Druin Burch

I have spent a quarter of a century caring for people dying from smoking. Deaths of this sort are not only premature but often horrible. My mother’s death from lung cancer was both. The puritan nature of my medical heart should, therefore, leap up at the new restrictions of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, introduced to parliament today. Smoking, Labour have declared, should be banned outside schools and hospitals. How they intend to police the ban, they haven't said. Self-righteous pleasure at seeing other people’s freedoms being reduced – unhealthy freedoms one disapproves of – should come naturally to a practising doctor. Instead, I’m struggling to feel even a frisson of morally superior joy. Something is amiss.

Over my quarter-of-a-century of being a doctor, I have overseen thousands of deaths. For a busy hospital physician, this is not an unusual number. Helping people die is a core part of our job. In the Commons today, the Assisted Dying Bill gets its first reading. But the debate about this bill is missing a crucial detail: assisted dying is already something of a reality. For those in unsalvageable agony, I like to think it happens almost automatically. Neither people, nor the NHS, being perfect, there will be errors and omissions. But I’m confident that assisted dying, in a sense, happens often already, and I speak from experience.  As junior doctors we were taught that we had the power to kill Hospital is the most common place of death.

Kemi Badenoch kicked up an almighty stink when she argued at the weekend that not all cultures are ‘equally valid’ when it comes to immigration. The Tory leadership contender was forced to clarify her comments, made in the Sunday Telegraph. ‘I actually think it extraordinary to think that's an unusual or controversial thing to say,’ she told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. The truth is, Badenoch is right – and to pretend otherwise is a mistake. There can be no better reminder that the different qualities of culture matter very much indeed I’m a doctor and the idea that all cultures are equal, at least in the way they practice medicine, is absurd. Some years ago, the historian David Wootton wrote a slim and beautifully argued book called Bad Medicine.

'The wise bustle and laugh as they walk, but fools bustle and are important,' wrote F.L. Lucas a century ago. 'And this, probably is all the difference between them.' The government and the British Medical Association, who yesterday announced that henceforth junior doctors will be called 'resident doctors', are bustling and self-important fools. I was 37 when I ceased being a junior doctor and became a consultant. Not quite the glittering early success of Pitt the Younger, but I had the common comfort of being ordinary and surrounded by peers roughly my age. I search my memory for the awful horrors caused by carrying around the name ‘junior’ all those years, but I search in vain. No mental scars seem apparent.