Things go from bad to worse as far as my life with the NHS goes. Earlier this week I reported the mishandling for the second time this month of my visit to a dermatologist at nearby hospitals (St Mary’s and Hammersmith). One would have thought that that would be enough for one month but, blow me down, Chelsea and Westminster’s ambulance service rocked up this morning whilst I was still asleep seeking to take me to an opthalmology appointment of which I was wholly unaware. The chap in charge of this expedition is OK since I was able some months ago to write in his support in the misuse of ambulance services and therefore had to assess his willingness and reliability when asserting the truth to me.
He assured my wife that the straps on his power-track wheelchair were sufficiently long to go round my excessively large stomach and that that restriction would not apply. But he went away no doubt privately fuming that his time had been yet again wasted.
I do not know what the cost to the NHS of all this totally ineffectual palava is so far this month but I guess it is of the order of £1,000, possibly more.
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This morning’s DTel features Professor Karol Sikora whom I met about twenty years ago in connection with MedSol. Professor Sikora is a leading and highly respected oncologist and here he recounts the madness of NHS management who are more concerned with protecting their backsides than getting to the truth and therefore improvement of the NHS.
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In the meantime I have also spent half an hour considering a tax case which revolves entirely around French and British taxation law. This correspondence has been going on for about a year and, frankly, it is proving tedious and pointless. I have been seeking to persuade my client, a highly civilised and reasonable Frenchman, to sue HMRC with all the delays and expense entailed since, as matters stand, he has a cast iron case. For my latest move I am getting the Paris-based lawyers to converse in French only with HMRC’s Leeds-based representative. This should be interesting even if I am not optimistic.
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This morning’s Daily Mail features an Alex Brummer piece on the importance of the Royal Mail continuing to be appallingly mismanaged so to appeal to the sentimental stupidity of the public. This is not because he believes it. It is because a central principle of Daily Mail writing is to develop a hate every day. Brummer’s contribution is to invent total nonsense and pass it off as reasonable and culturally sensible. He wants Kretinsky’s bid for IDS to be so inhibited that nothing happens.
This is part of his campaign in case after case to stop the offshore takeover of London-quoted companies in the public eye. That’s where he judges, probably correctly, that he maintains and possibly increases his readership.
So my position is unchanged: IDS will be taken over by Kretinsky since there is no alternative. Still a buy at 325p.