Category: “Health”

The Guardian asked me for a piece yesterday on the news that Catherine Zeta-Jones was being treated for bipolar disorder. Here is the piece I wrote for them. In an ideal world, it would not take a film star to get the media focused on mental illness. But we don’t live in an ideal world, [...]

There has been a touch of the ‘I had that David Cameron in the back of my cab’ to the Prime Minister this week. Street parties for the Royal Wedding … all them Labour councils (allegedly) stopping people having fun, elf’n’safety blahdiblah … then he takes on the issue of the lack of black students [...]

First of all, thanks for all the responses to yesterday’s blog asking for examples of frontline cuts to mental health services. Thanks also to Mark Brown, editor of One in Four, for sending me a brilliant description of why ‘the frontline’ is different in mental health services from other aspects of NHS care. He and [...]

Stuart Prebble is a soon-to-be 60 year old TV programme maker of considerable repute. Of the telly things I have done, the ones I felt had the greatest depth and integrity were the ones I did with Stuart’s Liberty Bell company – including a three part series on The Blair Years,  and, best of all [...]

If anything underlined the hero to zero journey made by poor old Nick Clegg, it is the furore over his intervention yesterday about internships. It must have seemed so obvious to Clegg and his political comms team . . He has to find ways of differentiating himself from the Tories. Hence his foolish and inaccurate [...]

As health secretary Andrew Lansley stumbles through one of the most humiliating weeks of his career, at least his Cabinet colleague Caroline Spelman can boast her own little place in history as a result. The environment secretary is the first member of the coalition Cabinet to have become a verb … as in ‘Lansley’s just [...]

Geoff Boycott was one of my childhood heroes. Growing up as a sports nut in Yorkshire, I loved his technique, his attitude, his cussedness, and the focus he brought to Yorkshire County Cricket Club, whose players back then all came from the county. So taken was I with his brilliance that I started a Geoff [...]

It’s fascinating to watch liberal commentators say how blindingly obvious it is that military action should be taken to deal with a fascist dictator killing his own people (aka Gaddafi) … in many instances the same liberal commentators who remain so angry at the action taken to deal with a fascist dictator who had been [...]

It says something for the insularity of the UK media that The Guardian makes such a big deal of the idea of special reports from our European neighbours. Too often, the editor rightly says, the countries of Europe are reported purely in terms of their relations with Britain. This was something of a bugbear of [...]

I have given Nick Clegg a mild (very mild) kicking in the Spectator diary this week, so may I say a few words of praise and thanks to the embattled deputy PM. If it is true that the government, at Clegg’s insistence, is intending to repeal section 141 of the Mental Health Act as part [...]