Page 16 Daily Mail, Friday, August 23, 2019COMMENT
We need an appetite to
solve NHS food crisis
CONVEYING the importance of eating
healthily to fight sickness, Hippocrates
said: ‘Let food be thy medicine.’
Two millennia on, the Greek physician’s
words remain true: A nourishing diet is
essential to any patient’s recuperation.
But those of us who have been in hospital
know to our cost the dismal plates of
rubbery meat, chips and soggy vegetables
dished up when we are at our lowest ebb.
Seriously ill patients are regularly served
unpalatable meals that fail to provide even
basic standards of nutrition.
From both a medical and economic
perspective, it makes scant sense. Surely
unwholesome fare only increases a
convalescent’s chances of staying longer in
hospital – or, worse, being readmitted.
And the NHS squanders vast sums as
unappetising dishes are shunned by repulsed
patients and thrown away untouched.
Scandalously, some hospitals spend little
more than £2 a day feeding each patient – a
few pence more than prisoners get.
Because many lack kitchens, meals are
routinely cooked up to a year earlier in
factories, frozen and shipped to hospitals
(although, as the Mail revealed this week,
in-house catering can be equally wretched).
Tragically, NHS food standards came into
the spotlight recently when six patients died
after eating contaminated sandwiches. So
we commend Prime Minister Boris Johnson
for launching a ‘root and branch’ review.
TV chef Prue Leith will lead the crusade
to revamp the way 140 million meals are
served in our infirmaries. One idea? Employ
chefs to replace pre-packaged food with
freshly-prepared, mouth-watering menus.
But a note of caution. There is a doomed
history of celebrity food tsars being wheeled
in to improve our benighted hospital food.
Michelin-starred Albert Roux and TV
presenter Loyd Grossman crashed and
burned, bruised by Government inaction.
Good intentions aren’t enough. When it
comes to nutrition on wards, ministers
must have a hearty appetite to succeed.
Le breakthrough?
WILL wonders never cease? Before Mr
Johnson visited Emmanuel Macron, he was
braced for a frosty reception in Paris.
Indeed, the French president was
expected to refuse point-blank to
renegotiate the Brexit deal.
In provocative remarks, he warned that if
Britain quit the EU without a pact we would
endure ‘historic vassalisation’ to the US – a
demeaned 51st State (apparently missing
the irony that the Irish backstop would,
instead, leave us subjugated to Brussels).
But yesterday, Mr Macron followed Angela
Merkel’s footsteps and suggested the
controversial withdrawal agreement could
be ‘reshuffled’ – if the UK devises a
workable border plan. Certainly, that
counts as progress.
In these pages, ex-Tory minister Greg
Hands describes a possible technological
solution to avoid customs checks.
We mustn’t exaggerate Mr Johnson’s
success. But so far he is confounding his
sceptics by taking significant steps to ensure
a safe passage out of the Brexit maze.
No pill is a panacea
A NEW prescription pill could save
thousands of lives among over-50s by
slashing the risk of strokes and heart
attacks. Plainly, this is welcome.
Taken as a preventative measure, the 2p
tablet may save the NHS millions and spare
victims and their families a world of suffering.
But the Mail offers a word of warning.
It is already deeply troubling that millions
of pensioners take a cocktail of seven
different drugs every single day.
Isn’t there a danger that we are falling into
the trap of ‘over-medicalising’ patients?
And then, won’t they be encouraged to
duck responsibility for their own wellbeing
by eating unhealthily and exercising less?
After all, no pill is a panacea.
If I happen to die
from a pig falling on
my head, you have
my permission to^
roar with laughter
people — but not only is it not funny to
poke fun at people with Tourette’s, it’s not
even that funny a joke, is it?’
In the spirit of these times, I should say
at once that Tourette’s is a hugely dis-
tressing condition for sufferers and their
families, and my heart goes out to them.
But isn’t it sometimes healthy — cathar-
tic, even — to laugh at life’s cruelties,
instead of wallowing in victimhood?
Whatever the truth, Falafel was far from
alone this week in being told by po-faced
virtue-signallers that an attempt at a joke
was no laughing matter.
Next to incur the wrath of the politically
correct was Gary Lineker, who drew offi-
cial complaints to the BBC over a joshing
remark at the expense of his Match of the
Day co-hosts. ‘It’s a strong start to the
Premier League season,’ he said. ‘Real
hair-raising times ... unless you’re Alan
Shearer and Danny Murphy.’
The camera then panned to the two pun-
dits — neither sporting a single hair on his
shining skull — laughing and shaking
their heads, as bald as eggs.Preposterous
In most circumstances, I’d be reluctant
to defend Lineker — himself as preachy a
peddler of virtue-signalling pieties as you
could hope to avoid.
But it’s surely preposterous to add bald-
ing men to the growing list of victims enti-
tled to official protection from jocular
comments. And I write as a 65-year-old
growing distinctly thin on top myself.
But for those who seem to revel in taking
offence, the week had hardly begun. Next
to complain about an -ism was 80-year-old
Phyllis Hidden, after a visit with her
husband Robert to the Riverside Hotel in
Kendal, Cumbria.
She said she was left ‘incensed’ and
‘shaking with anger’ when she discovered
that instead of a table number, a waiter
had entered the words ‘old people’ on the
couple’s bill for lunchtime drinks and
pate. ‘It’s a terrible thing to label people
like that,’ she said. ‘Age shouldn’t be what
defines you.’
For heaven’s sake. Even in these hyper-
sensitive times, can it really be thought
offensive to describe an octogenarian as
old? You’d think a product of the wartime
generation might have a thicker skin.
Scroll forward, next, to Wednesday, when
the nation’s guardians against -ismsT
O everyone who hasn’t
heard it, I warmly recom-
mend Piers Morgan’s mag-
nificent diatribe against
‘utterly, pathetically illib-
eral liberals’, aired this week on the
Ben Shapiro Show by the Califor-
nia-based internet platform,
PodcastOne.
I know Piers isn’t everyone’s cup of tea,
vilified as he is in particular by holier-than-
thou actors, academics and bien pensant
broadcasters who despise the 63 million
Americans who voted his chum and spar-
ring partner Donald Trump into office.
But open-minded people the world over
will surely acknowledge the truth behind
his warning that vindictive attacks on free
expression by those who claim to be liber-
als have become a ‘massive problem’.
As he puts it: ‘What’s the point of calling
yourself a liberal if you don’t allow anyone
else to have a different view? This snow-
flake culture, this victimhood culture ...
everyone has to think a certain way,
behave a certain way ...
‘It’s all completely skewed to an environ-
ment in which everyone is offended by
everything, no one is allowed to say any-
thing and no one is allowed to say a joke.’
In this stifling atmosphere of political
correctness, Morgan argues, it’s no wonder
that voters turn to forceful, populist lead-
ers who say it’s all nonsense.Nonsense
Bang on cue, this week has thrown up a
host of examples of nonsense from self-
appointed censors determined to take
offence where it’s clear none is intended.
It began on Monday with a fatuous row
over the pun selected by a public vote as
the winner of Dave TV’s award for the
Funniest Joke at the Edinburgh Fringe
Festival: ‘I keep randomly shouting out
“broccoli” and “cauliflower” — I think I
might have florets.’
Now, some may agree with me that Olaf
Falafel’s one-liner was a little on the lame
side. In my view it wasn’t a patch on previ-
ous winners, such as Tim Vine’s 2014 entry:
‘I’ve decided to sell my Hoover — well, it
was just collecting dust.’ Indeed, if I’d had
the last word on this year’s contenders, I’d
have given the prize to Ross Smith, who
came fifth with this effort: ‘A thesaurus is
great. There’s no other word for it.’
But then of course something that tick-
les me may well leave others cold. Humour
is a matter of personal taste, after all.
Believe it or not, I even have a friend who,
inexplicably, fails to find anything funny in
the works of P. G. Wodehouse.
Equally inexplicably, some claim to be
amused by Nish Kumar’s pious Lefty plat-
itudes on BBC2 satire The Mash Report.
But whether we find Olaf Falafel’s 2019
winner funny or not, it should be abun-
dantly clear to the meanest intelligence
that he meant no harm by it.
Yet this didn’t stop a Tourette’s Syn-
drome charity from mounting its high
horse and demanding an apology for his
insensitivity. Said Suzanne Dobson, UK
chief executive of Tourettes [sic] Action:
‘Humour is a great way of educatingturned their fire on the Army, accusing it
of sexism because regiments light-heart-
edly refer to sewing sets carried by sol-
diers as ‘housewife kits’.
Shadow Defence Secretary Nia Griffith
said the phrase was outdated. Lib Dem
armed forces spokesman Jamie Stone
condemned it as sexist and embarrassing.
Not to be outdone, the SNP’s Martin
Docherty-Hughes said that language was
extremely important and ‘clearly someone
in the MoD needs to get with it in terms of
coming into the 21st century’.
More depressing still, an abject MoD has
surrendered to those who’ve complained,
declaring that the term housewife kits ‘no
longer has a place in the forces’. God help
us all if our defence chiefs ever have some-
thing more serious to fret about.
Which brings me to yesterday morning
and yet another storm in a teacup,
whipped up by illiberal liberals who seek
to silence and punish attempts at humour
that offend them.Outrage
This time their targets were the BBC’s
John Humphrys and former Brexit Secre-
tary David Davis, who appeared to make
light of an incident at the World Tango
Championships in Buenos Aires, in which
a Russian contestant was disqualified for
punching his dancing partner, who hap-
pened to be his wife.
Appearing on the Today programme, Mr
Davis told Humphrys: ‘I guess this is our
last tango.’ ‘It is indeed,’ said the veteran
broadcaster, ‘but I promise not to punch
you if you don’t punch me.’ At which Mr
Davis said: ‘Ah, very good.’
Cue a storm of outrage from the likes of
Labour MP Chris Bryant, who suggested
the Today host should resign, tweeting:
‘How on earth can it be right for John
Humphrys to JOKE about a man punch-
ing his tango partner?’
Now, whether or not you agree with me
that there’s something intrinsically funny
about a spat between tango dancers, isn’t
it seriously deranged to suggest Mr
Humphrys was in any way condoning or
encouraging domestic violence?
To illustrate what I mean, I commend
Graham Greene’s wonderful short story, A
Shocking Accident — in my book, one of
the finest pieces of comic writing in our
language. In it, a housemaster struggles to
suppress his laughter when he breaks the
news to a nine-year-old boy that his father
has been killed by a pig falling on his head
from a balcony in Naples.
Greene’s brilliant achievement is to
bring home both the tragedy of the boy’s
bereavement and the comedy of the
circumstances of his father’s death.
But woe betide any latter-day Greene
who told such a tale today. He’d have the
humourless champions of political cor-
rectness crashing down on him for making
fun of pig-related fatal accidents (of which
there are many, I see from the internet).
So I end with this pledge: as a heavy
smoker and drinker, I fully expect to die of
something painful and unamusing, such
as lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver.
But if I should happen to be killed by a
pig falling on my head, I give you all my
permission to laugh out loud.TOM UTLEY