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Sir: Do any of the editorial staff read Taki’s outpourings prior to publication? This week’s rant (High life, 8 March) about the NHS should have received closer scrutiny before going to press. By his own admission, Taki has never had to go to a hospital in Britain. His views on the subject are therefore, at best, second-hand. Lord Mancroft’s recent unfortunate outburst is of dubious veracity and cannot be used as support for Taki’s opinions.
There is a rigorous NHS complaints procedure to help dissatisfied patients, including Lord Mancroft. A letter to the local hospital is an appropriate first step. If unhappy with the outcome, patients can then discuss their complaints with the Healthcare Commission: misusing a platform in the House of Lords benefits nobody. Taki would be taken more seriously if he visited a few hospitals in this country and awaited the conclusion of any Healthcare Commission investigation of Lord Mancroft’s complaint. In the meantime, his musings amount merely to so much drivel.
Craig Goldsack
Chairman, Department of Anaesthesia,
University College Hospital, London NW1
Lost soul
Sir: Many of your Christian readers will respond to Martin Rowson (‘I could never believe in God’, 8 March) not by trying to pick holes in his atheist ramblings, as he seems to expect, but by quietly praying for his lost soul. Many, like me, will also be thinking to themselves: ‘What a tedious and nauseating chap!’
Gus Teljer
Little Massingham, Norfolk
Personal testament
Sir: At a recent Westminster Abbey memorial service I was invited to read a passage from the New Testament. Despite an expressed preference for the King James Authorised Version, the Abbey authorities made clear they expected the modernised text — which, they informed me, ‘is the one used by the Abbey’ — to be adhered to, and I reluctantly complied.
One can but admire the open-mindedness of the Church of England these days toward traditions of other faiths. Is it then too much to hope that in one of London’s two main Anglican places of worship, Church members themselves might enjoy a similar deference to their preferences? Or is the beautiful Authorised Version, a few years short of its 400th anniversary, now officially banished from the city of its birth?
Sir John Weston
Richmond, Surrey
Wrong about Bea
Sir: I deeply regret having written in a column a fortnight ago (‘Boris’s most brilliant wheeze’, 1 March) that Bea Campbell, one of the signatories to the letter endorsing Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London, was a ‘crop-headed, lesbian feminist member of the National Association of Irrationally Furious Women Against Everything who works in Newcastle.’ It is clear from Ms Campbell’s letter last week that an apology is in order: I of course accept that she does not work in Newcastle.
Newcastle’s loss, in my opinion.
Rod Liddle
Marlborough, Wiltshire
History lesson
Sir: Lord Adonis says (Letters, 8 March) that ‘it doesn’t need the Conservatives to “bring the Swedish education revolution to Britain”’ because Labour reformers have already done so in the shape of the academies programme.
The academies programme is a typical piece of Labour rebranding — this time of the Conservative city technology college programme introduced in 1986 by the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and secretary of state for education Kenneth Baker.
In the teeth of Labour opposition it was Conservative, not Labour, reformers who, in Lord Adonis’s words, ‘sought to introduce independent state-funded schools into England’ — concentrated in precisely the areas of low standards highlighted by Mr Nelson.
Andrew Mitchell MP
House of Commons, London, SW1
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