ITV, please repeat 'Breathtaking'

All photos ITV

Last night, we watched the final episode of Breathtaking, the three-part docudrama based on Dr Rachel Clarke's memoir of being a hospital doctor during the Covid pandemic. Joanne Froggatt gives a tour de force performance as Dr Abbey Henderson, an acute medicine consultant, from meeting the new coronavirus for the first time until the first roll-out of vaccines. Somehow she expresses the whole gamut of emotions mostly with a mask covering half her face and often with a visor as well.

There are very short counter bursts of complacent politicians (such as a Prime Minister announcing he wouldn't stop shaking people's hands, and a smiling Chancellor handing out dishes in a restaurant at the announcement of the "Eat out to help out" scheme) blandly pronouncing that everything is under control while we watch the continuing reality of the situation in the hospital wards. 

(The following paragraph has a number of plot spoilers, and so if you've not watched it you may wish to skip it, though the real thing is infinitely more powerful and moving.) This episode had many scenes which stick in my mind. For example, Ant, the registrar, pleading by phone with his vulnerable mother to stay at home until she can get the promised vaccine, and her regurgitating social media stories of the mythical disease, empty hospitals and dangerous vaccines; and later Abbey running the gauntlet of shouting and spitting Covid-deniers at the hospital doors on her home after an emotional and exhausting shift. Then there was the scene of Emma, a student doctor, whom Abbey finds crouching in emotional collapse and the two of them together silently sharing their intolerable grief. There's the scene of Abbey smoothing the brow of a dying terrified patient, and of her having to explain to the husband of a Covid patient with MS that if she deteriorates her preexisting conditions means she won't be moved to Intensive Care (on the assumption that her chances of recovery are compromised - thank God I was spared that, I thought). At other times we see her desperately and furiously arguing with the administrator and senior doctors hidebound by NHS and Government rules and guidelines, and later we witness her whistleblowing radio interview in which she reveals the real situation in hospital dealing with Covid and risks disclosing her name and job. 

What are my abiding reactions and conclusions? First it was one of gratitude to Rachel Clarke for writing her memories and for creating the drama with Jed Mercurio, and to ITV for broadcasting it. More it was of overwhelming gratitude to the doctors and nurses of the NHS in whose debt we were and remain. It was eye-opening to see the reality of life inside a hospital during a prolonged emergency - from the staff point of view. It was heart-breaking (yes, I did cry) to witness the stresses and the sacrifices made on doctors and nurses. Having watched all the episodes, I do wish that everyone, including MPs, would watch it and give our medics the honour and reward that they are due. I trust that ITV will broadcast it again - perhaps when the Covid Inquiry publishes its findings, or when it is next in the news. Lastly, I intend to read Breathtaking myself and Rachel Clarke's other books.

Fatal news fatigue

I have a confession to make. I’m ashamed of it. Really. I was once a news addict, but now I’m suffering from news fatigue – and I’m not sure which is worse.

Once when there was a big news story breaking I would follow it assiduously. And I’d regularly listen to Radio 4’s Today programme, hearing the news every thirty minutes. However, now I’m fed up with it, even though I much prefer the new guns presenting it (like the penetrating but polite Mishal Husain) to the old blunderbuses (like unsubtle and pompous John Humphrys). So my news-listening and watching tends to be restricted to local news and Channel 4 News (and occasionally for a different perspective foreign stations such as Al-Jazeera or Russia Today). Sometimes I’ll send myself to sleep the BBC’s World Tonight or its World Service. Mostly I tend to follow the news on-line on the Deutsche Welle and the Independent’s websites.

What is regrettable about news fatigue is that I am convinced of the importance of political understanding and engagement. Too often do I witness people airing half-baked sound-bite headlines and revealing their ignorance. What used to be pub prejudice is of course now largely replaced by social media reinforcement, as we, the gullible public, have no idea of the source or veracity of what appears to be news and informed opinion. I am sure the BBC have very authoritative people commenting on news stories including their own staff, but I doubt whether the people they use from various “think tanks” are at all objective. In my view their political backers ought to be declared. And as for their vox pop interviews they seem no better than the repeating of uninformed prejudice.

And that is the danger of news fatigue, that we get fed up with hearing the same things about issues which really matter. It’s of course largely a result of the 24-hour news cycle. I’m old enough to recall the days of a morning and evening news broadcast, which seemed to be sufficient. Do we really need to hear hour after hour, day after day, week after week, more about the latest sanctions and bellicose threats of Donald Trump's aims to make the rest of the world conform to his America-first agenda? Do we have to hear repeatedly all the twists and turns, and all the ifs and if-nots of Brexit? The requirement of “news” 24 hours a day means either you hear the same reports and opinions reinforced every hour or even half-hour, or you switch off literally or mentally. And such political disengagement is unhealthy for a society, because, when demagogues such as Trump or Orban, LePen or Farage seize on an issue like dogs with a bone, they are able to play on people’s ignorance and prejudices and create discontent until society itself is divided and eventually broken. In our western world’s case it is arguable that the 2008 financial crash provided the hammer for destroying society’s fabric. What is odd and disturbing is that the rich élite wolves who parade themselves as “ordinary” common-or-garden sheep, those most reponsible for causing our trouble, rather than choking, seem to float to the top.

And now here in the UK the spectre of the ultimate shape-shifting tousle-haired self-styled ram as our next unelected Prime Minister has been raised like a mad spirit of Britain Future. Preserve us! Begone, foul fiend!

The spreading wen

There’s a scene in Yes, Minister in which the minister, Jim Hacker, and his private secretary, Bernard Woolley, are being driven to Oxford for Hacker to be wined and dined at one of the Oxford University colleges. On the M40 a thought occurs to Jim Hacker, why there are two really good roads to Oxford (M40 and M4) and none to any of the ports, such as Southampton, Dover or Lowestoft. “Nearly all the Permanent Secretaries went to Oxford,” replies Bernard, “and most Oxford colleges do really good dinners…”

I was reminded of this when the local news was again about the “brain-belt expressway” announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond (Oxford University), in his autumn statement designed to run between Oxford, Milton Keynes and Cambridge. Before the summer holiday the Secretary of State for Transport, Chris Grayling (Cambridge University), announced, “We expect to make a decision on the preferred corridor for the Oxford to Cambridge expressway this summer.” Five days ago an indicative route (Option B) was announced, which local naturalists say is the worst of all possible options. “The potential impact on biodiversity of corridor B is so serious that the route should have been discounted entirely” (Estelle Bailey, BBOWT). The potential cost was estimated as just less that £3.5 billion in July 2017, but we know how public spending estimates escalate. It’s projected for completion in 2050. It’s proposed to build lots of houses along the route (lots means, I read, a million – the equivalent of three Sheffields); and so London creeps north. The impact on biodiversity would of course be huge.

Will the Prime Minister, Theresa May (Oxford University), have enough energy or will power after Brexit to question the sense of the scheme? What do you think? You might think that I who had the immense privilege of spending some of my education in both Cambridge and Oxford would be an enthusiastic supporter of this vanity project. I know that it has lots of fancy justifications behind it dreamed up, no doubt, by dutiful Oxbridge civil servants. However there is already a fledgling restoration of the former Varsity railway line starting from Oxford, which could extend to Bedford and Cambridge and have far less impact on the environment and, one would imagine, cost less. More public transport must be preferable to more private cars and juggernauts. And there's something called the internet.

What most perplexes me is what has happened to the famous Northern Powerhouse once so loved by the Tories? Perhaps it was defenestrated along with young George Osborne. So HS2 gets only as far as that great northern city, Birmingham. Heathrow gets enormous investment with yet another runway, while regional airports which are accessible to most of the country remain undeveloped. No one, it seems, has the political courage proactively to resist the metropolitan drift which clogs the infrastructure of the south-east and starves the rest of the country.

It was William Cobbett in his Rural Rides (1830) who described London as the Great Wen (sebaceous cyst) and asked, "But, what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, 'the metropolis of the empire?”

The answer is that, though the empire is long gone (despite the illusions of some Brexiteers), the monster has continued to spread and no amount of green-belt sticking plaster has been able to restrain it and it is as ugly and unnecessary as a boil, since no one has the courage to squeeze it and nourish other parts of the body politic instead.

Keeping religion out of politics

It's commonly claimed that religion should be kept strictly private. There's a long tradition of that view stretching in this country at least back to Thomas à Becket whom Henry II famously called "a low-born cleric" or a "turbulent priest", because he would not put the King's interests above divine ordinance, leading to his assassination in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. In more recent times it was echoed by the Thatcher government when Robert Runcie prayed both for British and Argentine casualties after the Falklands' conflict and then put his name to the 1985 Faith in the City report (a government "source" rubbishing it before publication as Marxist propaganda). It was particularly puzzling and galling that former Scot's Guard and Military Cross winner, favoured Tory choice for the archbishopric, should be so turbulent as to suggest that the individualistic policies of the government might have contributed to poverty in the cities of Britain. And of course Rowan Williams got up the nose of successive governments, including Mr Blair's, with his rigorous questioning. And now David Cameron must be having similar thoughts to Margaret Thatcher concerning Old Etonian, Justin Welby. Of all people, the former oil executive, "within a month", questioning how benefit cuts would affect the poorest children - what is it about the post of Archbishop that suddenly turns sound men into bleeding-heart liberals? Certainly arch-conservative columnist, Melanie Phillips, who sometimes talks good sense, is at a loss to explain it and can only vent her spleen on such meddlesome men.

Strangely enough I heard her on The Moral Maze last week maintaining, I think, that belief in God was needed to underpin ethical behaviour; I recall her mentioning "conscience". It might occur to her that the way we treat the vulnerable, such as children, in our society is, or should be, a matter of conscience. I guess it certainly is for Justin Welby and his 44 merry colleagues. It seems to me that they are doing no more than their Christian conscience demands, as paralleled in the early equivalent of a welfare state. "They only asked us to remember the poor - the very thing I was eager to do." In this case, the Children's Society, because it is that admirable charity which has, I suspect, enlisted the bishops' and other church leaders' support, is asking for the welfare uprating bill to be amended in the House of Lords next week in order to protect children in particular from the ravages of inflation, which the financially robust are able to ride. The letter written by the bishops and published by the Sunday Telegraph seems to me a justifiable request to a still well-off government to remember the poor. And it seems to me that faith without a public conscience is dead. So I am glad that the new Archbishop has already indicated his intention to follow Jesus in being "on the side of the poor" and powerless.

Having said that let me add a postscript concerning the plight of politicians. It is all too easy and all too frequently done to indulge in government-bashing. After all the High Court of Parliament is adversarial, and it is right that governments be held to account. However on Saturday I was talking to someone who has had the closest contact with the highest ranks of government, and he said that ministers have an impossible job; their days are filled with meetings and briefings from civil servants and advisers. They really have no time for quiet reflection about the big issues. Once in power they hardly have time to think. The implication of what he said, I take it, was, "Have some sympathy for these people. They're trying their hardest with impossible jobs."

On Saturday, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, who's not a politician I readily warm to, gave a speech looking to the next General Election. It was mischievously cast by the media as a leadership salvo. For me, more interesting because I suspect more genuine, was what she said at the outset: "It’s often said that politics is about public service, and of course it is. But to me, it’s about much more than that. Politics is a passion. A passion to make a difference. To change lives for the better. To stand up for people who work hard and want to get on in life. To help people to help themselves and their families. To help those in genuine need." I do appreciate that there's a bit of coding about strivers and skivers in those last phrases. Nevertheless the phrase "a passion to make a difference" does, I reckon, reflect the initial and fundamental motivation of the majority of those who enter the risky front line of politics, with its minefield of corrupting power. I guess that's why St Paul urged, "Pray every way you know how,... especially for those in power to govern well".

Predictably bonkers

Oh no, not again! First Dilnot. Now Leveson. Faced with a crisis, whether the cost of social care or the collapse of trust in journalism, David Cameron sets up a commission or an enquiry, under distinguished and extremely intelligent experts, who spend many months of intensive work of evidence-gathering and deliberation. They then come up with long reports with workable conclusions.

Then in Parliament the Prime Minister makes polite noises about the reports as he presents his verdict. But when it comes down to the nub of the matter he weaves and ducks. What a shame! In the case of Dilnot, the Government has been dithering about the limit of contribution towards social care that people should be expected to make. The suspicion of course is that HMG wants to set it higher than Dilnot's recommendation, to reduce its own perfectly affordable input. The effect of that would of course be to penalise those with modest savings, as they'd lose a larger proportion than those with fat-cat pensions.

And now with Leveson the plan is to present a bill to Parliament which, as the Culture Minister, Maria Miller, admitted to John Humphris on the Today programme, is designed to prove Lord Leveson's proposal unworkable. Unsurprisingly virtually all today's newspapers have been rubbishing the report. When you come to think of it, that's a pretty strong recommendation for it. They don't want to see their licence to kill reputations, privacy and even worse curtailed - and that is what they fear a more independent effective regulatory body might do. In Parliament time and again we heard the old canard that Lord Leveson was proposing state regulation of the press, the myth which that same press is very busy promulgating. It is clear that he is not. He is proposing that someone guards those who are keeping an eye on the guardians of our freedom.

Lady Helena Kennedy QC, the great champion of free speech, compared the Prime Minister's rejection of Leveson's central recommendation to a genuine Whitehall memo that followed the last enquiry into press standards by Sir David Calcutt 20 years ago. "We know we're not going to do anything. We can't say we're not going to do anything, so we have to say something that covers up the fact that we're not going to do anything." As she said, it could have been a line out of Yes, Minister. The tragic thing is that "not anything" means nothing for people like the Dowlers and the McCanns. David Cameron assured such victims that he would ensure the implementation of Lord Leveson's proposals "unless they were completely bonkers". Apparently he reckons they are. Most of us know they're not, and wonder whether our politicians have learned anything from the past few years.

Why the picture at the top of this piece? Well, you know what they say about kicking things into the long grass... One way we can try to prevent this happening to the Leveson report is signing the petition launched today by Gerry McCann and Chris Jefferies, the traduced teacher from Bristol:   http://hackinginquiry.org/petition/.

Reflections in the light of day

© National Geographic

The Church of God usually deals with a rather long time-frame. Last week the Church of England met the temporality of politics in which "a week is a long time", including a number of politicians pontificating (an activity usually reserved for popes) about its affairs and issuing thinly veiled threats against it in view of its recent inexplicable entry into madness, as its failure to agree about women bishops was regarded. Even the Prime Minister upbraided it to get "with the programme" - though I wonder whether he had actually read, let alone understood, the Draft Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure [item 501] - or if 99% of the MPs had for that matter. (I'm sure he'd have approved to the reference to civil partners in it, if he had.) It must be frustrating for governments, once they have devolved powers to a body, to find them being used in an uncongenial way. But, as the saying goes, as you make your bed, so you must lie on it.

However there you go. The media, including the blogosphere, have had a field day. Even my small last piece had an extraordinary circulation, which I am at a bit of a loss to account for. It seems it may have provided first aid for some of the women, not least priests, who were reeling from the blow that Tuesday had inflicted. It was, I must say, a long week for me, and though I longed to move on I kept chewing the matter and the debate over. This post might, I think, be an attempt to find some sort of resolution in my own mind, so that tomorrow I can back to business as normal.

I was surprised to find that my disappointment over the vote was not shared by everyone. I think at least one of our local clergy thought the measure was not sufficiently clearly defined, and therefore didn't offer enough protection for conscientious objectors. Perhaps if the Code of Practice which every diocesan bishop would have been required to draw up to “respect” the sincere requests of parishes and vicars who found themselves unable to accept the ministry of a woman bishop had been clarified beforehand (or at least the minimum requirements of a code) rather than the simple obligation to have a code, some of the fears might have been allayed. My listening to the debate, however, revealed that a lot of the argument was about the principle (or doctrine) of women in church leadership, which had already been agreed upon, rather than about the practicality of safeguarding the "traditionalists". I do understand that in fact producing specific safeguards is easier proposed than achieved. A previous attempt was felt to create second-class female bishops. 

Another of my reflections was regret that we would have been even further out of step with the most ancient churches, like the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Churches, who of course have only male priests. One of the clearest demands Jesus made of his followers was that they should be "one", i.e. unified; and one of the scandalous results of either outcome would be to deepen divisions in what likes to be regarded as the Christian Church. Of course, it may be too that those who long for another Council to continue Vatican 2's work may in time be rewarded and the Catholic Church may change.

A friendly theologian came to lunch on Saturday and I blithely expected him to confirm my half-baked impressions. Sadly he was more cautious about my interpretations of the evidence! He pointed out that actually there's a lot about submitting in the New Testament, such as submitting to the authorities, children submitting to parents, wives to their husbands - "and each submitting to the other," I pointed out. "Indeed," he agreed urbanely! - and even the Son submitting to his Father. There was, he reckoned, a structure of authority within Creation, reflecting the Trinity. I may not have got it exactly right, as by now my carefully constructed universe was rocking! Reflecting on it later, it occurred to me that there's an essential difference between voluntary submission and institutionalised submission. There's a world of difference between saying, "Choose to submit yourselves..." and "You have to submit...". In fact, submission is of its very nature a voluntary attitude. And to be blunt, it seems to me to be a precarious business to argue from the nature of the Trinity, which to me at least it is an incomprehensible mystery. 

He also took me to task over the meaning of the word, head (kephalé), the part of the anatomy, when I argued that we overlay it with meanings of superiority, such as head honcho, head teacher, head man. The Bible, said I, places the will and the centre of motivation lower down the body than the head. "Hmm," he said sceptically. And Jane told me to smile and stop giving him indigestion!

Afterwards I reflected, "What has all that to do with leadership in the Church?" After all, doesn't the Church have a very different view of authority, although you might not think it with all the medieval paraphernalia of power, from chunky rings and princely robes to "enthronement"? How I long, by the way, for a bishop to say, "It shall not be so with me. I know it will at first be a shock to you, but I am not going to go in procession with my outriders"! Our model of authority is Christ, the slave on his knees serving, not lauding it. And don't we see women exercising the spiritual and natural gifts, including leadership, throughout the New Testament church, including apostleship and eldership? In fact, it seems to me we make these terms too technical and too restricted. After all, they are trying to describe functions in a new sort of body which has never existed before with the limited palette of the language of a patriarchal society. This is the new Temple. "This is what is happening, some hosting, some prophesying, some teaching, some leading, some healing etc etc." All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills. And it may be, may it not, that he empowers a woman with oversight (episkopé)? 

It struck me that he was quite Elizabethan in his emphasis on the importance of hierarchical stability  - but then so was my revered Shakespeare. The enormity of Macbeth's crime is that he has murdered the King. 

"Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope

The Lord's anointed temple, and stole thence

The life o' the building!" It is a return to chaos (confusion) or anarchy. And that is most to be feared. Yet it also occurs to me that the great conservative evangelical of the 17th century, another of my great Englishmen, who uttered one of my all-time favourite sayings, "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken", was not afraid to contemplate the unthinkable for the sake of justice. We may think history proved him mistaken, but actually parliamentary democracy owes Oliver Cromwell a great deal.

St Mary Magdalene Church, Bruges

To give him his due, I’ve painted our divergence in rather starker terms than he would recognise. I don’t think he’d be troubled by women bishops…. But I think he didn’t want me to write off those with different views from mine too dismissively. It’s possible that he (or I) may be mistaken – but, of course, I'm still sure I’m right! I return to the radical nature of Jesus' mission. In Tom Wright's words, "The resurrection of Jesus is the only Christian guide to the question of where history is going. Unlike the ambiguous 'progress' of the Enlightenment, it is full of promise — especially the promise of transformed gender roles.... The promise of new creation, symbolised by the role of Mary Magdalene in the Easter stories, is the reality." 

So then I went to church on Sunday morning and, I assume, joined with tens of thousands of others in confessing, 

“Most merciful God,

Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

we confess that we have sinned in thought, word and deed.

We have not loved you with our whole heart.

We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves.

In your mercy, forgive what we have been,

help us to amend what we are, and direct what we shall be;

that we may do justly, love mercy,

and walk humbly with you, our God,”

which seemed very apt in the light of the previous week's emotions.

There was time before lunch to watch BBC's The Big Questions with Nicky Campbell - which I confess to not having watched right through before. It happened to be on... Women Bishops. (How grateful the BBC must have been to have a home news story which took the spotlight off itself!) I'm not sure how many of the participants in the debate were in a state of grace at the beginning, but it didn't take a minute for the gloves to come off in one corner at least. 

My friend Sally Hitchiner was in one of the front rows and was admirably restrained, even when invited to speak. Like me she was very disappointed by the vote, and she was hurt by some of the other participants' doubting of her priesthood. I have to say in terms of graciousness the antis (i.e. anti the measure) won the debate. I understand how hurt the pros were. But, as Sally demonstrated, you didn't need to be full of bile and insult to make your point. You didn't, Rev Pitcher, have to go red and wag your finger at those who disagreed with you. It wasn't necessary to tell the rather nice, articulate Zoe Ham that she was a misogynist. She clearly wasn't. As for the Speaker's Chaplain slagging off the other side as Biblically illiterate, that was simply rude and untrue. If I'd been a disinterested spectator, the fury of the pro-women troika on that side of the studio would have had two effects: one, to make me doubt the validity of their argument; and two, to put me off the Christian message of love. It was Marshall McLuhan who said, "The medium is the message." If you appear to hate your fellow-Christians who differ from you, what's your good news mean? It will, I thought, take a more skilled mediator than Peter Hitchens to bring this issue to a satisfactory resolution. Fortunately, in Justin Welby we have just such a man, perhaps with Sally Hitchiner to advise him!

It will too take all his leadership skills to repair the damage, not to the Church's image - because that doesn't matter -, but to its witness to both the love and the justice of God. It would be worse than sad if Parliament took it into its muddled head to tell the Church - or any other faith group - how to organise its affairs. It is equally sad that, as it stands, the Church's prophetic voice has been compromised by not having its own house in order.

I trust and pray that the issue will be visited again soon and an arrangement which accommodates all consciences is arrived at. I hope we will stop labelling each other and be one. Maybe something better will emerge from all this travail. Impossible? Well, it won't be long before we hear again the familiar story of ultimate encouragement, which starts with a faithful unassuming woman and includes the statement, "For nothing will be impossible with God," and includes Mary's great song of faith and freedom, the Magnificat, 

BBC The Nativity

"And his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;

he has brought down the mighty from their thrones

and exalted those of humble estate;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich he has sent away empty."

Amen – or do I mean Ah... men :-( ? Sisters, don't lose hope.