St Crispin’s, the changing clocks and the meaning of time
Today the clocks change and today is St Crispin’s Day, anniversary of the battles of Agincourt and Balaclava. Legend says…
The irony of the Palestinian poppy
‘Israel has a history of appropriating Palestinian culture,’ says the website palestinepoppy.com. This is where you can purchase your Palestinian poppy…
Barbarism cannot triumph in France
On Bastille Day, 1883, the people of Limoges inaugurated a beautiful new town hall, paid for from the legacy of…
Who’s to say Simon Pegg doesn’t have ADHD?
Simon Pegg has announced his diagnosis of ADHD, a condition now so well known that its abbreviation is normally left…
Why is the United States so bad at executing people?
Christa Pike has been on death row for more than 30 years. This week, the state of Tennessee finally tried…
Ranulph Fiennes and the perils of depriving liberty
Sir Ranulph Fiennes reached the summit of Everest at the age of 65. After eight years in the military, including…
The Hobbit is not a great book
The Hobbit was published on this day in 1937. It is a book I treasure, and not one of the…
Are we diagnosing too many people with ADHD?
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder was named in the 1980s, and by the end of that decade forty people in Britain…
Lucy Letby and the truth about NHS managers
Read the Thirlwall report on the neonatal deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital, and two kinds of culpability emerge.…
How to fix Britain’s ‘sick note’ disease
Alan Milburn, Labour grandee and member of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, has said our country’s sick note system…
Can AI really spot heart disease in less than two seconds?
September is here, and the mists and mellow fruitfulness have arrived as promptly as John Keats could have wished. His…
Fixing depressed kids is a near-impossible business
As a young Emergency Department doctor, I developed a spiel for the kids who came in with mental health problems.…
Is the high-street pharmacy in danger?
Only in France have I ever looked forward to attending a pharmacy. Napoleonic Paris, in response to the fatal incompetence…
Why people cared about Jason Arday
Don’t badmouth the dead, said Chilon of Sparta. Over time, the phrase became a positive injunction to say nothing of…
We need more emergency phone alerts
Last night, my phone, which was set to silent, erupted with the sort of siren one associates with immediately life-threatening…
Will the NHS get serious about prescribing weight loss drugs?
‘The weight is over,’ read an advert on the side of a bus outside my hospital this morning. The first…
The NHS is not in a crisis of racism
The Society of Radiographers have said racism is rising in the NHS. They give the example of a patient refusing…
Why I’m ignoring the hosepipe ban – and you should too
I returned from holiday to find parched lawns and a deliciously cool babbling brook where the road had been. Up…
Burnham is wrong to model social care reform on the NHS
There have been trimmings and ornaments: the bus fare cap and the performative opening of a No. 10 North in…
A free-to-use National Care Service will never work
As a former adviser on social care reform to a Conservative prime minister, allow me to explain why Andy Burnham’s…
The NHS is fundamentally dishonest
This weekend, the excellent health editor of the Sunday Times, Shaun Lintern, revealed how NHS England has been suppressing damaging reports…
Why the bus £2 price cap might just pay off for Burnham
Andy Burnham has announced a reduction in the cap on English bus fares, down from Starmer’s £3. Remarkably, he might…
The joyous ridicule of Stella Creasy’s avian error
‘Stella Creasy’s bird-brained parrot alert,’ ran a Steerpike headline yesterday. The Labour MP for Walthamstow had posted a video of…
The NHS can’t cope with this heat
The weather in 1976, like the football ten years before, lingers in our national memory. But already on some measures…
It must be harder for the NHS to strike
The BMA makes lots of vague demands for recognition and autonomy, control and civility – Madeline Grant, hearing similar words…
