more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Beyond that threshold, scientists will warn, the consequences of extreme weather will be devastating. The world must act urgently: if greenhouse gas emissions are not halved in this decade, 1.5C of heating will be inevitable and probably irreversible’. This does raise an interesting debate, though: to what extent should high-level activity of this nature be allowed to release those involved from obligations they’re desperately trying to get the rest of us to wake up to?

https://bit.ly/3isGED1

Meanwhile, much in the news again this week is what some describe as the ‘obsession with foreign holidays’, as the government’s ‘traffic light’ system comes into further disrepute, thought to be driven more by politics (eg regarding the withdrawal of quarantine requirement for those coming from France) than science. Ministers have not released data on which their decisions are based and the latest change to get people up in arms is Mexico moving to the red list. If those tourists don’t make it back to the UK before the deadline, they face large bills for the required stays in quarantine hotels.

The ‘amber watch list’ was also abandoned after it emerged a top adviser had left. In yet another scenario you couldn’t make up, it seems Transport Minister Shapps was the author of the scheme he later turned against. His colleagues were reportedly ‘furious’ as he initially briefed for it, then against, then tried to blame the Prime Minister. You have to love the way Boris Johnson said that he wanted ‘a simple traffic-light system for international travel’ – right. The current hokey-cokey can hardly be described in such terms. Citing the two week delay before putting India on the red list in April, Labour’s Ben Bradshaw said decisions about the traffic light system were an ‘absolute scandal’ and had ‘nothing to do with public health and everything to do with politics…The government has repeatedly failed to publish the detailed data on which its decisions are made…Every other country in Europe does this, so the public and business can plan. Air passenger numbers in Europe have already recovered to about 60% of pre-Covid levels, while the UK figure is 16%’.

https://bit.ly/3lFV04Z

But what seems increasingly clear is that ‘staycations’ aren’t always the answer. The BBC showed packed beaches in Cornwall (lifeguards estimated 14,000 on Perranporth beach at one point last week), local services including the NHS under severe pressure, long queues for everything and some people complaining about empty shelves in shops, staff shortages in restaurants and inflated accommodation prices. This is surely another example of a serious issue not being thought out by the Westminster government – they would have known long ago that Covid measures would put much more pressure on the UK’s seaside resorts but what help did those local authorities get when most are already suffering from significant cuts in their budgets?

https://bbc.in/3fGlU9n

And this is only if you can afford a holiday in the first place – for many low-paid workers it’s proving impossible. ‘Ministers have urged Britons to holiday at home but big rises in the cost of accommodation and limited availability have made that impossible for many. Inevitably, it is the people who have been most stretched during the pandemic, poorly paid frontline workers, who are in greatest need of a break and least able to afford one’. Another Observer Opinium poll registered findings which aren’t surprising, eg people in higher social and economic groups were much more likely to have taken a holiday abroad, but this is a stark finding: ‘almost two-thirds (64%) of the poorer group said they had not taken and had not booked a holiday this year; that figure was 52% for the wealthier group’. What a shame this is: those frontline workers really need a break yet one NHS worker quoted said she was now only looking to 2023 for a holiday.

https://bit.ly/3jwMLpr

The forever jaunty Grant Shapps came in for a second dose of opprobrium last week. When interviewed on Thursday’s Radio 4’s Today programme and asked about the secret ‘advisory board’ of rich Tory donors and their potential influence on government policy, he described them, in an outrageous example of disingenuous gaslighting, as people ‘who love their country and want to see it prosper’. For ‘prosper’ read changing policy to support crony profitmaking.

Three other ministers have also been in the news and not for positive reasons. Prominent Brexiteer Steve Baker has now called Brexit ‘a fiasco’, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab failed to quarantine on returning from France and, maskless, met Princess Anne only days later, and health minister Lord Bethell continues to be under pressure for appearing to take steps to avoid scrutiny regarding the award of crony contracts and use of private messaging rather than official email. He claimed to have broken and replaced his mobile phone, thereby rendering inaccessible the WhatsApp exchanges which could otherwise incriminate him. At issue is the controversial award of £85 million in contracts to Abingdon Health last year, for Covid testing kits, following a private meeting which Bethell did not declare.

We shouldn’t have to depend on private organisations taking the lead on this but again, the Good Law Project is leading the way. During an interview with James O’Brien on LBC, director Jolyon Maugham said: ‘These [contracts] involve epic amounts of public money so we need to be sure that they’re not doing what Dominic Cummings admits he’s done twice, which is giving contracts to his friends. You have a duty to account to those who give you that public money through our taxes and explain how it is that you came to award these weird and wonderful contracts to your friends or Tory donors…If you deliberately destroy evidence or break your phone… it’s very possible that you’re committing the criminal offence of perverting the course of justice. Once we receive the answers to the questions that we put to the lawyers acting for the Department for Health, we will be taking a close look at whether a criminal offence has been committed’.

https://bit.ly/3xzSzTP

Last week we heard that the NHS had gone down from 1 to 4 in a list of 11 countries’ health systems compiled by an American think tank, the Commonwealth Fund. Numbers 1-3 are now Norway, the Netherlands and Australia. Siva Anandaciva, chief analyst at leading UK health think tank the King’s Fund said: ‘According to this report, our previously world-beating health service is at risk of moving to the middle of the pack, largely due to growing delays across the system in people’s ability to access care quickly’. It’s hardly a surprise, because of this government’s longstanding underinvestment in the NHS, and this analyst makes clear the situation can’t be attributed solely to Covid. ‘We can’t brush this under the carpet as being solely a consequence of the impact of the pandemic on patients, staff and services. Even before Covid, waiting lists for treatment were already sizeable after a decade of stalling funding and a growing workforce crisis. As Covid put the NHS under unprecedented pressure, the waiting list for routine NHS care has ballooned to levels not seen since the early 2000s. Whilst the NHS is doing its best to keep services running, increasing demand for hospital, mental health and GP services means the whole health and care system is now facing a capacity crunch’.

This article is interesting, if depressing, on the criteria used for ranking countries. The UK’s rating declined on three important criteria: access to care; care processes, which look at the co-ordination of treatment and how well patients are involved; and equity, or the ability to obtain healthcare regardless of income. The UK was described as ‘a remarkably lean spender among high income countries’. Apparently ‘nearly 60% of adults in the UK found it somewhat or very difficult to obtain after-hours care, one of the highest rates among the countries surveyed’, and as we well know, mental health services have been inadequate. ‘Just 33% of patients said that they got counselling or treatment for mental health problems when they sought help from a specialist in psychological or psychiatric illness – a new indicator that the think tank had not previously analysed. The NHS was the second worst performer of the 11 countries on that criterion, just ahead of France’. This doesn’t surprise me at all – there are long waiting lists for most IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) services and often poor choice of treatment, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy being privileged when what many actually need and want is relational therapy.

https://bit.ly/3CpocDs

We hear, not surprisingly, that with the NHS on its knees, funding will be a stand-off between Health Secretary Sajid Javid and ‘hard-nosed’ Chancellor Rishi Sunak. While GPs report having to deal with many more patients in pain because of long-delayed procedures, the crisis overall is attributed to a convergence of ‘Covid issues, the emergence of health problems hidden during the pandemic, soaring waiting lists, an exhausted workforce and the continued pressures on capacity caused by increased infection control’. In turn, NHS Providers chief executive Chris Hopson attributes the funding crisis to an insufficient settlement in the first place, expensive new manifesto commitments, a social care crisis, a massive care backlog and ongoing Covid costs. ‘Any one of those by themselves would be a major pressure. The problem is the combination of all five of them at once…. “There’s real danger of a very large gap between the Treasury and the NHS, the Treasury insisting that they have to regain control of the public finances and get back to the May settlement as quickly as possible – the NHS saying that the demands on the service have changed dramatically and they can’t provide the right quality of patient care in a world of Covid-19 unless those pressures are recognised. It’s difficult to see how those two views get reconciled’.

It was shocking enough hearing recently that the NHS waiting list was about 5 million – it’s now predicted it could rise to 13 million before it starts to fall. Two key factors add to the conundrum’s mix – the new NHS Chief Executive, Amanda Pritchard, and Javid himself, who, as former Chancellor, had a reputation as a ‘fiscal hawk’. But the Prime Minister will also be involved, the King’s Fund said. ‘There won’t just be wrangling between the Department of Health and Social Care and the Treasury. No 10 always has a strong hand in NHS funding decisions and will have a keen interest in showing the electorate that a Conservative government can be trusted on the NHS’. Unfortunately, we’ve seen plenty of signs suggesting that the Conservatives cannot be trusted with the NHS but some commentators think that the 2024 election on the horizon might concentrate minds this time around.

https://bit.ly/2XbN5CB

There have been a number of reports in recent years on the need for better investment in mental health services and we need these more than ever, as the pandemic has given rise to much higher demand. The latest report is from the Centre for Mental Health (Now or Never) and calls for strategic government spending on mental health and for services in England to radically change to be fit for the future and respond to the aftermath of the pandemic. Crucially, it points out that it’s not only about investment but about addressing longstanding structural problems in the way services are conceived and delivered, including the inappropriate historical divide between physical and mental health services. Staff shortages are significant, but as the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) has long pointed out, thousands of well qualified and experienced counsellors and therapists are available for recruitment to help resolve this. But unfortunately the NHS has pursued a policy of training up a separate workforce, primarily in CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), which is not only wasteful but also continues to sideline approaches to therapy which are often found to be much more helpful to patients. The report also highlights the important need for focus on preventative work, less costly in the long run.

BACP makes the good point that health inequalities across England reinforce the need for mental health services to feature in any real ‘levelling up’ agenda. Centre for Mental Health chief economist and report author Nick O’Shea said: ‘Mental health care needs to change if it is to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Our Mental Health Act remains a direct descendant of nineteenth-century predecessors. We still see people being placed in long-stay hospitals and nursing homes far from home for mental health treatment’. A review was conducted of the Mental Health Act a while back but it’s unclear what has been planned as a result of the review’s recommendations. Yet another can the government has kicked down the road? Nick O’Shea reckons ‘the NHS is going to need two to three times current capacity to adequately meet and treat the expected increase in mental health problems resulting from the pandemic’. That’s quite some investment.

https://bit.ly/3CqQa1D

Worrying yet predictable findings from another report (by Carnegie UK) concern the decline in wellbeing and rise in loneliness in England, which had already been the case pre-pandemic but increased with lockdown. Governments continue to measure success in terms of GDP and the like, but wellbeing and our degree of connection with others are key determinants of quality of life. It’s appalling and it speaks volumes that such data have been so badly delayed – 17 months for Office of National Statistics data on wellbeing compared with 8 months for economic data. 

Within the context of loneliness in adults in England rocketing by 44% during 2020, from 2.6 million to 3.7 million, the charity is proposing a new measure of national progress – Gross Domestic Wellbeing, or GDWe – to measure whether life is getting better or worse. Chief Executive Sarah Davidson makes clear that this isn’t to minimise the importance of economic data: ‘We’re not saying that economic factors are not important, because they are, and the model of wellbeing that we talk about highlights the importance of balancing social, economic, environmental [and] democratic outcomes … In order to properly capture what’s important to people’s lives, you really need to measure all these things…. if we used GDWe instead of GDP growth ‘as the guiding star” for economic policymaking, it would be a major step towards measuring what matters most to people’.

Meanwhile (and the major principle of this blog), trust in government was found to be at an-all time low following a nearly 40% drop from 2018/19 to 2019/20 (from 31% to 19%). There’s a direct relationship between ability to trust our government and our mental wellbeing, this drop leading to the rise in public anxiety.

https://bit.ly/37rSgA3

Following news last week of Boris Johnson’s ‘weird and gimmicky’ crime plan, which involved offenders being made to wear high viz jackets, a ticking off has been delivered in the form of shoe repair firm chief James Timpson’s tweet, which caused a stir: ‘Instead of making offenders wear high viz jackets in chain gangs, how about helping them get a real job instead? In my shops we employ lots of ex-offenders and they wear a shirt and tie. Same people, different approach, a much better outcome’. This is a much more intelligent approach, of course, the Prime Minister’s plan instead appealing to a certain mentality amongst his voters.

‘Since 2008, when he opened a shoe repair workshop in HMP Liverpool (no key-cutting skills were practised), his company has employed more than 1,500 ex-prisoners. Just four have returned to jail. Many of those who turned their backs on crime – including some with drug and alcohol issues – have progressed to senior roles in the company, including a current board member’.

Crucially, he addresses the root causes of crime. As his parents successfully fostered 92 children, many from the care system, he’s well placed to understand how often these children have poor attachment patterns, leading to unmet emotional and educational needs, difficulties trusting others and poor relationships with authority. ‘What are we going to do with people we release from prison? Unless we stop putting offenders down, they will continue to distrust us and carry on down the paths their lives have led them to. Our evidence shows there is another way, which most certainly does not involve showing them up in public’. Quite so, but a problem for governments in addressing this is the polarity we often find between those wanting to prioritise punishment of offenders and those wanting the greater emphasis to be placed on rehabilitation.

https://bit.ly/37sJh1G

Recently the media rightly made an issue of the unprecedentedly high number of drugs deaths in Scotland. What the BBC at least spent less time on was not dissimilar findings for England and Wales. Sky News reported that ‘There were 4,561 deaths related to drug poisoning in England and Wales in 2020, up 3.8% from the previous year and the highest number since records began in 1993….. Two thirds (2,996) deaths were related to drug misuse, while around half (2,263) involved an opiate’. The opioids crisis is another serious issue in this country which has been under-reported in the media. Experts know that the problem has worsened during the pandemic, and while the Office for National Statistics attributes the rise to some concrete causes like people using benzodiazepines besides heroin and morphine, the root causes like despair and poverty can be overlooked.

While the government has set up a new unit to tackle the problem, experts point to the underinvestment and closure of much-needed drug and alcohol services over recent years. Sky quoted Dr Emily Finch, Vice-Chair of the addictions faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists: ‘Years of cuts have left addictions services ill-equipped to treat people and prevent these deaths from rising. The government needs to wake up to the fact that cuts to services, disconnecting NHS mental health services from addiction services and shifting the focus away from harm reduction to abstinence-based recovery is destroying lives and fuelling the increase in drug-related deaths’. The perennial question is can government detach itself from short-term sticking plaster measures in order to effectively address this situation?

https://bit.ly/3yzGRKe

In case you missed it there was a bit of really life-enhancing tv last week, in the form of actor Richard E Grant’s travels around Italy, referencing books which had demonstrated the country’s impact on the writers. What a great gig to get but well-deserved: Grant comes across as a lovely bloke who has numerous jolly and informative encounters with locals. Two worth watching out for are his experience of the sulphuric lemon drink and his obvious enjoyment of a freshly made Neapolitan pizza, during which his agent reprimanded him on his table manners.   

https://bbc.in/3xy6Rof

Finally, something else you couldn’t make up… Health Secretary Sajid Javid is one of five and he’s let it be known that his mother always wanted one of her sons to be a doctor. This didn’t happen but now she is apparently delighted that Sajid is finally something ‘in healthcare’! You could say that….

Sunday 1 August

Although the news continues to be dominated by Covid-related issues, there was another stark reminder last Sunday of the climate crisis, parts including London once again experiencing flash floods. We’ve become used to seeing these in other countries but it feels even more alarming when you see for the first time footage of local places under feet of water. It seems at least two local authorities in London don’t have a regular regime of drain inspection and in one borough councillors denied there was a problem despite being sent evidence of blocked drains. No doubt there will be more of this and more media coverage as we approach COP 26 in November.  

https://bit.ly/2TQVJoG

News yesterday that the Johnsons are expecting their second child (the PM’s 7th or is it 8th?) already has some sceptics wondering what bad news this has been timed to push under the radar, although the news we already have couldn’t get much worse. It seems strange, if not extraordinary, that politicians, media and commentators are mostly pushing the view that Covid cases are declining (based on a very limited time span) when medics yet again feel overwhelmed, conveying quite a different experience. More young people are being admitted to hospital than before and a 34 year old anti-vaxxer died last week. We don’t even yet have the data reflecting the effects of ‘Freedom Day’ and what too many are ignoring is that recorded case numbers aren’t reflecting actual numbers because so many have deleted or disabled the Covid app to avoid its ‘pinging’. Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, opined that we’re ‘not out of the woods yet’ (too true, with deaths of 91 and 131 on a couple days last week) and perhaps we will have to go much further into those woods before emerging from them.

Oddly, it was suggested for a while that it wasn’t possible to obtain statistics on the amount of app deletion and disabling but now YouGov has polled it and according to them, 40% of people say they never downloaded it, 34% did but have since disabled it to avoid being pinged and only 22% continue to ‘use it correctly at all times’. This is quite a low figure!

It’s worrying that progress with the vaccination programme has revealed that numerous young people have opted not to be vaccinated when they could be, often not realising that they are at risk of becoming seriously ill and perhaps not grasping the disabling effects of Long Covid. ‘NHS England said one-third of 18- to 29-year-olds had still not had at least one dose of the vaccine – a figure that falls to one in 10 for the whole adult population. While young people are generally at a much lower risk of dying from Covid, doctors say they are increasingly witnessing them become severely unwell. Dr Samantha Batt-Rawden, senior intensive care registrar, said the patients they were seeing were “getting younger and younger”…… ‘The latest data from the Office for National Statistics shows that coronavirus in England is now largely an infection among young adults, with cases in 16- to 24-year-olds almost six times more common than in 50- to 69-year-olds’.

https://bit.ly/3zSEAds

A serious point is why, apart from blatant protection of the government, are so many media sources spreading what could well be false optimism without giving the bigger picture? For example, ‘hospital bed occupancy for coronavirus patients has also increased significantly in the last week, with occupancy of mechanical ventilation beds rising by 31% and other bed occupancy up by 33%’.

https://bit.ly/3xc7a85

The Times conveys the contradictory nature of this debate and speculation about the trajectory of Covid, with some commentators trying to cover all bases. Professor Ferguson said we could be looking mostly at the back of it by October, but cases could well rise, for example when schools re-open in September. At least some sources recognise that the reduction in app use and in testing is contributing to the apparently positive (but possibly misleading) data. ‘Some scientists believe this reflects less testing as schools break up for the summer, while another theory being taken seriously in Whitehall is that a big part of the reduction is because people are avoiding tests in case their summer holiday plans are ruined’.

https://bit.ly/3C1G0nP

Following the recent ejection from the Chamber of MP Dawn Butler for calling out the Prime Minister’s serial lying, coupled with the longstanding efforts of journalist Peter Oborne and lawyer Peter Stefanovic, the mainstream media is now finally paying some attention to this mendacity. It was beyond embarrassing this week to see Work and Pensions minister Therese Coffey, interviewed on Sky News by Kay Burley, trying to dismiss such evidence as trivial social media stuff, saying she was ‘proud’ of the Prime Minister and that he was doing ‘a great job… leading from the front’- manifestly what he is not doing. But an equally serious issue is how helpless this can make us feel, when such behaviour is not called to account even in the House of Commons. One tweeter said: ‘Our political system can’t cope with a Johnson. His misdemeanours are so numerous, his lies so incessant, his morals so non-existent, his incompetence so gobsmacking, his chutzpah so breathtaking, the system has no answer. He goes ploughing on. We spectate – powerless’.

If it wasn’t so serious you could almost feel sorry for these ministers, one after another having to submit themselves to media interviews (as their boss won’t) during which they have to defend the indefensible, or, in the case of Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and Transport Minister Grant Shapps, misrepresent the government’s kneejerk and defensive policy switches as part of a carefully laid plan. It shows how desperate the government has become about the lack of tourists and their spending power that they’ve suddenly agreed that double jabbed visitors from the US and EU no longer have to quarantine, but the exclusion of France from this arrangement, allegedly due to their Delta variant prevalence, is a shameless projection of the UK’s situation.

https://bit.ly/3xbQhKA

But despite at least some now being away on holiday, a number of ministers have been in the news this week because of intractable situations they’ve done little to effectively address, for example the significant increase in migrants, demands for more former Afghan interpreters at threat from the Taliban to be allowed to settle here and the ‘advice’ for Latin to be on state schools’ curricula, allegedly to tackle elitism. Insufficient desire to resolve these situations and lack of brainpower to do so are only going to increase public anxiety further when confidence in the government has long been in marked decline. One tweeter summed up the views of many: ‘The police have no confidence in Patel; the teaching profession regards Williamson with contempt; Javid is a disaster zone for health workers; Dowden has left the highly successful creative industries in a state of despair; and Johnson is an embarrassment to all and sundry’. The latest example must be his antics at the unveiling at the memorial for fallen police officers, when he showed himself incapable of managing an umbrella. Several video versions of this have gone viral and Prince Charles could be seen joining in with the general amusement, though this was clearly an occasion warranting some gravitas from our Prime Minister.

https://bit.ly/3rM7kSh

Details have recently emerged of what many must have suspected for some time, that is, quite apart from regular lobbying, government policy is being influenced by a select group of Tory donors. One tweeter described The Financial Times piece about this as ‘Great article showing how this government is rotten to the core and reliant on money from anywhere. Cash for policy is not democracy it is autocratic and corrupt’. Lawyer and Good Law Project founder Jolyon Maugham tweeted: ‘There’s a rather charming frankness about the Tories’ decision to call the fantastically wealthy donors who give vast sums to push their personal agendas an Advisory Board’.

‘The club, some of whose members have given at least £250,000 to the party, has been developed by Ben Elliot, Tory co-chair, as a means of connecting major Conservative backers with its top figures. The club does not appear in party literature but Conservative officials confirmed the Advisory Board “occasionally” meets with Johnson and Sunak “for an update on the political landscape”.

Wouldn’t you just know that the Conservative Party denies the existence of this ‘250 club’?

‘Government policy is in no way influenced by the donations the party receives, they are entirely separate. Donations to the Conservative party are properly and transparently declared to the Electoral Commission, published by them, and fully comply with the law. Fundraising is a legitimate part of the democratic process’. Maybe not this kind of fundraising, though.

https://on.ft.com/3lnWjWb

The Week summarises an article from US magazine The Atlantic about the enigma who is Boris Johnson, revealing the different sides of his character lurking beneath the superficial bonhomie. ‘Johnson is unlike other prime ministers I’ve covered’, said author Tom McTague…contrasting him first with Blair and Cameron (‘polished and formidable’), then with Brown and May (‘rigid, fearful, cautious’), he says Johnson is ‘scruffy, impulsive, exuberant – the first British leader I’ve seen who genuinely seems to be having a good time’. At our expense, perhaps? McTague details ‘his ambition, his outrages, his scandals’ over the years, saying that what ‘drives opponents mad’ is that nothing ever seems to stick. The most recent revelations of mendacity would appear to prove this. During a conversation about John le Carre’s views on ‘England’s failing ruling class’, he more or less admitted to being a cynic as well as a romantic, being determined to ‘squeeze out’ ‘world-weariness’ within the government and re-energise it with ‘some of the energy and optimism that this country used to have’.

This sounds alarmingly simplistic: it’s not without merit but ‘energy and optimism’ need to have firm foundations, some track record and surely can’t be achieved simply by jollying people along. It’s probably no understatement to suggest that for many, Brexit knocked the stuffing out of the country. The article emphasises what appears to be his unrealistic optimism, his close aides concerned that he’s too reliant on faith that things will be fine. ‘The duality of his character continued to fascinate me. There is the light and the colour he wants the world to see. But there is also a darker side that most who know him acknowledge, the moments of introspection and calculation’.

Shortly after the unveiling of Boris Johnson’s rather simplistic-sounding Beating Crime Plan (for England and Wales), it’s timely though arguably strange that a police review has been announced which will explore the reasons for the rise in the teenage murder rate. ‘Every government agency involved in the victim’s life – health services, local authorities, children’s services, probation, and even voluntary groups – will contribute to an examination of what went wrong and consider how to identify the signs of a life at risk. Police hope to see patterns that will help to prevent future murders. If the pilot scheme is successful, it will be introduced across England and Wales’. While the cross-sectoral approach in this review sounds promising, it’s surely way overdue: so far this year 22 teens have been murdered, compared with 14 in 2020. While it’s clear to authorities that Covid restrictions, lockdowns and the drugs trade have contributed, partly because gangs have targeted pupils out of school, it’s surely a significant factor that so many youth clubs have closed. Apparently, between 2010 and 2019 (coinciding with Conservative governments) 760 youth clubs closed in England and Wales, related to councils’ expenditure on youth services declining by 70%. While these places cannot be a panacea, they’ve provided much-needed structure and opportunities for personal development and friendships that won’t be available to all of these young people at home.

https://bit.ly/3lgY5Iz

Some good news for the NHS this week must be that Baroness Dido Harding, who has presided over the massive Test and Trace shambles, didn’t get the Chief Executive job. ‘Lord Stevens of Birmingham’s deputy is to replace him as head of NHS England in a decision that signals continuity as the health service attempts to recover from the pandemic. Amanda Pritchard was confirmed as NHS chief executive yesterday after a protracted recruitment process that was overshadowed by rows over the candidacy of Baroness Harding of Winscombe, the former head of Test and Trace’. Pritchard has over 20 years experience in the NHS and apparently knows her way around Whitehall, but the fact that two very corporate candidates were seriously considered for the job would yet again indicate the government’s privatisation intentions. On a related issue, Stevens does sound worthy of a peerage but how many more peers can be created when numbers already exceed those of MPs? ‘He became a crossbench peer three weeks ago and is expected to become a prominent advocate for social care reform and related issues’.

https://bit.ly/3icLgNE

As an aside, the efforts of former Health Secretary Matt Hancock to rehabilitate himself were dealt a blow last week when Newmarket Town Council passed a vote of no confidence in him. ‘The full motion said: “Newmarket Town Council states its concerns that the West Suffolk MP Matthew Hancock neglected the best interests of his constituency. As secretary of state for health he has demonstrated hypocrisy and hubris in the pursuit of his own interests. Newmarket Town Council states that we no longer have confidence in Matthew Hancock MP representing Newmarket’. Although this motion only passed because the Mayor used his casting vote and the local constituency party is still backing Hancock, such a judgement won’t help him.

https://bbc.in/37aAUHK

Worrying news about the NHS, though, is the crisis in primary care, with GP practices groaning under their workloads while staff shortages undermine patient care further. Many have experienced the effects of this, for example their GP practice perhaps going into special measures, the difficulty of getting to see the doctor in person because of the massive move to virtual and telephone consultations and the knock-on effects these have for onward referrals. ‘Doctors are warning that general practice clinics risk cracking under the pressure of “unsustainable” workloads unless the government ramps up the recruitment of medical staff and takes steps to reduce burnout. The Royal College of GPs is calling on the government to introduce an emergency rescue package to shore up general practice clinics after the pandemic, including recruiting 6,000 more GPs and 26,000 additional support staff, such as nurses and receptionists, by 2024 as well as reducing paperwork and investing in £1bn worth of improvements to infrastructure and technology. Without these changes, patients will not receive the care they need, the college said’.

The ‘rising and ageing population’ is thought to be the main reason for the rise in consultations but perhaps the after-effects of Covid are adding to this as well, not to mention issues patients didn’t feel able to consult their doctor about during lockdowns and restrictions. Over the last 5 years the number of qualified GPs in England has apparently declined by 4.5% and it’s shocking that many are considering leaving the profession because of stress and burnout. Needless to say, a Department of Health and Social Care spokesman detailed all the investment the government is apparently putting in, but also falls back on that old bribing chestnut of saying how ‘incredibly grateful’ the government is ‘for the tireless efforts of GPs’, when gratitude isn’t going to do the business.

https://bit.ly/3CdRq8n

Following the controversial news last week that Unesco was removing World Heritage Site status from Liverpool because of ongoing waterside development, it’s good news that this status is now being granted to Snowdonia’s slate landscape. ‘The landscape in Snowdonia National Park became the world leader for the production and export of slate during the 18th century, when the industrial revolution saw demand for slate surge. The industry had a considerable impact on global architecture and urbanisation in Europe and North America, with Welsh slate used on buildings, terraces and palaces across the globe. According to Unesco, the status was awarded in recognition of the region’s 1,800-year history of slate mining, its people and culture, and its role in “roofing the nineteenth-century world”…. The region is the UK’s 32nd World Heritage Site and the fourth in Wales, following the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, Blaenavon industrial landscape and the castles and town walls of King Edward in Gwynedd’. We hear that Boris Johnson backed the bid – how long before he claims credit for it, we could ask ourselves.

https://bit.ly/37b4HAb

It’s worrying, though, that several UK sites are under threat of having this status removed, including Stonehenge, the Lake District, Devon and Cornwall, Edinburgh and Westminster, the urban ones being related to what are felt to be inappropriate developments threatening to dwarf the skyline. Some commentators have been critical of Unesco’s decision making, citing the need for regeneration and other social issues – perhaps in Unesco’s eyes these aren’t reconcilable with recognising key heritage sites.

https://bit.ly/2Vai9Sp

Last week saw the publication of this year’s Booker Prize long list, in which the latest novel by Rachel Cusk was thought to stand out. ‘Mercilessly anatomising privilege, creativity and ambition, male-female relationships and lockdowns Covid-driven and emotional, Cusk is brutally funny and honest about shame, ego and our sense of self. The novel is truly one of a kind’. It does sound a very interesting list of contenders but I do hope the judges avoid the temptation often given into that the winner should be unreadable by anyone except academics and critics.

https://bit.ly/2TN5DYh

Finally, in the current circumstances of needing to adapt our ways of greeting others, it seems to me another book would be well worth reading. The handshake: a gripping history, by ‘evolutionary biologist Ella Al-Shamahi’, focuses on how the shaking of hands has persisted over years despite attempts to ban it during previous pandemics. She reckons that since chimps and uncontacted tribes of humans have similar gestures, we could be genetically hard-wired to shake, ‘perhaps to deliver things like smell-related chemosignals to each other’. Although people don’t often seem to expect women to shake hands, I’ve always liked it and regarded it as very civilised, with the exception of the wet haddock hand shake most of us will have experienced at some point. I hope the other kind persists despite this pandemic!  

Sunday 25 July

Yes, I seem to say this most weeks but you really couldn’t make up what happened last weekend. On the cusp of the much trumpeted Freedom Day, the Health Secretary tested positive and the PM and Chancellor were told to self-isolate, taking out at one fell swoop three key government figures. ‘Beyond satire,’ as one commentator put it, but, for a while, it was suggested that a special scheme would enable Johnson and Sunak to continue with their duties in Downing Street, before an absolute outcry about one rule for them, one for the rest of us forced a humiliating u-turn just hours later. But not before Boris Johnson had hightailed it to the much more comfortable setting of Chequers, thereby breaking more rules. While Housing minister Robert Jenrick said this scheme had been set up last December, it was odd no one had heard anything about it and claims that Transport for London were participants were immediately rebutted by TfL.

Actor and director David Schneider tweeted: ‘It’s almost like they know millions self-isolating undermines their countrycidal “Freedom Day”. So by not self-isolating themselves they push everyone else not to do it. £37bn on Test & Trace and now they’re making sure it’s ignored. We’ll be back in lockdown in weeks’. Palliative care doctor and broadcaster Rachel Clarke outed the PM’s ‘explanatory tweet’, which had read ‘Like so many people I’ve been pinged by NHS Test and Trace as I have been in contact with someone with COVID-19, and I will be self-isolating until Monday’ by saying ‘Unlike so many people, you had to be publicly shamed before you did the decent thing’. On Monday there was a car crash interview with Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi on Radio 4’s Today, during which the minister tried to suggest that the PM proactively did the right thing instead of being shamed into the U turn.

What a different experience for Boris Johnson from the one most of us will have – Chequers reportedly has splendid leisure facilities and an excellent wine cellar, not to mention those lovely grounds and the surrounding countryside. What’s surely way overdue is a tv documentary about Chequers: it would be most informative.

It was noticeable during the week that there was even less compliance than usual with the mask wearing requirement on public transport, around here at least. Apparently transport staff unions won’t be enforcing it and just to take one Underground carriage as an example, just one individual was wearing a mask correctly. The other passengers had no mask (or put it into their bag when boarding the train) or were wearing it under their nose or around their throat. I’ve also observed several times people not wearing a mask on the train but putting it on to exit the station, clearly when there’s a likelihood of more officialdom. Interestingly, the public being once more ahead of the government, The Week describes public polling suggesting that two thirds think masks, distancing and travel limits should have continued for another month and ‘a sizeable minority’ want freedoms restricted permanently. One in four of us even want nightclubs closed for good and two in ten want a permanent 10 pm curfew.

Again, the government narrative makes itself apparent, creating a false polarity between restrictions and a total lack of them, ‘living with the virus’ being taken to mean just allowing it to take over. In a letter to the Observer, all four of the UK’s independent public health bodies warned: “Living with Covid-19 is not the same thing as letting it rip. We should proceed carefully, not recklessly … The government must promote effective public health measures because personal responsibility will not be enough’. This is certainly true – we’ve seen plenty of evidence that many aren’t capable of using their ‘common sense’, if they have any in the first place.

The extra time being holed up at Chequers will afford Boris Johnson extra time to deliberate his hubristic legacy, since we’re told he wants to ‘echo Blair’s promise of an ‘opportunity society’ and energise those who feel left behind’. A source sounding as if hailing from a parallel universe disclosed the comparison of ‘levelling up’ with Blair’s programme: ‘We’re going to do the thing that Tony Blair failed to do for the people who voted for him. We’re going to energise the towns and regions that feel left behind: we’re going to reach out to those places and improve people’s life chances’. How on earth do they think they’re going to do that, since Red Wall voters are already beginning to see the light about the Emperor’s lack of clothing and in any case ‘levelling up’ has proved to be vacuous waffle? ‘Johnson’s biographer, Andrew Gimson, told Politico’s Playbook on Friday that as Johnson celebrates two years in power this weekend, “he’ll be pretty pleased because he’s a bit like Tony Blair, oddly enough, with the wider public. He’s having an unnaturally prolonged honeymoon. He’s high in the polls and the Labour party have got terrible difficulties at the moment. I think Boris Johnson will think to himself: ‘This is just the start – if I play my cards right, then I can win three more elections’’’. We could well ask why there’s been no evidence of his ‘opportunity society’ after 11 years of Conservative government and Johnson has led the party for two years.

https://bit.ly/3y3uDcQ

Meanwhile, who is running the country while Covid cases rise rapidly (on Tuesday 46,558 new cases and 96 more deaths were recorded, the highest number of fatalities since March), the frequency of Covid app pinging has resulted in staff shortages  and cross-party work found a significant decline in analysis of red list country arrivals’ positive tests for variants? ‘The analysis of NHS test and trace data was carried out by the House of Commons library, commissioned by the chair of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on Coronavirus, Layla Moran’.

https://bit.ly/3BETTrV

Various industries are pressing the government to urgently review the way the Covid app works, as it’s been shown to often ‘ping’ people unnecessarily and staff shortages across the economy, especially transport, are having a serious impact. A news bulletin today suggested that without urgent action in the distribution and retail sectors, the supply chain would break down within two of three weeks. The system will change on August 16, when the double jabbed will no longer be expected to self-isolate when pinged (an advisory system, as opposed to the Test and Trace phone calls, which confer a legal requirement to isolate), and new adjustments to allow some key workers to continue have been criticised for their longwinded procedures. ‘The government has said supermarket depot workers and food manufacturers will be exempt from the ten-day self-isolation rule if pinged by the Covid app or contacted by a Test and Trace official, regardless of vaccination status. Instead they will do daily Covid testing and can carry on working if they test negative’.

Up to 10,000 workers are expected to qualify for the scheme across 500 key sites. The measures have started at 15 supermarket depots, to be followed by 150 depots this coming week. As ever, we can sense the government’s reluctance to properly take responsibility for a difficult situation as they go off on holiday, but this latest abdication will further raise public anxiety. They seem repeatedly to demonstrate poor capacity for nuanced thinking, resorting to blunt instruments and one-size-fits-all approaches, which prove unhelpful. The daftest example must be the plans to introduce Covid passports for nightclubs and other venues in September, a good example of trying to close the stable door once the horse has bolted.

https://bit.ly/3i1tn45

 As if all this wasn’t enough, Health Secretary Sajid Javid was lambasted this morning for an ‘insensitive’ tweet in which he’d appeared to boast about recovering from Covid within 8 days, advising that people shouldn’t ‘cower’ before the virus. Notice that government narrative again? If you’re being careful given the premature ending of restrictions you’re somehow being cowardly. Hours later he was forced to remove the post and apologise but he can’t undo this so easily: ‘I’ve deleted a tweet which used the word “cower”. I was expressing gratitude that the vaccines help us fight back as a society, but it was a poor choice of word and I sincerely apologise. Like many, I have lost loved ones to this awful virus and would never minimise its impact’. Even this could be seen as a non-apology as it resorts again to government narrative – ‘we’re all in this together’ (‘Like many, I have lost loved ones’). One of the main organisations to complain was the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group. Co-founder Jo Goodman said earlier that the ‘flippancy and carelessness’ of Mr Javid’s comment had ‘caused deep hurt and further muddied the waters of the government’s dangerously mixed messaging’. As one tweeter put it: ‘I am not in a position to delete tweets due to poor choice of words. A health minister who cannot consider impact of choice of words until some time after tweeting perhaps needs to consider if twitter is an appropriate medium for communicating re serious issues’.

https://bit.ly/36ZdtB7

Meanwhile, numerous commentators point out the trivialisation of the pandemic by alluding to the ‘pingdemic’, which proves the app is actually doing its job, albeit perhaps too effectively in some instances. Observed one tweeter: ‘The pinging problem is being framed in terms of the sensitivity of the app. The real problem is the number of infections’. Anecdotally (crazy that the government can’t supply statistics on this) it seems many are disabling the app because they don’t want to be pinged, so an unsatisfactory situation all round.

The government continues to get it in the neck from various critics, including Sage member Sir Jeremy Farrar, who runs the Wellcome Trust. ‘Boris Johnson’s failure to start a public inquiry into Covid this year is a disgrace that is all about “political manoeuvring” to protect his reputation, according to a leading scientific adviser to the government. The comments from Sir Jeremy Farrar came in the third extract from his book Spike – The Virus vs The People: The Inside Story, where he claims that Johnson’s pledge to wait until 2022 to start the inquiry into what happened with the management of the pandemic is for “no reason other than political manoeuvring”. Farrar’s latest comments come after he revealed that he nearly stepped down as a member of Sage over Johnson’s decision not to lock down the UK last autumn’. Sir Jeremy is highly critical of Boris Johnson’s lack of strategic thinking at the start of the pandemic (although surely this has been the case throughout) and reckons what we need is ‘hard-nosed independent assessments of political and structural capability’, not a likely outcome of anything the government controls.

https://bit.ly/3zvgxRN

Another regular critic, of course, is the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, who also reveals in this piece that, not for the first time, some NHS trusts have been gagged so the public doesn’t get to hear how bad things are. So much for ‘not overwhelming’ the NHS. ‘The prime minister had planned a Churchill-style speech. But his U-turn reveals the true cost of his Covid bungling. ‘Please, please, please be careful’, Boris Johnson urged in full U-turn, but that’s not what his lot practise. His “irreversible” pledge has vanished because, right here and now, disaster has already struck an exhausted NHS all over again.

But so as not to spoil freedom day, the public was not supposed to know about it. The Health Service Journal reports that three NHS chief executives have been banned from speaking to the media about the “unsustainable pressure” their hospitals are facing, and banned from commenting on the reckless removal of masks, social distancing and indoor gathering limits’. Citing the example of the Health Secretary testing positive and who had recently visited a care home and had attended Cabinet meetings, she points out what at least some ministers don’t grasp, that there’s no invincibility however much the rules are bent: ‘That’s the story: the virus is everywhere, disease-inducing and still deadly to VIPs and little people alike…. Boris Johnson’s “Do what I say, not what I do” freedom day won’t be remembered for Churchillian declarations, but for foolish boasting, toxic politics, and calamitous health policy misjudgement’.

https://bit.ly/3zvIWXO

But the news making most impact this week must be Dominic Cumming’s latest silo in the form of the documentary on BBC2, which featured him being interviewed by the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg. Coming over as supremely arrogant and Machiavellian, it was nevertheless telling that when she asked ‘How do you see yourself?’, he had to ask what she meant. Of numerous revelations, one of the most damaging must be the one in which Boris Johnson appeared to refuse an autumn lockdown because those at risk of death were only those in their 80s. Or it could be the one where he had to be dissuaded from visiting the Queen, although Downing Street denies this, or was it the one where Johnson said the Telegraph was his boss? The most humiliating suggestion must have been that ‘Boris Johnson’s closest aides decided he was unfit to be prime minister within weeks of his 2019 election victory and began plotting to oust him’. Downing Street can deny away because, despite the obvious faults and curious amorality of Cummings, his description of events rings too true to be dismissed, as with his previous revelations. Will Cummings keep them coming till he engineers Johnson’s defenestration, as he did with Matt Hancock? Hell hath no fury like an adviser scorned.

https://bit.ly/3zDMkQB

The BBC produced a useful piece about this interview called Dominic Cummings: eight takeaways from his interview, the eighth concerning his alleged ease with criticism. ‘Portraying himself as someone who wanted to reform government and was opposed by the “establishment”, Mr Cummings says he wasn’t afraid to upset people to get things done. People thought of him “generally as a nightmare”, he said. ‘If you are airing big difficult things, it’s going to be upsetting for a lot of people… A lot of people have a pop at me, but you don’t see me crying about it’. I suspect he would see being considered ‘a nightmare’ as a badge of honour.

https://bbc.in/3kThxuR

If we needed any further proof that many government ‘inquiries’ these days are whitewashes, the Greensill inquiry outcome will supply it. Although it concluded that David Cameron showed ‘significant lack of judgement’, it didn’t find him guilty of breaking any rules, demonstrating the weakness of those very rules rather than Cameron’s exoneration. To be fair, the report did suggest that the rules needed strengthening, but we have to ask why chairman Nigel Boardman was allowed to get away with consistently refusing evidence from Lady (Suzanne) Heywood, the widow of former Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, who feels that her husband has been scapegoated by this inquiry. The inquiry said Lord Heywood had failed to fully consider conflicts of interest over a government role for the financier Lex Greensill, but Lady Heywood said there had been insufficient scrutiny of ministers who signed off the Greensill appointment. ‘In a statement after the report’s release, Lady Heywood described the report as ‘nothing less than a travesty….His absence is being exploited to distort the facts of a decade ago and divert attention from the current government’s embarrassment at the collapse of Greensill Capital long after Jeremy’s death’. Not surprisingly, a Cabinet Office spokesman said the inquiry had been a fair process, that they had listened to Lady Heywood’s concerns, and that they would respond ‘in due course’.

https://bbc.in/3x56Aca

Another clear example of faulty procedure is the ejection from the Chamber on Thursday of Brent MP Dawn Butler, for outing Boris Johnson as a liar. There’s been no end of evidence for this assertion but the old parliamentary rule disallows calling a member a liar even if they manifestly are. It’s an absurd anachronism that you can be ejected for calling someone a liar but not for lying in the first place. In Byline Times Hardeep Matharu argues that Butler’s removal exposes the structural failings at the heart of the British state. This is a key point and I believe the Speaker is very much at fault in this: ‘Johnson has not been required to correct the record in the Commons over his many misleading statements – which have been catalogued by the journalist Peter Oborne and others – and is hardly ever robustly challenged by the Speaker when he repeats them weekly in Prime Minister’s Questions… There is nothing to compel Johnson to demand greater accountability of his ministers or to offer greater responsibility himself. As the Ministerial Code – a guide rather than a guard-rail – states: “Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the Prime Minister.” It makes no mention of to whom Prime Ministers who knowingly mislead Parliament should present themselves’. Matharu makes the key point that besides the current procedures not being fit for purpose, the government isn’t being held to account by a robust media, especially since BBC governance has been packed with those with links to the Conservative Party. All of this can make us feel rather disempowered.

https://bit.ly/3x5Qxeb

Yet again NHS mental health services have been in the news, with further evidence, if any was needed, of the deficits which have caused pain and distress to many. An area of acute need is eating disorders, with deaths and suicides amongst young people having resulted from service inadequacies and the continual raising of the bar allowing someone to even qualify for treatment. For some time it’s been very difficult to even ‘qualify’ for a place on the CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service) waiting list. Across the whole of mental health, the most recent statistics showed that ‘up to half of all children and teenagers referred to mental health, learning disability and autism services in the run-up to the pandemic were left without proper support, with parents telling the Observer of children waiting years for treatment and a seven-year-old girl denied support as she was not suicidal’. It’s an appalling situation that parents have to prove their child is suicidal before help can be considered, and not always then. Following her own ‘horrendous’ experience, one parent last week ‘posted on Facebook asking for people’s experiences of CAMHS and got 500 responses within a day. Parents described years of waiting for help, with many saying CAMHS refused to help unless their child was suicidal’. Not surprisingly, ‘he pandemic has seen a rise in demand for young people’s mental health services. It was revealed last week that referrals rose by a third in 2020-21 compared to 2019-20. Mental health minister Nadine Dorries recently tweeted that “we lead the world in the delivery of [mental health] services” and “we are not in the middle of a MH crisis” after a deluge of parents described their negative experiences of CAMHS’.

Nadine Dorries, not unlike most NHS spokesmen, is severely in denial here, as it’s well known that there’s been serious underinvestment in mental health services for years. One of the most galling misrepresentations was when she tried to suggest in the House of Commons that some service issues were caused by ‘lack of people coming through’ (to work in mental health, when there are thousands of qualified and skilled counsellors and therapists not recruited by the NHS. We find many not benefiting from cheap options like apps and computerised Cognitive Behaviour Therapy: what they want and need is relational work during which their difficulties are explored and understood rather than quick fixes being foisted upon them which don’t work long term anyway.

https://bit.ly/3rxyTPf

Last week Liverpool received the unwelcome news that, after several warnings, it was going to lose its UNESCO listing as a World Heritage site, because of what the United Nations agency considers unacceptable waterside development. Liverpool officials are fighting back, regional mayor Steve Rotherham saying that ‘places like Liverpool should not be faced with the binary choice between maintaining heritage status or regenerating left-behind communities and the wealth of jobs and opportunities that come with it’. Others have found it shaming, though, because only two other sites have lost this status since the scheme started in 1978: Oman’s Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in 2007 and the Dresden Elbe Valley in Germany in 2009. It seems there is no appeal process so Liverpool will have to live with this and see to what extent it will dent tourism.

https://bbc.in/3i1bEKj

Finally, good news about museums: the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year shortlist rightly focuses on institutions which have focused on their local communities during the pandemic. ‘The Art Fund museum of the year prize is the world’s biggest museum prize, with the winner receiving £100,000. The five shortlisted museums were named on Wednesday: the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Derry, Experience Barnsley, Firstsite in Colchester, the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds and Timespan in Helmsdale, a village on the east coast of the Scottish Highlands’. In recent years the competition has helpfully focused on smaller museums rather than large, national museums – it makes sense as those institutions already benefit from other funds. The competition also usefully alerts us to museums we may not previously have heard of. The winner will be announced on 20 September.

https://bit.ly/3i3kmHV

Saturday 17 July

Having watched football on tv for the first time ever (the Euro 2020 semi-final and final) I am now a football expert (!) and I did think it seemed a mistake for Southgate last Sunday evening to bring on different players for the penalties. Gratifyingly, many of those who know the game inside out seemed to agree, but how well the team did to even get to the final. Even more shaming, then, was the behaviour (not called out by the government) of some fans booing the opponents’ national anthems and abusing England players for falling at the last hurdle. Even more shaming, in the eyes of many, was the government’s hypocrisy over a period of time, condemning ‘taking the knee’ as ‘gesture politics’, giving the green light to misbehaving fans, then appearing to condemn the very abuse this stance had led to. ‘This England team deserve to be lauded as heroes, not racially abused on social media. Those responsible for this appalling abuse should be ashamed of themselves’, tweeted Boris Johnson, leading to this response from footballer Tyrone Mings: ‘You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens’. Oof.

While one Tory MP had the nerve to tell footballers to stick to their day jobs (of course, that would be convenient for them, for these critics to be silenced)‘Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative peer and former co-chair, sent a public message to Patel, the Home Secretary, calling on her and all Conservatives to “think about our role in feeding this culture in our country. If we ‘whistle’ & the ‘dog’ reacts, we can’t be shocked if it barks & bites,” Lady Warsi tweeted. “It’s time to stop the culture wars that are feeding division. Dog whistles win votes but destroy nations’. It comes to something when even a member of the Conservative Party feels the need to publicly criticise this evident racism.

https://bit.ly/2UTuSIw

Dominating the news this week, with all the anxiety it provokes, is the increasing division between those seemingly desperate for ‘Freedom Day’, regardless of the potential costs, and those urging caution because of the significant rise in Covid cases and hospitalisations. While it was always clear that vaccination couldn’t be a silver bullet, the government has treated it as such and continued with its schtick of ‘vaccination has broken the link between infection, hospitalisation and death’. Now the schtick has to change as this is manifestly not the case: those infected and hospitalised include the double jabbed and it seems every week there’s news of a new variant which has a high transmission rate and which is vaccine resistant.

The government’s determination to stick to Freedom Day on Monday 19 July come what may, is a display of hubris only modified by its having already to roll back on its ‘irreversible’ mantra. It’s an offloading of responsibility onto the people. Seeming to see no irony, former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, interviewed on Saturday’s Today Programme, predicted that we could see another lockdown by September and said ‘much depends’ on people’s behaviour over the next few weeks. This again reinforces the message that if people get ill (and there’s been effectively no recognition of disabling Long Covid, now affecting 1m in the UK according to May statistics) it’s their own fault and fails to even acknowledge that perhaps this is the wrong time to reopen everything at once. It seems somewhat of an ironic comment on all this that Health Secretary Sajid Javid has tested positive today. Who will now step up to the plate? Boris Johnson doesn’t seem to have much faith in the junior health ministers (no surprise there), but there’s always Matt Hancock. Not serious but it’s nevertheless interesting that this week London’s Evening Standard reported Hancock as talking to former colleagues to plan his comeback.

Freedom Day schtick also indicates poor recognition of what the clinically vulnerable have to face after Monday: whereas at least some felt safe to get out and about when restrictions and mask wearing were mandated, many now fear being confined to their homes because they can’t rely on the public’s sense of responsibility, wearing masks in confined spaces, for example. Earlier this week junior health minister Edward Argar told the media: ‘people will make their own judgements. I trust in the innate responsibility of the British people to exercise that responsibility in a cautious and sensible way’. This is so disingenuous because we see time and time again evidence of lack of judgement and ‘common sense’, not least in the Euro 2020 crowds last weekend.

Another faulty polarised argument has been ‘If not now, when?’ but a sensible solution would be to wait until many more are vaccinated (currently 52%), so it’s not either continue with restrictions or open up immediately. It’s been interesting to see this last week more and more organisations, especially Transport for London, mandating the continued wearing of face coverings, effectively resisting government policy, although in some cases it cannot be legally enforced. Meanwhile, more than 1200 scientists and medics have added their names to the letter to The Lancet which urged the Prime Minister to rethink his strategy. What’s even more galling is that health experts all over the world are condemning the government’s approach, experimenting with herd immunity, as it doesn’t only affect the UK but the entire world.

‘Professor Christina Pagel, the director of University College London’s clinical operational research unit, told the meeting: “Because of our position as a global travel hub, any variant that becomes dominant in the UK will likely spread to the rest of the globe. The UK policy doesn’t just affect us. It affects everybody and everybody has a stake in what we do.”The letter to The Lancet said: “We believe the government is embarking on a dangerous and unethical experiment, and we call on it to pause plans to abandon mitigations on July 19, 2021.”

How damning is this? The Prime Minister has brought the UK into global disrepute. ‘In New Zealand we have always looked to the UK for leadership when it comes to scientific expertise, which is why it’s so remarkable that it is not following even basic public health principles,” said Michael Baker, a professor of public health at the University of Otago and a member of the New Zealand ministry of health’s Covid-19 Technical Advisory Group’.

https://bit.ly/3eukmP0

Professor Pagel also deconstructed the Prime Minister’s two arguments for ending restrictions now, so it’s interesting that Chris Whitty has accepted them. The ‘rationale’ is based on over 90% of the most at-risk people being vaccinated and it being better to have mass infection during the summer than the winter, when the virus spreads more readily and the NHS is more burdened. While scientists have described a mass infection policy as ‘a dangerous experiment’, the NHS is already under severe strain at a time when it’s trying to deal with the massive backlog of delayed procedures and cancer treatments, etc. Pagel also cites the damage caused by Long Covid and effects on the clinically vulnerable, but another key issue undermining the PM’s stance is that new infections make mutations more likely.

 ‘Dr Susan Hopkins, the head of Public Health England, estimated three more doublings of cases before the peak, potentially meaning more than 200,000 cases a day in six weeks’ time. Even the health secretary, Sajid Javid, concedes there are likely to be more than 100,000 cases a day (implying around two more doublings), which would be higher than the highest recorded day in January. This could easily mean another 2 million people infected before cases return to the low levels we saw in early May’.

Professor Pagel makes the strong point that ‘infectious diseases are a matter of collective, rather than personal, responsibility’ and that as a society we could choose to sign up to keep certain measures in place including investing in better buildings ventilation, and to demand better than what appears to be the government throwing in the towel. ‘We could choose to suppress this virus over winter and protect our population and our NHS and so provide far more freedom to go about our daily lives. The current government position is that it’s not even going to try. This is not good enough and we have to demand better’. Newcastle Labour MP Chi Onwurah made some good points on BBC’s Any Questions, including the loudly applauded ‘You cannot outsource public health to the public, which is what he (Boris Johnson) is trying to do’. Just one indicator of the strain the NHS is under came with the news that one of the country’s largest hospitals, Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth, cancelled dozens of elective operations for two days, including liver transplants, because of the increase in Covid cases, and we can be sure it won’t be the only two days this happens.

https://bit.ly/3imMfty

Very timely is an article this week about misleading ‘hygiene theatre’, suggesting that excessive cleaning gives us, especially those with health anxiety and OCD, a false sense of security, that ‘something is being done’ to mitigate Covid risks. But such an approach leads to the important things not being done, such as ensuring effective ventilation, which cost more and take time to implement. The article cites a beauty business where the staff frantically clean after each appointment and customers say they feel really safe there, but…. ‘the one measure that would contribute most to the safety of the clients and workers in Claudia’s clinic isn’t being implemented: ventilation’.

‘What Claudia is performing on behalf of the customers who frequent her skincare clinic is “hygiene theatre”. The term was first coined by the Atlantic writer Derek Thompson in a July 2020 essay, in which he defined hygiene theatre as Covid safety protocols “that make us feel safer, but don’t actually do much to reduce risk, even as more dangerous activities are still allowed”. Hygiene theatre is plastic facial visors that do not protect wearers from breathing in infected air or contaminating the people around them. It is single-use cutlery and disposable menus in restaurants and shields between tables. It is staff fastidiously cleaning communal touchpoints in pubs while maskless groups chant football songs at full volume. It is hazmat suit-wearing officials fumigating entire streets with disinfectant. It is gyms that require people to wipe down every piece of equipment they touch, but do not make them wear masks. It is quarantining your post by the front door and wiping down your groceries with bleach. All well-intentioned, but mostly ineffectual, gestures that make us feel safe, but do not keep us safe from the threat posed by Covid-19’.

I suspect many would be shocked to read this article, learning that what they’ve been religiously doing for months on end is ‘mostly ineffectual’. It could also be that such hygiene enthusiasts have been judgemental towards the others less inclined to follow such procedures. Although the term was only coined in 2020, it has interesting origins, being based ‘on a concept originated by the security expert Bruce Schneier in his 2003 book, Beyond Fear. Schneier coined the term “security theatre” to describe the safety measures implemented at airports after the 9/11 terror attacks, such as banning nail scissors and cigarette lighters. In reality, these measureswere pointless: a complicated charade to reassure nervous passengers rather than anything grounded in reality. They also came at a huge cost to taxpayers – the US has spent more than $100bn on aviation security since 9/11’.

This is the most interesting article I’ve read about the pandemic in a while. It concludes that ‘Hygiene theatre can be actively dangerous because it prevents people from making informed choices about the levels of risk they’re willing to accept in their lives’. What makes it even more important now is the imminent ‘Freedom Day’, when people have to make their own judgements because the government has abdicated responsibility. Yet even Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty recently reiterated the importance of handwashing (the hands, face, space mantra looks a bit facile now) but not that of ventilation, now seen as one of the most important interventions in controlling the spread. If you read nothing else, read this!

https://bit.ly/3wMtrZR

What’s contributed markedly to the current febrile mood is concern about the NHS Covid app ‘pinging’ people left right and centre (some say unnecessarily), instructing them to self-isolate, which has forced some businesses and organisations to slow down or grind to a halt because of lack of staff. Allusions to a ‘pingdemic’ have been criticised for trivialising a serious situation, the pings being an indicator of potential new cases, yet businesses and some commentators are asking for the app to be adjusted to make it less ‘sensitive’. Although after 16 August double vaccinated people and those under 18 won’t have to self-isolate if a close contact tests positive, this leaves almost a month for this limbo to continue.

As we know, numerous people have been deleting or disabling the app in order to avoid pings, and those without smartphones or choosing not to download the app were never available for pinging in the first place. Jeremy Hunt came out with a good phrase during his Today Programme interview, suggesting that the app was ‘losing social consent’, prompting the tweet: ‘The app is ‘losing social consent’ – now that’s a phrase. Should have asked Jeremy Hunt when this government lost public ‘consent’.’

The other issue dominating the news and causing much anxiety is the government’s hokey cokey traffic light system for foreign travel, and how relaxing is it going to these countries when their status can change within hours? This week the Balearics were placed on the amber list and, virtually overnight, some political fudging has led to an amber plus category for France. Those returning will now have to quarantine, which will annoy a great many. If this was a clinically informed decision it wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s clear it’s a projection onto another country of the UK’s own dire situation. Sky News’s Sam Coates illustrates what happens when the consequences of a policy aren’t thought through: ‘By putting France on the all new Amber Plus/Magenta category, people will struggle to claim on their insurance. Sadly no ministers are available tonight to ask.’ It surely adds insult to injury to introduce such a policy with next to no warning, then remain unaccountable by making ministers unavailable to the media.

The groundswell of ridicule and opprobrium surrounding our Prime Minister was given a further boost this week with Boris Johnson’s allegedly groundbreaking speech about ‘levelling up’. It was felt by many to be incoherent and full of empty promises, but perhaps most striking was a new level of bombast, as if he’d finally lost the plot. ‘Boris Johnson’s flagship “levelling up” speech has been criticised by experts for containing scant new policy as concern grows among Conservative MPs that the guiding principle of his premiership risks becoming little more than a soundbite. Two years after first committing to levelling up, the prime minister travelled to Coventry to deliver a freewheeling speech heavy on rhetorical flourishes but light on detail, and urged local leaders to send in their own suggestions’. If this doesn’t sound like someone who’s given up, needing the public’s ideas as he’s got none of his own, I don’t know what does. A former Cabinet minister said: ‘He seems to be throwing the kitchen sink at it, which suggests there isn’t much of a coherent idea behind it’. Quite without irony, ‘Conservative MP Laura Farris told the BBC on Thursday that levelling up was an ambiguous phrase that “means whatever anyone wants it to mean”, prompting a wag to tweet: ‘Levelling up means whatever I want it to mean’ – Boris Johnson channels his inner Humpty Dumpty’. If nothing else does it, the nonsense constituting this speech, (‘strong leadership is the yeast that lifts the whole mattress of dough, the magic sauce, the ketchup of catch-up’ etc), might surely be what makes at least some followers, including the Red Wall MPs, start to question the mast they’ve pinned their colours to. ‘Strong leadership’ it isn’t.

https://bit.ly/3hNSw24

Alarmingly, this week the Health and Care bill, which would lead to NHS privatisation, passed its second reading in the Commons (356 for, 218 against), a Labour amendment being defeated. Problematic measures the amendment cited included the ability of private healthcare companies to sit on boards where NHS spending was decided, allowing more opportunities for outsourcing of contracts without scrutiny and allowing an approach whereby cuts to and closures of services are incentivised. Labour said that the bill ‘does not ensure that the NHS is a fully publicly funded, accountable and publicly delivered service providing free high quality care for everyone who needs it’. So what happens next? A useful WordPress blog by Calderdale and Kirklees 999 Call for the NHS states: ‘Following discussions in the usual channels, the Public Bill Committee is expected to begin its consideration of the Bill in September. Four sittings are expected for oral evidence in the week of 6 September, followed by 20 sittings for line by line consideration, concluding on Tuesday 2 November’.

Much has been written over the last 16 months about work attire and the alleged slide of sartorial standards. The Week summarises an article by Ben Wright in the Daily Telegraph, saying how ‘the suit and tie are fast becoming endangered species in the corporate world’. ‘Numerous zoom calls’ had thrown up only a handful of men (and what about women’s outfits?) thus attired and I’m surprised it was as many as that. Many workers from home have said how they might wear a smart shirt on the upper half, while their lower half remains encased in pyjama bottoms but now, it seems, the upper half has descended (!) to ‘polo shirts and even t-shirts’. While this will spell freedom for some, Wright cautions that it may be a short-sighted view. Staying with the suit and tie saves endless decisions about what to wear, he reckons, and eliminates the competitive system in companies which claim to have no dress code but which actually do: ‘chinos, button-down shirts and armless fleeces’.

An important point he makes, though, is that formal dress at work helps maintain ‘the necessary boundary between being on and off duty…if you’re always working from home you never get to leave the office..and if you’re always casual you never get to fully relax. The best thing about a suit may be that you can take it off’. Interesting, especially when, outside the corporate world, there are those will never have worn a suit to work and whose work attire morphs from casual to scruffy. It’s not uncommon to witness men who’ve been told they must wear a jacket and tie at dinner (in a smart hotel, for example) vote with their feet, perhaps unwittingly, in that they are indeed wearing a jacket and tie, but such ancient and moth-eaten examples that they negate the original instruction. A good example of obeying the letter of the law but not its spirit, perhaps.

Finally, I’ve been enjoying catching up with the 6 part series of BBC4 documentaries on Ernest Hemingway, described as ‘the most influential US writer of the 20th century’. I’m not proud to admit that I’ve never read him, partly because my English degree was English and European literature, the other option being English and American. Yes, I could have done since then but somehow that hasn’t happened: there’s just so much to read and American literature has never appealed that much. One critic described the series as ‘extraordinarily moreish’, but the film makers were rather felt to skate over the author’s ‘rabid violence, racism, disgusting treatment of women…. misogyny and homophobia’. He sounds to have been rather unstable and prone to depression, but it was hardly surprising to discover why: in the first episode we learn that his mother endlessly made her children feel how much she’d sacrificed for them, how child rearing was like a bank, into which the mother first deposited and into which later (a letter from mother to son quoted this) children were expected to ‘make deposits’. The letter told Hemingway he was overdrawn, but not only that: she regularly dressed him in female clothing alongside his sister, as ‘twins’. Such a subversion of a child’s latent sexuality is a sure-fire way to induce psychological disturbance. I’m now keen to see the rest of these documentaries and read some of this author’s work. Many Hemingway aficionados out there??

Sunday 11 July

Ever since the government reiterated its intention to end lockdown restrictions on July 19th, there’s been an avalanche of doubt, anxiety, criticism and incredulity expressed by scientists, medics and the public, given the rapid rise of Covid cases, including the virulent new Lambda variant. Epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding tweeted: ‘Watching—new Lambda Variant now found in 30 countries…The Lambda originated from Peru, with the highest mortality rate in the world.” Some scientists are worried Lambda may be “more infectious than Delta variant’.

It’s concerning for our mental wellbeing not only that the government seems to be pursuing more explicitly a herd immunity strategy but also that this is polarising society. While many, according to polls, will continue distancing and wearing their masks in indoor spaces, and it’s being mandated in some areas of public transport, there are also many rejoicing in the ‘freedoms’. (YouGov polling indicated 71% want mask use to continue to be mandatory on public transport, 21% don’t. 66% want them in shops, 27% don’t). One sceptic tweeted: ‘Yes, 1m Covid 19 cases are projected by Independent Sage in the next 3 weeks alone… The Johnson regime is doing nothing to prevent this’. Another said: ‘Absolutely extraordinary that Sajid Javid has used today’s Mail on Sunday to declare the ‘health benefits’ of allowing Covid to run entirely unchecked through the UK population – without once mentioning Long Covid. This is experimental, reckless and wrong’. The point about Long Covid is well made as it’s still receiving insufficient attention for its disabling effects in many cases.

After the Downing Street briefing several viewers tweeted about the responsibility issue: ‘What is this sudden outbreak of ludicrous ideological zealousness about making our own choices on COVID risk? These are collective risks which need planning and agreement. They cannot be addressed purely through individual choice. This is crazy!’

Alastair Campbell was somewhat less restrained, using the hashtag ‘sadopopulism’: ‘That was a masterclass in mixed messaging …. It will kill people but as Johnson thinks he has got away with more than an eighth of a million dead through his previous mistakes, he thinks he can get away with this too’.

The 19th July decision (though not 100% certain yet) has thrown into sharp focus the divide between those operating according to collective values, their behaviours determined by the common good, and those pursuing individual goals and desires. However we view it, it does seem an abdication of government responsibility: of course self-responsibility is important and there’s not enough of this, but in this context it’s an overarching and evidence-based government strategy we need. Some commentators see this as the start of another ‘culture war’, not unlike that between Remainers and Leavers. The government’s decision has been condemned by the World Health Organisation as ‘moral emptiness and epidemiological stupidity’. Care Minister Helen Whately, not for the first time, gave a car crash interview during Monday’s Radio 4 Today programme, delivering a series of vacuous responses, not answering the question as to whether or not she’d continue to wear a mask and coming out with such gems as ‘I don’t think all cultures are the same’.

While Tory backbenchers shouted ‘Hallelujah’ on hearing the news, the backlash against prime ministerial idiocy, including allowing theatres and nightclubs to operate at full capacity, has been loud and clear, scientists predicting new cases rising to 50,000 a day. Clinicians joined forces to write to the Lancet about their concerns, and Jude Diggins, an interim director at the Royal College of Nursing, said: ‘This disease does not disappear on 19 July. No available vaccine is 100% effective … Public mask-wearing is straightforward and well-established – government will regret the day it sent the wrong signal for political expediency’. But already there are signs of government reservations: ‘ministers will hold on to powers to ‘reimpose economic and social restrictions at a local, regional or national level’ if needed to suppress a dangerous new variant, according to a Whitehall document published on Monday’.

https://bit.ly/3idFlH5

Less than a week after his announcement, it seems even our Prime Minister is grasping the need, so he has a ‘get out clause’, to tone down the triumphal rhetoric, although he needed help to do even this. ‘The Prime Minister still believes it is “now or never”, with a later reopening potentially posing even higher risks as cases could peak as children return to school and winter looms. Two Whitehall sources told the Guardian that ministers had been spooked by internal polling. One said the data showed just 10% of the public support the policy of scrapping all restrictions at once, while another said substantially more people believed the government was moving too quickly than at the last reopening step on 17 May. These accounts were denied by No 10’. Despite Boris Johnson warning people not to be ‘demob happy’, not walking that talk himself, of course, adherence to restrictions has been leaking away for months in some quarters.

https://bit.ly/36y0gig

At least one commentator focuses on the government’s obvious fatigue with Covid and its pushing of responsibility onto us, but this avoidance and cowardice is not what we elect governments for. ‘Boris Johnson ends Covid as a ‘me problem’ and makes it a ‘you problem’ gives it to us straight. ‘The prime minister’s overriding imperative – you could tell by the very many times he said it – is to “move from universal government diktat to relying on people’s personal responsibility”. He’s basically had enough of making all the decisions, and wants someone else to have a go. Absent an obvious single candidate, he’s throwing it on to all of us’.

https://bit.ly/3k25I5b

Meanwhile, a frontline respiratory consultant voiced the views of many colleagues: ‘NHS staff  have a sense of dread about what’s around the corner. While we understand things need to open up some time, the timing feels like utter madness while we are so close to successfully vaccinating the population, and with a more contagious variant circulating’. Again, the government is taking their efforts for granted, failing to recognise the need for a decent pay deal and the level of exhaustion still being felt following the first and second Covid waves. There’s also insufficient recognition of the burdens of the long waiting list, significant rise in Long Covid cases and reduced capacity due to distancing regulations. Let’s hope Sajid Javid doesn’t do as his predecessor often did, just blithely throwing out his ‘I know they can do it’ mantra.

https://bit.ly/3ht2jL0

It seems the government is finally realising what scientists have always known, that vaccination was never going to be a silver bullet, despite the soundbite that vaccination is a ‘wall of defence’, ‘breaking the link between infection, hospitalisation and death’. This piece illustrates via infographic how no one measure is 100% effective and how a number of measures are needed to work together.  ‘Australian virologist Ian Mackay, the first to use the Swiss cheese model in relation to the pandemic, says, in reality, the cheese’s holes will constantly open, shut and shift location depending on our behaviour…. It is only by using a number of slices – or measures – that we create the best chance of protecting ourselves and our friends and family’. The simplicity of this infographic’s messaging doesn’t disguise the complexity of the topic, though, something the government has proved itself manifestly unable to manage.

https://bbc.in/3hwGHxh

Not unrelated to this desire for simplicity is the government’s pursuit of a cynical narrative, analysed by Rafael Behr in a piece headed ‘Boris Johnson cries ‘freedom’ to fill a void where his leadership should be’. On the Freedom Day ‘pantomime’: ‘They mean freedom from the face mask, asserting their own right to no longer care about Covid infections, while making it sound like freedom from the disease itself. This is the same reflex that wanted to celebrate Brexit with an “independence day” on the grounds that EU membership equated to colonisation by a foreign power. It is the familiar revving of ideological engines, racing through the rhetorical gears from metaphor to hyperbole to paranoid delusion and fantasies of joining the resistance in people whose only political struggle has been for selection to a safe Tory seat’.

He suggests that ‘the language of political emancipation’ has been misapplied to a situation which should be seen rationally ‘in terms of clinical outcome’. Behr deconstructs the series of vacuous soundbites we’ve grown familiar with, eg ‘building back better’ and ‘levelling up’, revealing them as emperors wearing no clothes. Unfortunately, though, many are still taken in by them, including sections of the media. ‘That effect should not be overstated. Johnson is still a unique performer: part raconteur, part escapologist, talking his way out of troubles that would sink other leaders. But a consequence of that shtick is the growing gap between heroic language and grubby practice. It is the duality inherent in any failing ideological project that must keep cranking the rhetoric of abstract ideals higher to cover the stoop to ever shabbier methods. The support it generates is widely spread, but maybe also shallow; a popular consumer choice, lacking the connective tissue of shared and consistent beliefs’.

https://bit.ly/3k33P8b

While some commentators fear the mask wearing issue becoming a culture war, others opine that this needn’t be the case if mask wearing is seen as a form of etiquette. This brings us back to the individual versus collective again. I suspect it’s not commonly realised how many thousands will feel more restricted following 19 July because for various reasons they’ve had to shield due to compromised immune systems. Up till now, for some time they could have felt able to get out and about, if social distancing and mask wearing were in evidence, but not if these measures suddenly collapse on 19 July. Adding to these numbers those yet unvaccinated or double vaccinated, it suggests a large number of people who would be left vulnerable.

‘Reportedly, the Department of Health will be issuing new guidance for the immunosuppressed and clinically very vulnerable. But while support for shielders is needed, confining them to quarters indefinitely is hardly a liberation. Nor is there much choice for exhausted NHS staff who face a soaring workload again, or for patients whose operations are being cancelled because hospitals are treating growing numbers of Covid patients or staff are having to self-isolate. If anything, the authors of the Lancet letter are too generous in describing this as “a dangerous and unethical experiment”: that terminology suggests a degree of scientific rigour and concern. Instead, this is a political wager, in which large parts of the population are not players but gambling chips’.

Radio 4’s Any Answers yesterday was interesting on this conundrum, the presenter getting those with opposing views to speak to each other. It was noticeable that the vulnerable callers sounded calm yet concerned, but those clamouring for restrictions to end annoyed and impatient, suggesting the others would just have to ‘stay indoors’.

Green MP Caroline Lucas tweeted during the Andrew Marr programme: ‘Minister says Government taking a “cautious” approach – but making bonfire of all restrictions is the opposite of caution. People are “expected” to wear masks in public places – but why should others be put at risk by some who don’t meet “expectations”? Utterly incoherent’.

Meanwhile, it’s very interesting, if worrying, that while one government adviser, Christopher Fraser, is trying to insist that use of the ‘NHS’ app is at ‘an all time high’, there’s clear evidence that it’s not, that the app’s inappropriate level of sensitivity is causing people to be unnecessarily ‘pinged’ and that numerous people are deleting the app or switching off notifications. We hear that the politicians are partly doing this because they don’t want to risk being ‘pinged’ just before they go on holiday, some even citing the possibility of their marriages being put at risk if they don’t delete or ignore the app. There must be data available on the usage of this app but it’s not being made public – no surprise there.

It was also alarming to hear (and the media obsession with holidays must take some responsibility here) that NHS staff  in some areas have been pressurised and abused by those trying to get their second jabs before the scheduled time so they can go on holiday. ‘One vaccination lead in the south-east of England said: “We’ve had a number of violent and aggressive incidents at sites, and even had to call the police, with people demanding their vaccine earlier than eight weeks. These incidents involved verbal abuse and aggressive and threatening behaviour. We have had to bring in security for our walk-in and ‘grab-a-jab’ sessions. GP leaders fear that such unsavoury behaviour, especially by younger adults, could intensify following the government’s decision on Thursday to allow double-jabbed Britons to return from amber-list countries this summer without having to quarantine’. It does seem desperately unfair that beleaguered NHS staff  have to put up with this kind of thing and as vaccination experts have said, there needs to be much clearer Government messaging about why bringing the second dose forward is not recommended.

https://bit.ly/2UzEAjg

But enough of all this….. across the country and possibly across the whole of Europe, anticipation is building ahead of the Euro 2020 final tonight between England and Italy. It’s still hard to believe England has got this far but very gratifying to see that at least this country can be good at something. Commentators have pointed out the maturity and thoughtful management exhibited by England manager Gareth Southgate, a sharp contrast to the way government is conducting itself. As someone not keen on organised sport and who had never watched football on tv, I surprised myself by watching England vs Ukraine and will watch tonight as well. I was struck by the clever footwork and tactics, particularly of some players like Sterling, but also taken aback by how rough the game was. I didn’t think players were meant to trip each other up and be quite as physical, having attributed that technique more to rugby than football. Needless to say, I’ve been corrected in this misunderstanding by local Arsenal supporters! But now a belated start has been made, who knows…. I might be progressing to trying to understand the offside rule and propping up bar of a local hostelry, pontificating about transfer fees and the deficits of coaches and managers.  

Let’s hope there’s no booing of Italy’s national anthem. What is more sickening, though, is the way Boris Johnson and his government have tried to associate themselves with England’s success, implying that this performance is somehow linked with ‘Brexit dividend’ or an example of ‘global Britain’ manifesting itself. Journalist Andrew Rawnsley suggested that the PM’s desperation to ‘steal himself a slice of their glory’ fails because ‘embracing this diverse and harmonious squad authentically is impossible for the party he’s created’. Marina Hyde wrote a funny piece, lampooning the PM’s appearance at Wembley in a football shirt clearly put on over his shirt and tie, in which he looked only too like a parody of himself. ‘Did you see the prime minister in the fancy seats at Wembley on Wednesday? He seemed to have come dressed as a particularly brutal Matt Lucas impersonation of himself….It’s quite something to think that the government went into the first lockdown last year attempting to score cheap points on footballers’ pay. They are now exiting all restrictions desperately trying to piggyback on what footballers have brought to the country, despite Johnson having managed England’s pandemic like Steve McClaren’.

The PM’s bullish and risible tweets about the England team predictably attracted plenty of derision: ‘Shut up, you tiresome fraud’, said one tweet. Another spoofed his claim to be au fait with sport: ‘I’ve loved rugby ever since I saw Gary Lineker score a century at Wimbledon’. It will be interesting to see what he wears tonight, since he won’t have been wearing his suit today.

https://bit.ly/3ep8Rsj

Following on from the recent news about George Osborne being made chairman of the British Museum (and his likely role in ‘persuading’ this cultural institution to follow the government line on portrayal of British history), journalist Sam Leith expresses exasperation at the increasing tendency for a certain ‘well connected’ individuals to land jobs they have zero experience for. ‘Good grief’, he said on UnHerd, ‘is there anything George Osborne can’t do?’ Leith points out the two different ‘routes’ taken to career advancement: one ‘where you progress by gaining skills and experience in a specific field’, and the other, where seniority and connections enable a select group of individuals to be appointed to key posts for which they have no experience or expertise. ‘Take Dido Harding, another inhabitant of this world..’, in which the occupants ‘make the right friends at university’, then going on to top jobs, peerages and the like. Alluding to Harding’s hat being thrown into the NHS Chief Executive ring, he said: ‘She’ll probably get that, too. If not, perhaps George Osborne will see her right with senior role at the British Museum’.

After some days of lying low following his dramatic resignation, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock has apparently been seen in public for the first time, having his second vaccination. A bystander described a serious-looking Hancock staring at his mobile phone. Following on from journalist (and wife of Michael Gove) Sarah Vine’s recent piece about political marriages coming under strain and the ‘need’ for a partner who boosts the politician’s ego rather than constantly seeing through their facade, Hadley Freeman has likened Hancock’s affair to a 1980s film, along the theme of ‘dweeb and hot girl’. Apparently Gina Coladangelo was regarded as way out of his league during their university years but in recent times, Freeman suggests, he went out of his way to draw her into his orbit, including her recently vacated NHS non-exec directorship.

‘Boy, did Hancock play the long game here! Lord knows I’ve done some crazy things to try to get a crush to notice me – thrown parties, bought expensive clothes, pretended I could cook – but at least I never gave any of them slightly dodgy jobs and a salary, forcing them to hang out with me. Who knows, perhaps Hancock’s entire career was just a ploy to attract the attention of his university crush. If so, (a) that explains a lot; and (b) while I cannot condone Hancock’s deception of his wife, I do salute his tenacity’. Given their intention to move in together, it seems that hasn’t yet taken place, and we can wonder whether this affair will stand the test of scrutiny. ‘As I write this, “friends of Hancock” are insisting he and Coladangelo are “a love match”. But if Hancock had watched more 80s movies, he would know that getting together with your longstanding crush doesn’t always lead to the expected happily ever after’.

https://bit.ly/3r0LwlH

Finally, you might be interested to listen to this episode in the Profile series, featuring England player Raheem Sterling and his rise from ‘troubled youth’ to being one of the highest paid footballers, at only 26. ‘I was probably a naughty kid at school- I didn’t really like to listen to anyone except my mum’, Sterling says, yet a few years later a teacher described him mostly as ‘smile and dreadlocks’. It also seems symbolic that from his home in North London he could see the new Wembley Stadium being built. Many will be looking forward to seeing what he pulls off tonight.

https://bbc.in/3wvUUP9

Saturday 3 July

As the shock waves of the Matt Hancock revelations and resignation continue to be felt across the political spectrum, there was derision at Boris Johnson’s later attempt to rewrite history by implying he had actually sacked Hancock, contrary to all evidence. In a car crash Today (Radio 4) interview with Justice Minister Robert Buckland on Monday, Buckland complained about being asked about the Hancock affair when he’d been invited on to talk about youth offending. For once we were treated to a tour de force by presenter Nick Robinson, who gave the minister a deservedly tough ride when so often Labour politicians are grilled and ministers get an easy time.

Questions keep coming about the details of this debacle, the most recent ones focusing on the role and recruitment of non-executive directors. One minister interviewed last week tried to offer reassurance that all appointments were overseen by the Cabinet Office but, as we’ve seen, this ‘oversight’ is lacking and needs rethinking. Peter Riddell, the Commissioner for Public Appointments, said recently that such roles were ‘not regulated at all’ and take place more and more ‘without competition and without any form of regulatory oversight’.

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Could it be, though, that rather than ‘hopeless Hancock’ being patronised and lined up as fall guy by Boris Johnson, he’s actually stolen a march on his boss by depriving him of a scapegoat and using questionable contracts/relationships and personal email to protect himself from scrutiny? A related news item this week is that of the Goves divorcing but their statement stresses that ‘no one else is involved’, apparently soon to be contradicted by the Sunday papers, and that they will ‘remain close friends’. What was interesting, though not surprising, about Sarah Vine’s recent article analysing the Hancock affair (and now we know she was speaking partly for herself) was the egoistic pull of Westminster life, the thirst for power needing others to feed it, a process which often would not be performed by a spouse who knew their wiles and defences. ‘…. long-time partners know all your history and insecurities and that they know deep down inside, you are not the Master of the Universe you purport to be.’

‘The problem with the wife who has known you since way before you were king of the world is that she sees through your facade….  there were some politicians who could walk away from power and others who will compromise everything for the sake of it….Westminster changes people… wives of senior politicians are still more or less the same person they were when they got married but their husbands sometimes are not…. And when someone changes, they require something new from a partner. Namely, someone who is as much a courtesan as a companion, one who understands their brilliance and, crucially, is personally invested in it’.

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Returning to Hancock, there has also been unease in some quarters at his replacement, Sajid Javid, who raised eyebrows with one of his initial tweets in this role, saying his priority was to reopen the economy. We also understand that he is still continuing to work for the bank J P Morgan. It was as if he was still thinking like the Chancellor he once was, rather than a Health Secretary who should be prioritising public health. Liberal Democrats leader Ed Davey challenged Javid to ‘abolish Conservative cronyism’ at the Department of Health and Social Care, starting by ruling that Tory peer Dido Harding will not be made the next chief executive of NHS England. ‘The public expects so much better from the government during a pandemic’.

The government is between a rock and a hard place, as the alarming rise in Covid cases, the rapid spread of the Delta variant (60% more transmissible than Alpha) and increase in hospitalisations (including the double vaccinated) point to rethinking the 19th July date, but Tory lockdown sceptics, the travel and entertainment industries and others would be up in arms if it was delayed. Public Health England figures show a total of 161,981 confirmed and probable cases of Delta variant have now been identified in the UK – up by 50,824, or 46%, on the previous week. Senior medics are now asking the government to consider retaining some restrictions to help curb the spread of the virus.

‘The British Medical Association (BMA) said that keeping some protective measures in place was ‘crucial’ to stop spiralling cases numbers having a ‘devastating impact’ on people’s health, the NHS, the economy and education. Dr Chaand Nagpaul, BMA Council Chair, said easing restrictions was not an ‘all or nothing’ decision, and that ‘sensible, cautious’ measures would be vital to minimising the impact of further waves, new variants and lockdowns’. Will the BMA’s views cut any ice with the government? We will see. It will not be good for the nation’s mental health to know that such professional opinions have been expressed and ignored, especially if such a strategy results in yet another lockdown. Whatever the decisions are, we can expect some non-compliance to result from the ‘Hancock effect’, just as we had to from the ‘Barnard Castle effect’.

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As ever, the government continues to oversell and over-rely on the vaccine, when important measures like Trace and Trace are seriously underperforming. Many are now complaining about what they see as its faulty strategy, pinging via the app anyone who’s been within any distance of someone testing positive, resulting in an increasing number of people deleting the app or switching off notifications. A Radio 4 listener tweeted: ‘I suspect Boris Johnson unlocking promise on 19th has become a hostage to fortune. He’ll unlock & hope that the NHS can muddle through & accuse anyone being critical of being a doom-monger’.

Another blow to Conservatives came in the form of the Batley and Spen byelection on Thursday, the Labour candidate, Kim Leadbetter, winning by a 323 votes. This number would probably have been much higher without the vote being thoughtlessly split by George Galloway and others. The aftermath has seen much speculation about Keir Starmer’s future as Labour leader, but it doesn’t help that the Labour Party’s far left has been so determined to undermine him. The Conservative Party chair, Amanda Milling, rather ungraciously commented that it was ‘a Labour hold, rather than a Labour win’, but the Party must nevertheless be reflecting on their recent byelection losses and what they mean for the Party’s strategy.

While the extent of the Prime Minister’s less than honest statements is becoming better known, it’s hard to conjure with similar statements emerging from the official No 10 spokesman. One of these was the assertion that no personal email had been used in government business, but in the wake of the Hancock debacle, the Good Law Project issued a press release and tweeted that leaks confirmed use of personal email by Health Minister Lord Bethell (who had also sponsored the official pass of Ms Coladangelo). ‘It’s shocking that the Prime Minister, via his spokesperson, is misleading the public…… On 19 April 2020 Lord Feldman (who you’ll recall lobbied to win PPE contracts for at least one of his clients while working at DHSC) emailed Lord Bethell on his private @jbethell.com address about Covid-19 test kits. Plainly this is government business. And plainly Lord Feldman, once co-Chair of the Conservative Party, was writing to James Bethell at his private email address on that government business. This is far from the only email we hold involving Lord Bethell’s private email address’. The press release also mentioned leaked minutes which confirmed Hancock’s own use of personal email. It’s not yet clear how these issues are being investigated – Commons Select Committees can give those appearing before them a rough ride but what outcomes ensue?

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Linked to this is evidence, again via the efforts of the Good Law Project, of the existence of a ‘VIP lane’ early in the pandemic not only for PPE supply but also for Covid testing. ‘Bids from politically connected firms to provide Covid-19 tests in Britain were designated as “fast track” according to an email that suggests a VIP priority lane may have operated for tests as well as for personal protective equipment in the early stages of the pandemic….. The same email, sent last April by Max Cairnduff, a Cabinet Office procurement director, also referred to Covid testing, saying there was a separate dedicated email where offers would be “triaged”. It said ‘If they come from a minister/private office then please put FASTTRACK at the beginning of the subject line’. It was later publicly confirmed that a ‘VIP lane’ or ‘high-priority route’ existed for PPE offers’ but it appears this is the first time such a route was found to exist for testing. ‘Jolyon Maugham, director of the Good Law Project, said there was clear evidence of a VIP route for companies supplying testing kits’ but government spokesmen have strongly denied this. Since they had to publicly admit the existence of the PPE one, how long before they admit the evidence of the testing one? An equally important question, though, is why is it left to organisations like the Good Law Project, to hold the government to account?

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Still on accountability and its avoidance, it was reported this week that the widow of Jeremy Heywood, formerly head of the Civil Service, has expressed concern at the way the Greensill inquiry is being conducted. Suzanne Heywood is worried about the neutrality of the inquiry Chair, Nigel Boardman, and she fears her husband could be scapegoated to protect the government. Dominic Cummings said the inquiry would be a ‘stitch up’ and, more worryingly, Conservative-connected Boardman is said to have refused to accept a submission from Lady Heywood or anyone else representing her husband, who died in 2018. Besides the probity issues here, we have to wonder about the cost of such inquiries and lack of public confidence in them because of such weaknesses and biases. Wouldn’t you just know that, when asked for a response, a Cabinet Office spokesman supplied the following reassuring statement: ‘The Boardman review is ongoing, and as we have set out we will publish and present his findings to parliament and the government’s response, in due course’.

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How often do we hear that government sound bite ‘levelling up’? This week further news emerged of what this really means: ‘declining life expectancy and deteriorating social conditions in England’s poorest areas’. Health inequalities expert Sir Michael Marmot, who produced two groundbreaking reviews on health equity in this country, has now produced Build Back Fairer in Greater Manchester: Health Equality and Dignified Lives, which reveals ‘jaw-dropping falls in life expectancy and widening social and health inequalities across the region over the past year’. One example is that the Covid 19 death rate was 25% higher in this region than the rest of England, made worse by lockdowns and spending cuts. Whereas the government’s idea of ‘levelling up’ (insofar as there is a genuine one) has attracted criticism for focusing on large infrastructure projects, but it seems the Marmot approach is much more granular, focusing on improving the lives of individuals and, crucially but more complex than large projects, getting to the roots of inequality by addressing the underlying social conditions.

‘Marmot called for a doubling of healthcare spending in the region over the next five years, as well as a refunding of local government, to tackle and prevent these inequalities and growing problems such as homelessness, low educational attainment, unemployment and poverty. Future spending should prioritise children and young people, who had been disproportionately harmed by the impacts of Covid restrictions and lockdowns, and had experienced the most rapid increases in unemployment and deteriorating levels of mental health’. The region’s mayor, Andy Burnham, would have had a hand in commissioning this report and sounds very firmly behind the findings and recommendations.

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During the last few years much more attention has been paid to the fundraising choices made by cultural institutions and the decision by some to decline donations from companies associated with questionable or downright unsavoury activities. BP has been in the frame and notably American opioid purveyor Sackler. Culture Unstained is a research and campaigning organisation ‘which aims to end fossil fuel sponsorship of culture’ but I think their concerns extend beyond fossil fuel sponsorship. This is such an important issue for cultural organisations because, if they receive government funding in the first place, it will be limited by smaller amounts being made available, leaving them to seek it elsewhere. But there’s often an ethical cost to doing so.

We now hear that the billionaire founder of online gambling company Bet365, Denise Coates, is supporting a major Van Gogh exhibition at the Courtauld in London next year, described as ‘once-in-a-generation’, partly because it will include a previously unseen showing of Van Gogh self-portraits. But it’s not just this exhibition – Coates has funded an entire new exhibition space: the Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries. The Courtauld’s press release quoted her as saying: ‘I feel sure that the newly renovated Courtauld galleries will give all visitors, both in person and online, a world-class opportunity to experience their own connections to visual art. I have found great fulfilment from my own exposure to the visual arts and I am pleased to be able to support that journey for others with The Courtauld’.

Those familiar with the expression ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ will be interested to learn of research at Cambridge University, reported in The Week, regarding problems which occupy the attention of podiatrists. There have long been concerns about high heels damaging feet, but the 1950s and 1960s fashion for ‘winklepicker’ shoes must have caused similar concern. Now a team of researchers has found that bunions are not a modern phenomenon but one which was common in the 14th and 15th centuries. Based on findings from an excavation of ancient skeletons, it was found that 27% of the population suffered from the ‘bony lumps’ (bunions), attributed to elongated shoes with pointed toes, called poulaines or crakows. These were apparently even worn by priests, despite being forbidden by the Pope. But the shoes didn’t only cause bunions – they also resulted in frequent fractures because of people wearing them falling forward. The mystery surely is how these pointy shoes were ever considered attractive, whether in the 15th century or the 20th.

Finally, something that might make you laugh. I was in Lush this week buying my regular body spray, and as he fetched it for me and chatted about this product, the young server said ‘You can also spray it on your butt cheeks’. Taken aback by this risqué comment to a customer, I realised, as he chatted on, that he’d actually said ‘You can also spray it on your bed sheets’. I wonder how many misunderstandings have occurred this last year as a result of mishearing what someone may have muttered or mumbled behind their mask!

Sunday 27th June

Yet again, what a week it’s been, many items temporarily pushed off the news agenda by the emergence of Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s affair during the pandemic (and ongoing) with ‘a friend’ who he subsequently made a non-executive Director of the NHS. Many were up in arms about Hancock having been instrumental in making the social distancing rules, giving former government adviser Professor Neil Ferguson no choice about resigning when he breached those rules back in 2020, yet having had no qualms about breaching them himself. The epitome of hypocrisy, though the case has raised many questions including the state of security arrangements which allowed the theft of the incriminating CCTV footage. The most galling thing for many, especially those who suffered bereavements during the pandemic, was the Prime Minister’s easy acceptance of Hancock’s apology, saying it was a personal matter and that he now considered the matter ‘closed’. Not so fast: the public’s reaction has been one of almost unequivocally condemning Hancock’s lack of principle when they were having to distance themselves from loved ones and accept not being able to visit care home residents.  

Housing Minister Robert Jenrick must have spent all Friday afternoon rehearsing responses for the inevitable question on Radio 4’s Any Questions and his attempted defence of Hancock (using the unfortunate construction of ‘Matt being on the job’) resulted at times in uproar from the audience. It’s not only shaming that Boris Johnson was prepared to let Hancock continue, but his own position was weakened by the subsequent resignation, partly as it leaves him without a scapegoat. As we’ve seen, Boris Johnson’s stock response regarding proven wrongdoers (eg Cummings, Patel, Williamson and Jenrick) has been to allow them to continue, declaring the matter ‘closed’, but this is now open to question. We can wonder what further scandals are waiting in the wings to be instantly branded as ‘closed’, this verdict then being overturned via pressure from Tory MPs, the public and the media.

It’s not surprising to hear the theory that Dominic Cummings is behind this. Now Hancock has fallen on his sword Cummings has his first scalp. How many more? It’s most interesting, though, that this government, having demonstrated immunity from any sense of shame in public life, now finally has this resignation. Perhaps Hancock has started something here. Within 24 hours we learn that Gina Coladangelo has left her position on the Board of the Department of Health, Hancock ended his marriage, the couple are moving in together and former Chancellor Sajid Javid has stepped up to the health portfolio. This is an interesting choice as it’s not only a comment on junior health ministers, most of whom are most unsuitable for any office, but it could be seen as a silo in the war against Cummings, who had dismissed Javid’s adviser, prompting his resignation from the Chancellor role.

A medic tweeted: ‘A note on Matt Hancock: for Boris Johnson to back Hancock, announcing that he “considered the matter closed” a day before the pressure caused Hancock to resign… …shows the PM to be weak, of poor judgement & out-of-touch. Like with lockdowns, he cannot make timely decisions’. Another opined: ‘The point is that it shouldn’t have come down to Matt Hancock doing the so called “honourable thing”. He should’ve been sacked rather than allowed to resign and Boris Johnson’s refusal to deal with this shows a serious failure leadership’. Boris’s Johnson’s response to Hancock’s resignation letter made an extraordinary claim: ‘…you should be proud of what you’ve achieved’….. As at least one tweeter observed: ‘Very proud  of 150,000 people dead, the carnage in care homes, PPE fiasco, contracts given to mates via his personal email, selling off the NHS, 1% pay rises to staff. Is this what UK pride looks like now?’ Perhaps the most worrying aspect is the hint of a possibility that Hancock could be rehabilitated at some point, another Johnson tactic. ‘I am grateful for your support and believe that your contribution to public service is far from over’.

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Whether or not Hancock’s ‘contribution’ is over, the problems definitely aren’t, as health commentator Roy Lilley says: ‘The NHS will have a new Secretary of State and a new chief executive at a critical time; a new Covid wave likely in the autumn, a workforce crisis, busted budgets and waiting lists around the block, social care in ruins and no IT strategy. Apart from that it’s easy!!’

And the questions keep coming: it’s not only the breaching of social distancing guidelines at issue but also evidence of ‘chumocracy’, for example Hancock giving Coladangelo a paid role after the initial unpaid one, sponsoring her for a Westminster pass, enabling the use public money for her to accompany him to a meeting of G7 health ministers, and easing the path for the company owned by her brother (Roberto Coladangelo) to receive a £28million contract last year to carry out work for the South Central Ambulance Service NHS Trust.

As if this wasn’t enough, Hancock is also in deep water for having consistently used a private email address for government business, meaning, amongst other things, that his conduct can’t be subjected to the same level of scrutiny.

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If it wasn’t so serious, it would be almost amusing witnessing senior Conservatives publicly struggle with their massive disappointment in Hancock and their leader at the same time as trying to maintain that they’re doing a great job. Could it be that these Tories, who entered politics in the Major and May eras, are finally seeing the light about the populist and unprincipled ethos of today’s party?

With the headline ‘Matt finished: front pages deliver final humiliation to departing Matt Hancock’, the Guardian describes how the Sunday press has weighed in heavily (‘a bonanza’) to condemn Hancock, the broadsheets only expressing more moderately what the Mail and Express screeched: ‘Matt finished’ (The Sun); ‘Hancock forced to quit (The Express) etc.

Although Hancock’s conduct has been reprehensible, the anger expressed by politicians, the public, NHS staff and groups like the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK seems beyond what this would merit. It’s likely that it represents the coming to a head of resentment and anger which have gathered a head of steam over the last 15 months, when we have been deprived of so much and there has been next to no democratic outlet for our frustrations with government corruption, cronyism and mismanagement.

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Also making headlines today is news, highly embarrassing for the government, that on Tuesday confidential and sensitive Ministry of Defence documents had been found at a bus stop in Kent, featuring the destroyer HMS Defender, which we heard a lot about last week. ‘Following the controversy generated by HMS Defender’s mission, the documents discovered in Kent confirm that passage through the TSS (Traffic Separation Scheme near the south-western tip of the Crimea) was a calculated decision by the British government to make a show of support for Ukraine, despite the possible risks involved…. The documents don’t stop there. The bundle includes updates on arms exports campaigns, including sensitive observations about areas where Britain might find itself competing with European allies… and observations on President Biden’s first few months in office.’ Interestingly, the anonymous finder of the documents decided to pass them to the BBC, which didn’t hold back on analysing them and detailing their contents, except, it seems, when it came to policy on Afghanistan. The MOD is investigating and surely it won’t take long to discover who had access to such classified material and who could have left them in that particular location. Boris Johnson must be cursing these Matt Hancock and defence document debacles in the lead-up to the Batley and Spen by-election this week.

https://bbc.in/3jjw7uM

Meanwhile, as most ministers continue to flag 19th July as the poorly-named Freedom Day, at least some clinicians and commentators are expressing doubts because of the rising number of Covid cases, the fact that the government is using the criteria of hospitalisations and deaths rather than cases, the rise of the Delta variant and the highly transmissible Delta + variant, and the use of ventilators increasing by 41%. There’s also increasing awareness of the extent and debilitating effects of Long Covid, more than 2m adults still experiencing symptoms three months after their illness, some for far longer. It seems important to enjoy things while we can as further restrictions can’t be ruled out despite the PM’s bullish declaration that the roadmap steps would be ‘irreversible’.

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Amid the travel and entertainment industries’ complaints about restrictions they see as unfair and illogical, some people have been irritated by what seems the media’s obsession with going on holiday. Despite what’s thought to have been a Cabinet rift on the issue of giving more freedom to twice-vaccinated travellers, the ‘green list’ for overseas travel was extended to 16 more countries, meaning no need to quarantine on return to the UK. There’d still be the need for tests, though, before and after returning, and it does seem disingenuous to trumpet about travel opportunities without mentioning that more countries are placing restrictions on travellers from the UK because of the Delta variant risk. Whereas EU countries have been deciding their own policies, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said there should be a coordinated EU policy requiring all UK arrivals to quarantine. It certainly makes for a confusing picture for UK travellers, especially when we’ve seen changes overnight to the green and amber lists. It could easily defeat the purpose of going on holiday if tourists suddenly hear the goalposts have changed yet again and they feel compelled to change their flights before the deadline requiring quarantine. Skegness, anyone? Perhaps a mass return to Britain’s own resorts is way overdue, complete with fish and chips, candy floss, buckets and spades.

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One of the ongoing complaints the travel and entertainment industries have with the government, one which will add to others in raising public anxiety, is the refusal so far to publish the data on which decisions regarding restriction easing are based. We have to wonder why the secrecy, especially over the pilot mass events, some of which took place in April. ‘The organisers of summer events and the owners of music and sports venues are eagerly awaiting the findings, but Downing Street is still unable to say when they will be published. Boris Johnson’s spokesperson said only that they would come shortly’. It seems that the Department of Media, Culture and Sport reported positive findings but Downing Street didn’t want anything to undermine its cautious messaging following the 21st June delay. It’s interesting that the government is even ‘facing legal action’, to obtain research disclosure,  by key figures like Lord Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, Lloyd Webber on record as saying he would go ahead with his production of Cinderella whatever the government says. ‘We simply must now see the data that is being used to strangle our industry so unfairly…..The government’s actions are forcing theatre and music companies off a cliff as the summer wears on, whilst cherry picking high-profile sporting events to go ahead. The situation is beyond urgent’. Lloyd Webber turned down the government’s offer for his production to be one of the pilots and Cinderella opened on Friday with an audience capacity of 50%.

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Anything prior to ‘hopeless Hancock’s’ resignation might seem like ancient history now but it’s hard to resist mention of the Prime Minister’s first in the flesh audience with the Queen for 15 months. John Crace wrote a spoof account in the Guardian: ‘There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” said the Queen, her heart sinking. It was the moment she had been dreading. Why on earth couldn’t she have carried on her weekly meetings with the prime minister on Zoom? Not having to deal with Boris Johnson face to face had been one of the few upsides of the coronavirus lockdown. She couldn’t stand the way he put his feet up on the furniture and generally acted as if he owned the place. There was only so much entitlement a Queen could take….’.

The Queen’s allusion to the Health Secretary (‘poor man’) was probably her way of admonishing the PM for his ‘f……. hopeless’ WhatsApp messages, but when she said of Hancock ‘he’s full of………’, the PM suggested ‘beans’ when perhaps some of us would have supplied a less flattering noun. Boris Johnson, looking embarrassingly casual in his crumpled suit and with his scarecrow hair, surely broke protocol by finishing the Queen’s sentence for her – it would be interesting to know if he was pulled up on this later.

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Especially given increasing criticism of the BBC, there was alarm last week at plans to sell Channel 4. ‘The broadcaster – home to shows such as the Great British Bake Off, It’s A Sin and Channel 4 News – is editorially independent but has been owned by the state since it was created by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1982. It operates with a remit to commission distinctive programming and serve diverse audiences across the UK. Unlike other broadcasters it is required to reinvest its profits in new shows, funnelling cash to the independent production companies that make all its programmes’. It’s no coincidence that the move comes at the same time as complaints from Conservatives about what they see as anti-Tory bias. ‘The announcement came as the government takes an increasingly aggressive approach towards broadcasters, welcoming the new rightwing discussion channel GB News while regularly battling with the BBC over funding and so-called “culture war” issues. This has led to criticism from figures such as Sir David Attenborough, who signed an open letter warning Dowden against dismantling the UK’s public service broadcasting ecosystem – the heavily regulated channels run by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, S4C, and Channel 5’.

Privatising Channel 4 was first mooted 25 years ago and the channel has fought off regular attempts to do this ever since, most recently in 2017. Let’s hope the latest attempt doesn’t gain a foothold.

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With the Northern Ireland protocol problems rumbling on, negotiator ‘Lord’ Frost has again been in the news, astonishingly having expressed surprise on the part of Leavers that relations with the EU had deteriorated so badly. No doubt many leavers had no idea of what this Protocol was or how it would work. ‘The Brexit minister, David Frost, said they had dreamed of a sovereign Britain, which could set forth on a global mission while maintaining friendly relations with its neighbours…. Asked if the British government had “underestimated what sort of impact” the protocol would have on the movement of goods, Frost hinted this was the case. “I don’t see what is wrong with learning from experience. This is a very unusual agreement and we’ve learned a lot about how economic actors behave … we underestimated the chilling effect.” It’s a bit late  to be talking now about this kind of learning, yet despite sour relations the PM and ministers still cynically continue to refer to the EU ‘as our friends and partners’. When asked what all this would look like in 10 years time, Frost predicted that the UK will have ‘settled into a more normal relationship with the EU … one where we have gone our own way in a number of areas and succeeded … nobody is questioning Brexit. It was self-evidently the right thing to do’. I would think a good many will still be questioning Brexit after ten years.

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Frost also didn’t cover himself in glory at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, by the sound of it. ‘Having established his credentials as being rather more important than a minister for Europe, Lord Frost then did his best to prove why he wasn’t really up to the job. He got off to a bad start by saying that the decision not to fully accredit the EU ambassador to the UK had been “over-interpreted” and that petty point scoring had been the last thing on the government’s mind. For some reason, the EU had seen it differently and taken offence’. He also maintained that the current impasse with the EU over Northern Ireland couldn’t have been anticipated. It seems Frost believes himself to be a force to be reckoned with, the opposite of how many now see him, an example of the Peter Principle.

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It will be seen as worrying in some quarters, that following on from Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden’s avowed intention to compel government-funded cultural institutions to reflect a traditional view of British history, former Chancellor and Evening Standard editor George Osborne has been made chair of the British Museum. The government doesn’t want cultural organisations giving the bigger picture, including institutions’ links to Britain’s colonial past and slavery, regarded by some as a ‘woke’ agenda, so pressing for Conservative chairs and trustees will be one way of fending off such attempts. ‘The former chancellor, 50, will take up his new role in October after stepping down last year as editor of the Evening Standard. He will combine his position with a partnership at Robey Warshaw, a Mayfair investment bank.’ He’ll really be able to give it his all, then.

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Finally, we’ve heard about the idea of incentivising hesitants to get vaccinated and in the US this seems to be common, some states people being offered free beer and baseball tickets in exchange for being jabbed. Washington State has gone quite a bit further, with cannabis shops offering ‘joints for jabs’ to anyone over 21, a plan approved by the local drug and alcohol licensing board. We can just imagine the collective shudder around the Cabinet table at the thought of anything like it ever happening here.

Sunday 20 June

As the week pass, it seems they become ever more action packed and this last one has certainly been a corker. It started with various assessments of the G7 summit, some commentators thinking it had been groundbreaking, others seeing it as the equivalent of a weekend spa break. Labour leader Keir Starmer said Johnson ‘was a host not a leader, a tour guide not a statesman’. Time will tell, as work on climate change and global tax arrangements continue, with many steps before their goals are realised. At the summit Boris Johnson worked hard to play down the rift with EU and to play up ‘global Britain’, prompting a sceptic to tweet: ‘Global Britain? Little England, more like’. This tweet does rather sum up the government’s approach to negotiations with the EU: ‘EU: please implement the deal we agreed. UK: hang on, hang on… We need to be pragmatic, flexible, and imaginative. EU: what does all of that even mean? UK: you know the text we negotiated, agreed and ratified? Let’s bin it and do something different. Here’s our list of demands’.

It was also noticed that, despite having just got married in a Catholic church, he didn’t attend mass – no surprise there.  

Having been widely trailed, it was no surprise to hear the official announcement on Monday that the fourth step of lockdown exit wouldn’t now be until 19 July at the earliest, prompting predictably angry reactions from the usual suspects. Speaking VERY EMPHATICALLY (a sure sign he’s on uncertain ground) our PM kept saying ‘I’m confident’ that this or that, but many of us have no confidence in his confidence. It was noticeable that a worryingly snuffly Michael Gove, interviewed on Tuesday’s Today programme, had already downgraded this to ‘pretty confident’.

And ‘irreversible’? ‘The prime minister sees this as the final stretch and wants people to be patient. We are nearly there, it’s one last haul’. The doubt now creeping into this bullishly declared ‘irreversible’ exit schtick is now palpable. It’s telling that polls indicate widespread public support for delaying the exit and for continuing certain measures like mask wearing, despite regular anti-lockdown protests, which this week in Central London had BBC journalist Nick Watt being chased and abused.

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The Times discussed how Conservative MPs were privately accusing the PM of ‘having lost his nerve, especially after Edward Argar, a health minister, conceded this morning that it was “possible” restrictions could be extended again beyond July 19’. This has naturally prompted cries of protest from the hospitality, travel and entertainment industries.

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During Monday’s BBC World at One programme, irascible lockdown sceptic Sir Charles Walker opined: ‘If you can’t lift restrictions at the height of summer, and we are in the height of summer, then you almost certainly are looking at these restrictions persisting and tightening into the autumn and winter. We were told we were going to live with Covid-19 and it now looks like most of the remaining of this year, and certainly the first half of next year, will probably end up with some form of lockdown’. Walker was annoyed at the question as to whether he didn’t trust Boris Johnson, saying he had a ‘great affection’ for the Prime Minister, then, astonishingly, that the PM had nearly ‘given his life to Covid’. A listener tweeted: ‘Surely this comment of Charles Walker’s will go down in history as one of the most deluded about Boris Johnson. He put himself in the position of ‘nearly giving his life’ by ignoring scientific advice, not distancing and shaking hands willy nilly’.

Another dimension of 14 June announcement was Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle’s fury that Johnson had made the announcement at a press conference rather than first to MPs, as per the proper procedure. He said he had been “misled” about the prime minister’s announcement over the delay to the roadmap, telling MPs he had been told no decision had been finalised. ‘I was told no decisions will be taken until the Cabinet meets. I am being misled, this House is being misled. I find it totally unacceptable that once again, once again, that we see Downing Street running roughshod over members of parliament. We’re not accepting it and I’m at the stage where I’m beginning to look for other avenues if they’re not going to treat this house seriously’. Yet again, though, it’s water off the duck’s back: Boris Johnson managed to pacify the Speaker for now but it won’t be the last time he treats the Commons without respect.

Besides general concern about the rapid rise of Delta variant cases, some scientists and clinicians are convinced a Third Wave is on the way, one saying he’s ‘resigned to it’. The criterion as to how bad things are seems to be not the number of cases but numbers of hospitalisations, but as ever, it seems the lingering and disabling effects of Long Covid are overlooked.

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Ministers keep talking up the vaccination programme but other supporting measures have never worked properly and now statistics show that councils refuse about 6 in 10 of applications for self-isolation support. Whereas Track and Trace should have been allocated to local authorities in the first place, this self-isolation support could perhaps have been removed from busy and cash-strapped councils and operated centrally and consistently, ensuring those who need it get it. It’s the government’s criteria for receiving the payments which are too tight, say some local authorities, ‘sparking warnings from trade unions that a key policy to limit Covid-19 is “failing” in the face of rising infections’. It’s known that some who’ve tested positive are continuing to go to work and the Office for National Statistics reckons that between March and May, ‘between 13% and 17% of people who tested positive did not stick to self-isolation requirements’.

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The latest Dominic Cummings silo (how many more are waiting in the wings?) took centre stage last week, texts showing that last March Boris Johnson had called Health Secretary Matt Hancock ‘totally f…ing hopeless’, evidence that can’t easily be undone by Downing Street statements that the PM has ‘every confidence’ in his Health Secretary. The media played clips of journalists calling out ‘Are you hopeless, Mr Hancock?’ This morning’s Radio 4 Broadcasting House featured an amusing piece on this phenomenon by veteran broadcaster Michael Crick, who said it had developed in the wake of Parliament being televised: ‘if in doubt, shout it out’.

A journalist tweeted: ‘No 10 failing to deny Johnson planned to sack Hancock and replace him with Gove will confirm for most reasonable people that he did, leaving the Health Secretary a dead man walking in a Covid crisis’ and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said: ‘So, Boris Johnson – if you keep a Health Secretary you consider to be “totally f***ing hopeless” in post during a global pandemic, what does that make you…?’

Thanks to Emma for the heads up on this…. Astonishingly, in the Commons on Thursday, Jacob Rees-Mogg defended his colleague, calling Hancock ‘the brilliant, the one and only successful genius who has been running health over the last 15 months…he has done so much to make not only the country but the world safer’. You couldn’t make it up.

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The Guardian’s sketch writer John Crace returned once more to his regular targets – ‘Door Matt’ and the Prime Minister. ‘But on a day of ironies the biggest one was left to last. For who should the government send out to lead the debate on extending the lockdown restrictions for a further four weeks than Hancock. The minister whom even Boris thought was completely f……. hopeless. Still, not even Door Matt could screw this one up as Labour was supporting the government, though he did seem to think the appearance of the Delta variant had been a total mystery that couldn’t have been expected by anyone. Just give us four more weeks, Hancock said, and we’ll be back to normal. Data not dates no longer appears to be government policy’.

On Prime Minister’s Questions: ‘Johnson did what he always does when put under pressure. He blustered and lied…… And Boris doesn’t care that people know he’s lying, because even his own MPs seem happy for him to do so. A liar’s gotta do what a liar’s gotta do. The Tories knew what they were buying when they chose him as leader and, as the Cummings blog shows, he’s not about to have a personality change. The irony is that the same MPs are outraged at perceived breaches of faith from other parties and countries, yet are blind to the more obvious failings of their own man’. With all these goings on, it’s hardly surprising that so many are experiencing insecurity and anxiety, since the government is not only doing nothing to psychologically contain the causes, their role, but actually creating more with a never-ending stream of disreputable acts.

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Guardian columnist Marina Hyde explores why it’s useful for Boris Johnson to surround himself with the ‘hopeless’: ‘from Matt Hancock to Gavin Williamson, these proven failures have become the prime minister’s human shields’. I can’t believe these ministers don’t know this, that they’re being used in the most cynical way, but their egos and desire for spurious advancement must be enabling them to overcome any misgivings or pricks of conscience.

‘….the role of Health Secretary in a pandemic is a profoundly critical one. Likewise that of Education Secretary in a period of disrupted learning and life chances. So to stick with known and proven failures says vastly more about Boris Johnson than anyone else. Despite his matey posturing, the prime minister appears so completely indifferent to the death and myriad forms of suffering his own hopelessness has wrought that he would rather retain Hancock and Williamson as human shields than upgrade his personnel. This is the weak leadership of a man who judges – perhaps rightly – that if he permits the bell to toll for one of his cabinet ministers, it hastens the moment it tolls for him.

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Former Speaker John Bercow’s defection to Labour will be a further blow: although Bercow insisted that this wasn’t ‘personal’ towards the Prime Minister, he did go on to say in interviews that the PM’s contempt for Parliament and his ‘lamentable’ management of the pandemic had been factors. Describing today’s Conservative party as ‘reactionary, populist, nationalistic and sometimes even xenophobic’, he said of the PM: ‘he is a successful campaigner but a lousy governor. I don’t think he has any vision of a more equitable society, any thirst for social mobility or any passion to better the lot of people less fortunate than he is. I think increasingly people are sick of lies, sick of empty slogans, sick of a failure to deliver’. Let’s hope the government doesn’t try to dismiss this as resentment for not being given a peerage – I can just see this happening in tomorrow’s Today programme ministerial interview.

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Other concerning news during the week was that Track and Trace ‘supremo’ Dido Harding had shown interest in the top NHS job, prompting a petition to prevent this happening and palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke to tweet: ‘Dido Harding just threw her hat in the ring. Can we be clear? If Boris Johnson chooses to reward the woman who’s presided over the multi billion pound debacle of Test & Trace with the role of next NHS England CEO, then he has nothing but contempt for the NHS & NHS patients’. As if this didn’t display sufficient hubris, the Baroness, writing in today’s Sunday Times, has vowed to end England’s reliance on foreign doctors and nurses if she becomes the next head of the NHS. This prompted numerous tweets from critics, one calling her ‘a repugnant individual’ and another ‘a serial failure and menace’. One commentator tweeted: ‘Tough words but if Dido Harding is capable of feeding xenophobia to the press to win the NHS top job, she should be utterly ashamed of herself. “Foreign” medics/nurses saved the PM’s life, they are our pride and joy’.

Whoever does get this top job will have their work cut out, assuming they take their role seriously, given the revelation that fixing NHS waiting lists could cost £40bn. Alarmingly, the government seems to think there’s no urgency about this, according to a No 10 ‘source’, because the public are not thought to be ‘distressed’ about long delays. How out of touch is this? I suspect most of us know at least one person waiting for an operation or other treatment and they are certainly perturbed by the wait. The number of patients waiting now exceeds 5 million.

 Professor Anita Charlesworth, an NHS finances expert at the Health Foundation think tank said: ‘The health service now has a mountain to climb. Reducing the backlog of long waits and getting the NHS into a position where waiting time standards are consistently met will need a major increase in funding. But that would also need 5,000 extra beds, 4,100 more consultants and 17,100 additional nurses, as the NHS was too under-resourced to ramp up the number of patients treated’. So much for Dido Harding’s plan to do without foreign staff.

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There were also mixed reactions, particularly from British farmers, about the much-trumpeted trade deal with Australia, promoted as an example of global Britain throwing off EU shackles, its proponents seemingly unable to see that the so-called benefits were not at all comparable with what had gone before. This was brought out on Radio 4’s Any Questions, ‘Dame’ Andrea Leadsom fulfilling the role of government cheerleader, saying what a fantastic opportunity it was that young people could live and work in Australia for 3 years. This was instantly deconstructed by commentator Ellie Mae O’Hagan, who pointed out how much weaker these ‘opportunities’ were than the ones afforded by EU membership.

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Despite Boris Johnson’s attempt to brush off their devastating result in the Chesham and Amersham by-election as ‘due to local circumstances’, it’s clear and some Conservatives admitted that they do need to seriously think about the dramatic overturning of their 16k majority, the Lib Dems winning by almost 8k. While commentators speculate as to whether this is the first breach in the ‘blue wall’, the PM declared that they would ‘continue to unite and level up the country’. ‘Continue?’ questioned one tweeter: ‘He’s done a good job of dividing it’. Commentators suggest this result could mean the end of the ‘safe seat’ and that the local electorate was voting with its feet regarding planning policy and HS2. At least one caller to Radio 4’s Any Answers said the Conservatives had been ‘complacent’ and this did seem evident from the manner of candidate Peter Fleet, who appeared to attribute the Lib Dem victory to them ‘having thrown everything at it’.

It’s striking how many Conservatives are saying ‘this is a very disappointing result’, as if this is a fact rather than their opinion. As for Labour’s failure, a New Statesman article (summarised in The Week), suggests this is partly due to the party’s attitude towards English identity, thought to be more important than Labour recognises. Rather than being a set of regions, traditional supporters ‘have a strong sense of English identity and they worry that regional devolution would put them at a huge disadvantage to Scotland in the matter of funding’. They’re thought to be concerned that Gordon Brown is urging the party to go further down the regional devolution path. ‘Unless it shows more deference for English identity, Labour will remain marooned’.

Former Conservative MP for South West Hertfordshire David Gauke, who was rejected by Johnson over Brexit, thought that the ‘realignment’ in British politics had favoured the Conservatives but now there is vulnerability in areas not naturally aligned with Boris Johnson’s brand of politics. ‘… there are a group of seats – up to 30 or 40 – where the Conservative vote is not Johnsonian, considers the government to be pretty populist, not focused on the interests of taxpayers, not sufficiently pro-business, and that vote is soft. And it’s vulnerable’. Not for the first time, I’m finding that the views of those cast into outer darkness on account of Brexit have just as or more interesting and intelligent views than opposition politicians.  

Although it’s a different setting and set of circumstances (the Labour candidate being the sister of former MP Jo Cox, Kim Leadbetter), all eyes will now be on the upcoming Batley and Spen by-election on 1 July.

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Some good news for the environment, nature, wildlife and indirectly mental wellbeing comes in the form of plans for a £16m fund to pay landowners for creating new woodlands in England. These would ‘boost wildlife, increase public access and reduce flooding’…. The new scheme will cover all the costs of saplings and planting and pay bonuses of up to £2,800 a hectare for woodland that helps wildlife recover, £1,600/ha for riverside trees, £2,200/ha for woodland with long-term public access and £500/ha for cutting flood risk by slowing water flow. Landowners can claim multiple benefits if their project ticks multiple boxes’.

We have to wonder, though, at the government’s claim that this is part of ‘the biggest shake-up of farming policy for 50 years in November, enabled by Brexit’. While the intention sounds good, ‘redirecting subsidies from simply rewarding land ownership or rental to measures that help tackle the climate and wildlife crises’, it didn’t set out the level of payments or how this would be implemented, given the amount of administration such an exercise will involve. The scheme seems to have been cautiously welcomed by representatives of farming and conservation organisations, but, as one said, ‘the devil is in the detail’, so these experts will no doubt be carefully monitoring these developments over the next few years.

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The Week describes some of this year’s finalists, including Father Len Black, a Catholic priest who streamed mass from a shed in his Inverness garden to an online congregation including people from all over the world. Another is a shed turned into a Peaky Blinders themed bar. Category winners will be announced in August – who’d have thought, years ago, that the humble garden shed could reach such heights of sophistication?!

Finally, many will be aware of the men’s sheds movement, which has grown up over recent years to promote a sense of sharing, community and mental wellbeing amongst men who might be less keen to join mainstream clubs and societies. The Men’s Sheds Association describes them as ‘kitted out community spaces where men can enjoy practical hobbies. They’re about making friends, learning and sharing skills. Many guys come just for the tea and banter, everyone’s welcome’. Many had an online presence during lockdown and we can well imagine that these places became even more popular during the pandemic.

I wonder how many in this movement entered this year’s Shed of the Year contest, run by DIY firm Cuprinol, now in its 15th year. Categories included cabin/summerhouse, unexpected/unique, nature’s haven, budget and lockdown. Cuprinol’s Creative Director, Marianne Shillingford, said: ‘Our garden sheds are more than just a place to put our tools – they are a wonderful creative outlet for an individual’s unique artistic vision’.