Druin Burch

Alan Milburn, Labour grandee and member of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, has said our country’s sick note system ‘is just bloody insane’. He was in Holland with Sir Gareth Southgate. They visited on our behalf, trying to work out why the Dutch have less than 5 per cent of their youth not in education, employment or training, whereas for us the figure is not far off triple that, at 13.6 per cent. ‘We know that once you enter the welfare system... the stickiness kicks in,’ Milburn said, noting that people have a 50 per cent chance of still being on health and disability benefits 15 years after first receiving them. ‘Everybody talks about the fiscal disaster.

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.