Politics

Doctors have always been political. Medical school is often a cradle of social activism, driven by a syllabus underlining health inequalities and the cultural aspects of disease. Some medics inevitably take up politics: Che Guevara, Salvador Allende and Bashar al-Assad are just a few (notorious) examples. But there are plenty of others, and this crossover between medicine and politics highlights how the study of medicine can easily influence ideology. A different challenge posed, however, is when ideology begins to influence medical policy, corrupting medical decisions. This can be particularly problematic in the field of medical publishing. Medicine relies on the integrity of up-to-date published scientific evidence to find the right

The best thing I can say about Boris Johnson is that he’s not a real Tory. The Prime Minister belongs instead to the popular liberal right, though he seems to get less popular by the day. His appeal to right-wing voters is based on his promise to ‘get Brexit done’ and the demented, 30-tweet-thread rage-pain he stirs in the hearts of some progressives. What these supporters have not yet but one day will have to confront is the fact that Boris is not one of them. Not on immigration, not on climate change, not on the culture wars. Anyone who can establish a substantive difference between his response to the

One of my proudest moments as a Daily Telegraph leader writer came in 2015 when I managed to persuade my masters that their paper should bestow official praise on Harriet Harman as she stepped down (for a second time) as Labour’s interim leader and made way for Jeremy Corbyn. The resulting editorial (you can read it here) raised a few eyebrows, but the most striking thing about it was the number of people on the right of politics who quietly agreed with it. You don’t have to agree with all, or even any, of Harman’s political positions to acknowledge her formidable resilience. There are mountain ranges with less endurance than

Now that we are two months past the peak of the UK coronavirus epidemic, many fear the emergence of a second wave of the disease and remain anxious about any evidence that reopening the country has gone too far. For this reason media headlines like ‘Germany’s R number rockets again – from 1.79 to 2.88’ (Sky News) and ‘UK coronavirus cases no longer falling, ONS figures show’ (the Times) are amplified very quickly. But how worried should we really be by these headlines? By now, we have become familiar with the R number (the average number of people that each infected person will themselves infect) and are alert to the

These may well be the defining few days of the Johnson government. Having failed to make a towering success of the initial response to the Covid-19 crisis – by his own admission on Times Radio this morning – the Prime Minister is now embarked on the kind of structural reform of the machinery of government that will determine whether he will be seen by future generations as a Homeric hero or Homer Simpson. So far we can see the building blocks of the reconstruction, rather than the detail. These blocks include, first, infrastructure investment as a response to the economic calamity that is the consequence of the coronavirus calamity –

Huge infrastructure projects. A massive rise in public spending, and the creation of public works for an army of unemployed. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has started pitching himself as the new Roosevelt, modelling himself on the 1930s American president who spent big to pull the country out of the Great Depression, and re-wrote the rules of economics in the process. At this rate, he’ll be making speeches about there being nothing to fear ‘except fear itself’ and starting fireside chats over the wireless by the end of the week. But hold on. Is FDR a model we really want to emulate? Not really. We don’t face anything like the same challenges,