Druin Burch

Don’t badmouth the dead, said Chilon of Sparta. Over time, the phrase became a positive injunction to say nothing of the dead unless it was good, de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Christopher Hitchens had a different rule: say anything you like, so long as it was something you’d have been willing to say while they were alive. For him, death did not work as absolution, and the lives of figures public enough to merit scrutiny while they lived merited the same scrutiny in the aftermath of their death – perhaps even more acutely, because death was a time to reflect on who they were. When someone dies, and especially if they die by their own hand after public humiliation, as seems likely to have happened with Jason Arday, a great deal changes.

Last night, my phone, which was set to silent, erupted with the sort of siren one associates with immediately life-threatening emergencies. If you live in England or Wales, yours probably did too. “There is a very high risk of wildfires,” read the message that appeared, once I’d fumbled the cacophonous phone out of my pocket. My lawn is brown and crunchy and we are living through the hottest summer of our lifetimes. I’ve just finished a twelve-day stretch working in a hospital with no air conditioning, and had finally sat down to consider a glass of chilled rosé, so it was useful to be brought up to speed with the fact that it’s been a trifle warm.

‘The weight is over,’ read an advert on the side of a bus outside my hospital this morning. The first really effective pill for weight loss has now been on sale in Britain for just over a month. Wegovy – it has the same brand name as its injectable equivalent – is a semaglutide. Ozempic is the same drug at a lower dose, sold to treat diabetes. Mounjaro is more effective than Wegovy but is injection-only. Lilly hopes its rival pill – Foundayo, orforglipron – will soon be licensed here; already it’s on sale in America. Drugs have a brand name, which is capitalised, and a generic name, which is not. (An odd exception is aspirin, which was Bayer’s trade name, but which they largely lost as the result of the first world war. Since, as part of the conglomerate I. G.

I returned from holiday to find parched lawns and a deliciously cool babbling brook where the road had been. Up the hill stood signs warning motorists that work was in progress, and the source of the leak was surrounded by temporary barriers. The scene was quiet and peaceful, dappled by sunlight on flowing water, and entirely undisturbed by human effort. The hosepipe ban takes a problem the government has created and tells us it’s ours My village is currently subject to a hosepipe ban, like much of England. Coming home yesterday I rescued my wilting hollyhocks – which are drought-tolerant plants – with a hosepipe, and I am willing to do so again.

There have been trimmings and ornaments: the bus fare cap and the performative opening of a No. 10 North in an office block above a Manchester branch of the Slug and Lettuce. But Burnham’s first major act as Prime Minister is to walk back into the flames that consumed his last stint in high office. In 2010, his attempt at a legacy-defining Beveridge moment – creating a National Care Service – partially cost Labour power. Two failed leadership bids and exile to Manchester followed. Today, Burnham formally announced he’s having another go. 'I’m making this choice and I’m prepared to put everything I’ve got behind it,' he said. For now the Prime Minister is benefitting from the honeymoon glow of a bounce in the polls. That may not be enough.

As a former adviser on social care reform to a Conservative prime minister, allow me to explain why Andy Burnham's proposals on the issue – which I don’t know about, since he hasn’t revealed them – are wrong. Hints have been dropped, and a speech is planned for Wednesday. Burnham is committing himself to tackling the problem that brought David Cameron to my ward at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. He came in response to concern from a Witney constituent about delayed discharges. As ever, more than half my ward was occupied by patients termed ‘medically fit for discharge’. They were in hospital beds because the queue for carers at home, or for a care home bed or other supported accommodation, was long.

The weather in 1976, like the football ten years before, lingers in our national memory. But already on some measures this year is worse. Back then, the heat was drier and the nights cooler. We have already had six days above 35C, for the first time ever, and more warm nights in a single week than in the entirety of 1976. A recent study by British university researchers suggested that during eleven hot days in June, the weather in England and Wales was responsible for 2,200 deaths. Rather than a summer lull, my hospital is dealing with the sort of surge we normally see in winter. The same is true nationwide. Those of us not hospitalised by the heat will be noticing the sheer quantity of perspiration of which we’re capable.

The BMA makes lots of vague demands for recognition and autonomy, control and civility – Madeline Grant, hearing similar words coming from Angela Rayner recently, called them generic, vibes-based slop. But what the BMA specifically wants is more money – for less work.  Wales is invoked as an exemplar; rarely a good sign in arguments not involving male-voice choirs or leeks. The BMA wants consultants’ top salary point immediately raised by £16,000, to match the Welsh, and to copy the contractual obligation there for doctors to get a fully-paid day and a half a week free of clinical duties. They want higher rates of pay for out of hours work, improvements in pensions, and the working week cut by five hours. Strike action to support these goals was backed by 76 per cent.

Magdalen College, Oxford, is over-represented at The Spectator. Not long ago, Paul Johnson and Matthew d’Ancona were fixtures here. Today, there are Sam Leith, Douglas Murray, and Harry Mount. Unbeknownst to them, there is also me. I was there at the same time as all three, and a while after Matt Ridley. Poor white kids who are clever enough to go to Britain's ancient universities will find it much harder to get a look in Murray, I believe, spent time in a bad state school, but like Leith and Ridley reached Oxford via Eton; for Mount it was Westminster. I came the other way, a route which is now at the heart of a row over whether white kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are being shut out of many Oxbridge diversity schemes.

Across Britain today, people will take prescriptions to pharmacies and be told they can’t be fulfilled. After hearing a lifetime of speeches about the miracle of the NHS, they’ll find the miracle is out of stock. The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) warned earlier this month that we are short of medicines, with the shortages 'some of the most severe the UK has experienced'. Life is a muddle, and the best we can do is battle endlessly against imperfect trade-offs. That’s the lesson to be read in the NPA’s announcement, if it’s one you’re willing to see. Little in the world is an undiluted good, not even the modern decline of premature mortality. There are people who would find the downside to an England victory in the World Cup, although probably only Scots and Welsh.

The Ockenden Maternity Review, published today, finds the NHS is not to be trusted – not for maternity care, possibly not at all. Set up in 2022 in response to concerns over the safety and competence of maternity care at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH), the report finds failures of leadership, governance, and culture: Poor practice is not investigated; learning is not integrated; and mothers and babies are failed by an organisation they should be able to rely upon. Perfection is not to be found and should not be expected. My son’s arrival into the world was delayed by a junior doctor’s dishonest laziness. Spotting problems, she prevaricated, arranging unnecessary tests that delayed decision-making until her shift finished.

TThe junior doctors were due to strike again, and everyone was sick of the whole business. At the last minute, after a new government offer, the walkout has been called off. This is a relief, even if it isn’t yet a resolution. The vast majority of junior doctors I work with have become as fed up with the dispute as the rest of us. As the strikes have progressed, an ever-increasing number have turned up to work despite being members of the BMA. But even if this dispute now ends, new legislation means similar ones may soon return with dreary frequency in other trades and professions.  Junior doctors feel underpaid, and we ought to manage some sympathy for that, if only on the grounds that few of us feel we’re overpaid.

The quiet kid from my friend’s school has become a trillionaire, and many people are unhappy that this should be so. Musk’s success narrows our lives only when we let it make us prisoners of our own resentment Being a boy in a white South African classroom isn’t easy if you’re not outgoing and sporty. The culture that grew in the shadow of the Boers is not forgiving of eccentricity or admiring of unvarnished intellect. Elon Musk appears to have suffered childhood misery that a trillion-dollar fortune can’t buy back. What money buys, for him as for the rest of us, is freedom - and he has more of it than anyone alive. “I call people rich,” Henry James had one of his characters say, “when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.