Don’t blame me. I’m only the boss
The faces were not just sad. They were brow-beaten. They were defeated. The faces were those of the relatives of some of the hundreds of people who died, from systemic neglect or the callous indifference, in Stafford Hospital over a shocking four year period. They had just emerged from reading the findings of the Francis Inquiry into the biggest scandal in the recent history of the National Health Service.
Theirs is a world turned upside-down. They had entrusted those they loved to a hospital they assumed would help its patients to get better. Instead, in a grotesque inversion, it killed them off. Between 400 and 1200 people died needlessly.
The detail defies belief. Patients were left lying in their own urine and excrement. Others were denied the medicines they had been prescribed, refused pain relief and left unfed by heartless and overworked nurses. Some were left so thirsty that, desperate with dehydration, they drank water from flower vases.
And yet Robert Francis QC at the end of his 139-day inquiry, with its 164 witnesses and its million pages of submitted evidence, did not name the succession of individuals responsible for this catalogue of coldness and cruelty. Instead he blamed a culture which put corporate interests and cost-control ahead of people’s suffering. Target-setting, box-ticking and performance management goals blinded hospital staff to the humanity of the weak and vulnerable individuals who had been placed in their care. Everyone was doing their job, and yet the job was not getting done.
One of the most bizarre examples of this is Kate Levy, the Stafford Hospital solicitor who asked a senior consultant to alter his report which found a junior doctor had been negligent in not spotting a ruptured spleen after a mountain-bike accident. He diagnosed bruising and sent the young biker home where he died hours later.
When health chiefs discovered this they sacked Ms Levy who promptly took them to an employment tribunal. She was awarded £103,000 compensation after arguing it was her job to suppress the evidence – to “avoid further stress” to the dead man’s family and prevent “adverse publicity” for the hospital. “My actions were entirely consistent with my duties as a lawyer,” she said. “My duty was to my client, not to the [dead man’s] family.” The topsy-turvy tribunal agreed. Clearly you can have dirty linen on the patients’ beds, but you must not wash it in public.
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We were still talking theology over dinner on Monday. The prompt was not the over-long sermon we had heard on Sunday morning but the film we had gone to see in the cinema in the afternoon. I confess I had not been keen to see Les Misérables, whose music has always seemed to me to be mawkish and contrived, but the trailer for the film had looked a spectacular piece of historical fiction. And so it proved.
The stunning cinematic realism in this account of Victor Hugo’s novel is a most effective counterpoint to the heightened sentiments of its musical score. And where most Hollywood films centre on conflict between good and bad, Les Misérables is about salvation and damnation, which is a lot more interesting.
The two characters at the centre, the policeman Javert and the convict Valjean, have different understandings of what “good” means – and they respond very differently to the gift of grace and their sense of God’s presence in the world. Javert is a man of the law, pharisaical in his commitment to it and enslaved by the fear of transgression. Valjean, the man outside the law, is born again into a life of compassion and love through the freedom brought by forgiveness. This is not good versus evil, but mercy v justice. It is a story about, as our 12-year-old aptly put it, what happens when humanity collides with the law.
Paradox player who is modestly vain
David Beckham has only played once at Old Trafford in an opponent’s shirt since he left Manchester United where he began the extraordinary career which has turned him into the most marketable footballer in the world. He was received with extraordinary warmth by the fans of his old club when he came on to play for AC Milan. At the end of the match Beckham reciprocated with one of the big gestures which have characterised his long and shrewd career.
He bent down to pick up a United scarf thrown to him on the pitch. It was not the usual red and white. It was green and gold – the colours of the fans’ protest movement against United’s American owners, the Glazers, who have saddled the club with £600m of Glazer family debts. Beckham innocently draped the scarf around his neck, to a delighted uproar from the fans. When the press later asked him about it he shrugged and replied, with faux-naiveté (he’d better start learning a bit of French) that protests were not his business.
David Beckham has long been the master of the grand gesture, as we saw when he signed for the latest of his illustrious international clubs. After Manchester, Madrid, Los Angeles and Milan – the list makes him sound like an upmarket shopping chain, which is what, in a way, he is – he pitched up last week in Paris to join another mega-club. And the first thing he did was announce that he would be giving away his £4m PSG salary to a French children’s charity.
Laughing in the face of tragedy – 25 years of Comic Relief
- PHOTO Comic Relief
The photographs are only just recognisable. All along the corridor in the offices of Comic Relief are portraits charting the 25 year history of the charity. Those from the earliest years show a wrinkle-free Griff Rhys Jones, Stephen Fry like some callow undergraduate, Jonathan Ross still looking wholesome and Lenny Henry before he got fat and then thin again.
“When the BBC first agreed to do a programme for the first Red Nose Day,” says its founder the screenwriter, Richard Curtis, “I rang Frank Muir and asked him to present all seven hours. Quite understandably he said ‘No’ so I fell back on three people I knew – Lenny, Jonathan and Griff.” Curtis in those days was a scriptwriter on the tv sketch show Not the Nine O’clock News.
Since then Curtis has gone on to write tv comedies like Blackadder, Mr Bean and The Vicar of Dibley as well as movies like Notting Hill and Love Actually. Comic Relief, whose headquarters nestle between those of MI6 and Special Branch on London’s Albert Embankment, has become a national institution of a different kind. Over the past quarter of a century it has raised over £800 million which have been spent in over 15,000 projects in 70 countries.
It has come a long way since 1985 when Curtis – shocked by the famine in Ethiopia in which a million people died and inspired by the fundraising efforts of the pop stars of Live Aid – set out for Africa to see if there was anything similar he and his fellow comics could do to help.
His proposal was treated with great scepticism. “I remember thinking it was an absolutely dreadful idea,” says Paddy Coulter, who as head of media at Oxfam, was asked to organise the trip. “It seemed to be an abomination to be sending anything out other than food.”
“People had got used to the idea that pop stars could raise money for Africa – after initially asking ‘what do pop stars know about poverty’,” says Curtis. “But comics had a further hurdle: ‘What could silly people have to say about something so serious? Are you sure it’s suitable to be making jokes in the face of the tragedy of the causes’.”
A giant hole has been blown in the entire idea of school league tables
A couple of academics have, with a single devastating insight, blown a sizeable hole in our national preoccupation with school league tables. Parents who waited eagerly to pounce on the latest set of figures when they were published by the Department for Education on Thursday should read on before wasting too much time assiduously fine-combing the data on the schools in their area.
The researchers at Bristol University began with this simple thought. Suppose you are choosing a school for your child from next September. The exam results which should really concern you are not this year’s but the ones which will come in 2018 when your little darling sits whatever configuration of testing the Education Secretary Michael Gove leaves behind when he returns to the backbenches after the next election. But the results which came out on Thursday show how kids did in 2012. So that means there is a seven-year gap between the available information and what parents really want to know.
What the social statisticians Dr George Leckie and Professor Harvey Goldstein have done is turn the issue upside-down. They used data from seven years ago to predict how today’s schools ought to have done – and compared that with how they actually did. They found many schools moved, in just seven years, from the top quarter of results to the bottom. Worse still, they found the seven-year predictions were “so imprecise that almost no schools could be distinguished reliably from one another”. A blindfold and a pin would be just as effective.
Yet prediction is woven into the British education system. Cambridge University recently attacked Mr Gove’s plan to alter the A-level system and scrap the intermediate AS-level exams taken by sixth formers at the end of their first year. AS-level results provide crucial data for identifying the most talented applicants, Cambridge’s research has found; they are far more reliable than old-style A-level predictions by teachers.
Ending interim AS-levels will make life more difficult for university admissions tutors. But it will also discourage weaker students from embarking on A-levels in the first place. And it will disadvantage poorer kids because it will increase universities’ reliance on interviews and written statements in which middle-class kids have parents and teachers to coach them.
The Gove plans, of course, propose much more. He also wants to replace the GCSEs taken by 16-year-olds with an English Baccalaureate in English, maths, two sciences, history or geography and a foreign language. And by 2015 he wants A-levels to stop examining by topic modules over two years and instead have just one big exam at the end.
The opposition to the Gove reforms is formidable. The universities are unhappy. Business is unconvinced; the employers’ organisation the CBI wants more rigorous exams but says the Gove plans lack coherence. Teachers’ unions say that changing A-levels and GCSEs at the same time will put intolerable pressure on schools. Educationalists, head teachers, exam boards and even the exam regulator have expressed major doubts. So have activists in the arts, theatre, design, computing and engineering.
Dr Christopher Ray, High Master of Manchester Grammar School, who chairs the independent schools’ organisation, was last week withering when he wrote to parents: “The various components are rushed and incoherent. This does not betoken respect for the young people whose education will be reshaped by a process jumbling together changes to GSCE and A-level, while leaving inadequate supervision of examining unreformed – and all to a timetable based on electoral politics rather than principles of sound implementation.” Ouch.
Whose job is it to rescue Timbuktu from the sharia separatists?
For generations the desert city of Timbuktu – or Timbuctoo as we called it as schoolboys – stood as a symbol of the most distant place imaginable. So, metaphorically, it became again for a new generation of Islamic fundamentalists who saw in its gentle Sufi mysticism an implicit rebuke to their narrow and nasty reduction of the rich Islamic faith.
Many of those who have written about hostage-taking and murder in Algeria or the imposition of severe sharia on the north of Mali, including Timbuktu, have denounced such jihadists as stuck back in the seventh century. That is a basic misunderstanding. For as the philosopher John Gray explained in Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern such Islamicists, far from being medieval, are as contemporary as the globalisation of which they are a by-product. Fundamentalism is essentially a reaction to modernism.
What is more traditional about Islam is the scholarship and tolerance which characterised Timbuktu in its 13th century golden age when it rivalled Oxford, Cambridge or Paris as a centre of learning and spirituality. Its famous mud-built mosques, with their distinctive protruding beam-ends, stood alongside the celebrated University of Sankore, which had some 25,000 students at its zenith. At the crossroads of the ancient caravan routes where gold was traded for salt it was also a place of intellectual exchange.
Hundreds of thousands of surviving manuscripts reveal that its scholars, in Arabic and African languages, composed, copied and imported works on theology, astronomy, mathematics, physics, ethics, law, geography, history, literature, medicine, and botany long before the first European explorer, lured by tales of gold, “discovered” the forbidden city. These Sufi Muslims even saw divinity in pre-Islamic traditions.
None of that will do for the modern Islamic iconoclasts who have spent the past nine months systematically destroying the “idolatrous” mausoleums of Timbuktu’s Sufi saints. Happily the zealots have now fled the city as French fighter jets have pounded Islamist strongholds in the desert.
That said, the French incursion into Mali smacks of both neo-colonialism and an uncritical acceptance of the Bush/Blair “war on terror” worldview. It would have been far better to have used Western economic, financial and diplomatic muscle to persuade Mali’s African neighbours to do the job. That would also have avoided the possibility of a backlash; Western warriors risk inciting the resentment which can increase, rather than diminish, the problem they are there to tackle – as Prince Harry’s unwise words on killing the Taliban have reminded us this week. You stupid boy, as Capt Mainwaring used to say.
The smothering ball-boy and the toe-poking footballer – the lessons to be learned
The world of football is divided over whether or not the Chelsea international Eden Hazard should have been sent off after the bizarre incident in which he kicked out at a ball-boy who had covered the ball with his body instead of returning it speedily to play. Apologists insist he was trying to kick the ball not the boy; critics are demanding his automatic three-match ban should be extended, as was Eric Cantona’s when he kicked a fan some years back. Cantona was banned for eight months.
What will perhaps shock the rest of society more is the disclosure that ball-boys routinely cheat by passing their ball quickly to the home team and dallying over assisting their opponents. Indeed the ball-boy in question, one Charlie Morgan, actually boasted of this fact on Twitter ahead of the game.
That is not all they have learned from their role models on the pitch. The ball-boy at Swansea hammed up the incident with much melodramatic grimacing and rolling on the ground. Perhaps the Football Association should indeed impose an additional punishment on the felicitously-named Mr Hazard; they could require the footballer to pay for some drama lessons to improve the ball-boy’s woeful acting skills.
From the people who brought you Iraq and Afghanistan – a new rollercoaster blockbuster: War across the Sahara
So here we are again, being sucked into another war on the same old combination of flimsy intelligence, knee-jerk politics, high-octane rhetoric and virtually no serious parliamentary debate whatsoever. From the people who brought you Iraq and Afghanistan comes a new rollercoaster blockbuster – War across the Sahara.
There will be those who will feel that the bloodbath in the Algerian desert is justification enough for Britain to be backing the French military intervention in Mali. After all this is, we have been told, al-Qa’ida 3.0. First was Osama bin Laden’s original, then the Mark II version in the Afghan/Pakistan borderlands, and now this one is apparently “the most deadly al-Qa’ida yet”. It is the new front line in the war between the West and radical Islam. Didn’t the Algerian gas plant kidnappers announce that their raid was retaliation for the French military adventure in neighbouring Mail?
Forgive me if I take all this with the same amount of salt which the average caravan of Tuareg camel-traders used to transport in ancient days across the desert to the markets of the fabled city of Timbuktu.
To say that is not to minimise the terrifying obscurantism of the Muslim extremists who have controlled that forbidden city for the past nine months, imposing a savage interpretation of Sharia law which segregated the sexes and banned music, smoking, drinking and watching sports on TV. They have also destroyed ancient Sufi mausoleums dating back 500 years – a monument not just to dead Muslim saints but evidence that Islam can be a mystical and tolerant faith.
But it is important not to over-project strategic significance into that wild zealotry.
Consider the following. Though the terrorists who staged the raid on the Algerian gas plant claimed they were hitting back against French military action in Mali it is almost certain that such a complex hostage-taking operation was planned months ago. The group responsible, though it calls itself al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has, since 2008, been a largely criminal organisation. It has earned millions by kidnapping foreigners for ransom and smuggling Moroccan hashish, cocaine and cigarettes – so much so that its one-eyed leader, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the man the SAS have reportedly been told to hunt down, is locally known as Mr Marlboro. Making money has been far more important to him than purist Islamic ideology. In all those years last week’s attack on the In Amenas gas plant is the very first it has launched on the energy infrastructure on which the government depends for its revenue.
JB Shorts
Lowry Theatre, Salford
****
There is a myth, peddled by Manchester City supporters, that most footballing Mancunians support their team; Man Utd fans, they claim, fly up each week from London. A survey by estate agents Rightmove gave the lie to that this week revealing that 55.6 percent of Mancs follow United, while just 14.8 percent follow City. But James Quinn has a different view entirely. True Mancs, he insists, follow FC United, the breakaway club formed by disgruntled fans when the Glazer family bought Man Utd and saddled it with $600m dollars of debt.
Quinn’s play Red – at the festival of new theatre writing by top tv writers, JB Shorts @ Re:play at the Lowry in Salford – is a celebration of fan-based football. The writer plays an FC loyalist on the eve of a key FA cup match during which his businesswoman wife is preparing a bid for the catering contract in United’s posh Platinum Suite. It is a surprisingly even-handed contrast of the romantic and the corporate – pies versus prawns, Fosters v fizz, plucky part-timers v polished professionals – with some uproarious laughs and coruscating lines about the misfits, lefties, librarians and real ale hooligan socialists of FC. Connor Ryan does deft slow-mo miming to re-enact the on-pitch glory.
In Bombmaker by Lindsay Williams (East Enders) a Mossad agent is sent to Tehran to assassinate a scientist working on Iran’s nuclear bomb. A dialectic ensues in which the audience’s judgement oscillates over who is the true terrorist, patriot, family man and fanatic. Williams offers no easy answers but Amir Rahimzadeh’s anguished doubt as the scientist elicits more sympathy than Lucas Smith’s cool certainty as the assassin.
The bravura performance of the evening comes from Judy Holt as the ageing glamourpuss celeb in Maddie by Dave Simpson and Diane Whitley. Unexpected consequences arise when Maddie flirts with the boyfriend of her sulky teenager daughter, splendidly pouted by Emily Fleeshman who finally asserts herself with an unusual use of ten-speed nipple clamps.
In A Christmas Carol by Ian Kershaw (Shameless and Casualty) Jeni Howarth Williams has a feral exuberance as a desperate older woman with a young nightclub pick-up who turns out to have gone drinking straight from his mother’s funeral. Oliver Wilson as Waz has a touching moment of authenticity giving the eulogy the vicar ought to have delivered but didn’t.
Funny, thoughtful and moving JB Shorts are now a much-anticipated annual milestone in the Manchester theatrical calendar.
David Cameron is taking unnecessary risks in both Europe and Mali
We are now half way through the current parliament and the prime minister has started looking forward to the next election. He has begun to live dangerously.
Today David Cameron was due make his much-heralded speech on the future of Britain’s place in Europe. It was originally supposed to happen next week till the German Chancellor Angela Merkel icily pointed out that coincide with celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the treaty which sealed the post-war reconciliation of Paris and Berlin. Not the day for Mr Cameron to be rattling his sabre about leaving the European Union if he does not get his way over diluting the relationship between the UK and the EU. Blackmail, one of Mrs Merkel’s colleagues called it.
Mr Cameron has got himself into a very tight spot. The eurozone crisis – and the unrelenting hostility of our Europhobic press which never mentions that half Britain’s trade is with the EU – have created an increasing contemptuous public attitude to Europe. At the next election Mr Cameron could fatally lose votes to the surging UK Independence Party (Ukip). Many Tory backbenchers share its strident worldview.
His solution is to hijack a new EU treaty on revised eurozone governance structure to force other nations to loosen the rules on immigration, criminal justice, working time directive and more. The result would be put to the British public in a referendum.
This is a perilous tactic. It is highly unlikely that the EU will agree to rewrite treaty terms as radically as Mr Cameron would like. The process will antagonise our European partners. But it will also but leave UK Eurosceptics discontented, for they will be satisfied with nothing less than an In or Out referendum. That could set in train an unpredictable sequence of events that could force Mr Cameron – or another Tory leader if he is ousted in the process, as Margaret Thatcher was – to offer the public a vote on quitting the EU.
Top business leaders last week signed a letter saying that this risky political strategy could damage economic confidence and discourage foreign investors from setting up in the UK and creating new jobs. The United States, in an unusually bold diplomatic intervention, has warned Britain that part of the US/UK special relationship comes from London being a “strong voice” in Europe.
What Jimmy Savile did to me as a young man
I had my own encounter with Jimmy Savile when I was a young man. It was not sexual. But it involved abuse of another kind, indeed of the kind which is at the heart of the scandal which has seen the “wacky national treasure” rebranded as one of Britain’s “most prolific sex offenders”.
I was a young reporter on the Yorkshire Post in the days when Savile had just made the transition from a Radio 1 DJ to the presenter of one of Britain’s most popular television shows, Jim’ll Fix It. He was, consequently, a major figure in his home town Leeds where, after some charity fund-raising event I interviewed him. Savile was a man with two faces; his flamboyant public bonhomie could give way in private to something quite threatening. I asked him, probably naively, whether there wasn’t an ambiguity to his image as the man who raised £40m for charity, since it obviously gave quite a boost to his tv career.
“Did you know I’m good friends with Gordon Linacre?” he inquired coldly. (Linacre was the chairman of the board of Yorkshire Post Newspapers). “I don’t think he’d like it if he knew one of his reporters was asking questions like that”.
Jimmy Savile was a good friend, by his own account, of all sorts of people including prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Prince Charles and the Pope. On the side, we now know, he was sexually abusing more than 400 people, most of them girls aged between 13 and 16, and committing 200 crimes including 31 rapes. But beneath the sexual abuse was an abuse of power which extended to all his relationships. Considering the way he used his fame it is hardly surprising that no underage teenager felt anyone would believe her word against his.
A few tried. A 15-year-old dancer on Top of the Pops went to the police in 1971. But when detectives dismissed her claims as fantasy she committed suicide, leaving behind a diary detailing claims of how she had been “used”. Later a detective reported allegations – made by a nurse at Stoke Mandeville Hospital – that Savile was abusing patients. His commanding officer told him there was not enough evidence to proceed against a celebrity of Savile’s stature.
But some were believed and quietened. Savile’s own niece complained to her grandmother when her uncle put his hand inside her knickers. Don’t make a fuss, she was told, it’s only Uncle Jimmy. Grandma’s comfortable lifestyle depended upon Savile’s largesse. It was a pattern which others replicated – colleagues in the music industry, BBC producers and executives, charities and hospitals all had an investment in not asking too many questions.
There was something else. Social attitudes were different then in so many ways. The nature, scale and depth of child abuse was not properly understood. Those were the days when the National Council for Civil Liberties, staffed by Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman, allowed the Paedophile Information Exchange to be an affiliate, despite its members lobbying for the age of consent to be lowered. It was a time when mainstream tv comedy consisted of a leering Benny Hill, in his dirty old man raincoat, chasing girls in short skirts round a tree. And Jimmy Savile could put his hand up a teenager’s skirt and grab her bottom on live TV as he introduced the next act on Top of the Pops. He hid behind the truth to con the entire nation.
The Seventies and Eighties were still, for all the social revolution of the Sixties, an age of deference. As a schoolboy I was once punished by a priest teacher who made me lie spread-eagled on the floor. He then walked over my fingers. When I told my mother of this many decades later she looked astonished and asked why I had not told her at the time.
Put gay bishops and the Soho Masses together and this is what you get
What has changed when it comes to gays and the church in the past 10 years? A decade ago Jeffrey John was forced to decline a position as Bishop of Reading after an outcry over the fact that he was gay. His declaration that he and his partner were celibate did little to lessen the hoo-ha. Celibacy was not enough. Yet now the Church of England has decided that celibacy is quite sufficient thank you.
Over in the Roman Catholic church the tide is moving in the opposite direction. The Soho Masses for gays and their families which were approved by Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor have just been banned by his successor as Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols. In a move heavy with symbolism he has handed the Soho church in which they took place to the Ordinariate set up by Pope Benedict XVI to poach disaffected Anglicans, many of whom disapprove of the ordination of women let alone gays.
It is not, in either case, the theology which has changed, but rather the psychology.
Anglican opponents of celibate gay bishops seem motivated by distrust: “they may say they are celibate but can we believe them?” The Roman Curia, which one conservative Catholic recently described as “absolutely paranoid about homosexuality”, on the surface appears to assume bad faith too.
Weasel words are common in politics but we should not expect them in theology. Roman Catholic apologists have talked about the dilemma of ministering to a group which feels separate without endorsing its members’ separateness. Gay Masses risk the growth of a ghetto mentality which is the opposite of Catholic universalism. So ending them is a welcome into the embrace of the whole church rather than an act alienation. Separate worship can only be justified as a transition, as for incoming ethnic groups, like Poles for example. Quite why this ghetto argument is not applied to the Latin Mass Society is unclear. Nor does it address the fact that the Soho Masses are held only fortnightly to allow attendees to worship at their parish Mass on the other two Sundays.
So why these changes? It is hard not to suspect that Church of England bishops have acted out of embarrassment at the ridicule poured upon the Church when it rejected women bishops. The fact that the measure failed – despite a Yes from two out of three houses in the synod and 42 of 44 dioceses – looked to the rest of society like gerrymandering which has damaged the Church’s integrity.
