Daily Mail - 13.08.2019

Page 19

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THE Queen was at Balmoral

when Lord Mountbatten

was murdered in 1979 and

Diana died in 1997. Now,

another dark moment as she is

photographed at nearby Crathie with a

smiling Prince Andrew, whose friendship

with American paedophile Jeffrey

Epstein generates ominous headlines. A

royal source says: ‘The understandable

decision to smile on the way to church

with Andrew as a way of supporting him

might be seen by some as a rare mistake.

Andrew is reported as having arranged a

£15,000 loan for his cash­strapped ex­wife,

Sarah, from Epstein.’ Fergie later said this

was a ‘gigantic error of judgment’.

DOES globe-trotting Brexiteer Nigel

Farage resent his continuing lack of rec-

ognition in the honours list? His mocking

of Prince Harry in Australia as the ‘prince

of wokeness’ and his barb aimed at Prince

Charles – ‘I pray the Queen lives long

enough to save the Commonwealth from

the tyranny of her offspring’ – certainly

suggests so. Although his politics and per-

sonality are not to every taste, Farage’s

‘knight starvation’ indicates Establish-

ment disapproval of Brexit.

WHEN she made her

first London

appearance in decades

at the O2 Arena in

2010, The Guardian’s

critic Peter Bradshaw

gave Dame Julie

Andrews’s stage show

two stars out of five,

writing: ‘Again and

again, after some

scripted chat... she

just wheeled on her five support singers

and let them get on with it, while she sang

very little or just beamed supportively... a

creaky evening.’ Be that as it may, the

veteran songbird, pictured, has sold out

the 2,900­seat Royal Festival Hall (seats

£40 to £125) for her November 2 show, A

Conversation With Dame Julie Andrews.

PHOTOGRAPHED puffing a cigarette, la-di-

da actress Joanna Lumley, 73, has

defended her nicotine habit by saying:

‘You’ve got to die of something. Person-

ally, through my taxes on cigarettes, I’ve

built three hospitals single-handedly. I

never stop giving.’

GEEKY Tory life peer and blogger Lord

Norton, 68, says Brexit can be compared

to planes having to land without landing

gear extended, musing: ‘Much depends

on the skills of the pilot and crew, the

design and resilience of the aircraft and

prevailing weather conditions.’ As an old

comic quipped, ‘Fasten your safety belts

and return the air stewardess to an

upright position!’

HAVING announced that her sex life is

over – ‘I have closed up shop down there’

• octogenarian star Jane Fonda, 81, now
  insists: ‘I love men. I’m not done with
  men.’ She adds that her previous suitors
  ‘were wonderful but victims of a patriar-
  chal belief system’. Poor wretches!

EXPLORER Ranulph Fiennes elaborates

on the story about him sleeping in his car

during visits to London: ‘In hotels, bed

and breakfast can be more than £300 a

night. I have an extremely comfortable

car called a Ford Mondeo, which is long

enough to sleep in. So I can save the £300.’

Ephraim

Hardcastle

Email: [email protected]

‘Rural drug crime is on the rampage – even our fete’s gone to pot!’

LITTLEJOHN IS BACK NEXT WEEK

Superbug ‘evolving into a new species’

A DEADLY superbug is evolving to

survive in hospitals and has developed
to thrive in a sugar­rich Western diet.
The biggest­ever study of gut­infecting
bacterium Clostridium difficile found it is
mutating into two different species, with
one adapted to spread in hospitals.
Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger
Institute and the London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine studied 906 strains
of C.diff from humans, animals and the

environment, and discovered that it has

begun to evolve. The experts, whose find­

ings were published in Nature Genetics,

believe it began adapting to a human diet

thousands of years ago.

One species, or clade, made up around 70

per cent of the samples from hospital

patients and is able to sidestep common

disinfectants. Report author Dr Nitin

Kumar, of the Wellcome Sanger Institute,

said: ‘C.diff is currently forming a new spe­

cies with one group specialised to spread in

hospital environments. This particular bac­

teria was primed to take advantage of mod­

ern healthcare practices and human diets,

before hospitals even existed.’

SENIOR civil servants at By Vanessa Allen

the foreign aid ministry

have pocketed bonuses of

up to £10,000, it emerged

yesterday.
Bonus payments at the
Department for Interna­
tional Development totalled
£1.75million last year –
despite ministers conceding
that Britain’s foreign aid
spending target was
unsustainable.
The payouts were six per cent
higher last year than in the pre­
vious 12 months, and will fuel
calls among Tory MPs for the
department’s £14billion over­
seas aid budget to be cut.
More than £240,000 was
handed out to a handful of top
officials, with a further £1.51mil­
lion going to junior civil serv­
ants in the department.
The Government is one of the
world’s biggest state aid donors,
following a commitment to

spend 0.7 per cent of national

income on helping poorer coun­

tries. But there have been grow­

ing calls for DfID’s budget to be

cut or partially reallocated fol­

lowing scandals about projects

which have benefited from tax­

payers’ cash.

The latest figures from DfID

showed 21 mandarins shared a

year­end bonus pot worth

£147,900 – an average of just

over £7,000 each. An in­year

bonus was awarded to 28 senior

civil servants, who received an

average of almost £3,400.

The department’s former

director­general Joy Hutcheon,

who was paid an annual salary

of £115,000, was awarded a

£10,000 bonus, as was her

replacement Julia Chua.

Meanwhile in the junior ranks,

666 civil servants received a

year­end bonus averaging just

over £1,300. An in­year bonus

was given to 1,374 juniors, who

received an average payout of

£455. It was not clear if some

staff received both in­year and

year­end bonuses.

In January, the then interna­

tional development secretary

Penny Mordaunt admitted Brit­

ain’s foreign aid spending target

was unsustainable. She sug­

gested profits from UK invest­

ments abroad should count

towards the target. Then in June,

eign Office and the Department

for Business.

There has been criticism of

schemes which received fund­

ing, including £285million for a

runway on St Helena, only for

commercial flights to be sus­

pended due to high winds. And

in 2017 the department came

under fire for an £11.8million

plan to fund a girl band dubbed

‘Ethiopia’s Spice Girls’, which

was later halted. That year it

also emerged it had recruited 39

per cent more staff since 2010.

John O’Connell, of the Tax­

Payers’ Alliance, said: ‘Families

and businesses are struggling

under the highest tax burden in

50 years, and they won’t be

pleased to read that so much of

their hard­earned money is

going towards bonuses instead

of front­line services.’

A DfID spokesman said: ‘This

is a normal part of ensuring that

civil servants are incentivised

to perform well and deliver

value for the taxpayer.’

‘Cash for payouts,

not services’

Charity does begin at

home! Foreign aid staf f^

given £1.75m bonuses

Daily Mail, Tuesday, August 13, 2019

her successor Rory Stewart said

more British experts should be

sent around the world to audit

aid projects, and called for a

stronger focus on quality of aid

rather than quantity.

Britain’s foreign aid budget

leapt £682million to a record

£14.1billion in 2017. Of the rise,

£232million came from DfID

and £450million from other

departments such as the For­