A Good Innings

As one wait ends, another begins. Today, the Government published its Workforce Plan – a “blueprint to boost the NHS workforce by 200,000.” The details will be pored over but, thus far, it has received a broadly positive response. Not least from Shadow Health Minister, Wes Streeting who offered his respect to the Plan –…

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Going forward, it is what it is…

Private Eye has an occasional column – the Curse of Gnome – in which people the magazine has pursued, or been sued by, are reported as having come to a sticky end. Robert Maxwell, James Goldsmith and Sonia Sutcliffe all faced the Curse. Their hex on Rupert Murdoch has yet to materialise. Imitation being a…

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Escape from the Chateau

Insight has been indulging in a little schadenfreude this week, along with the red tops, Daily Mail and, significantly, the broadsheets.  That a TV darling turns out, off-camera, to be a monstrous bully, pervert, drug addict or all three is nothing new. Think Clarkson, John Leslie, Frank Bough, Rolf Harris. It’s a long list. But, news…

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G’bye and g’day

There’s a very old canard about a traveller, on arriving at the Australian border control, being asked if he had a criminal record. To which the man answers, “I didn’t know that was still mandatory…”. It’s not a joke that goes down terribly well these days.  The genesis of the quip is over two hundred…

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Paws for thought

Paws for thought Never shy to point out the absurdities of life – in particular as they relate to the communications industry or the health and care sector – this has been something of a bumper week. Especially for veganism: After years of being vilified as full of sugar and salt, beans on toast have been…

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Transported to another place…

Motoring news The announcement has not been made public yet, but you now have a new Secretary of State for Transport. It will come as something of a surprise to Insight readers to learn that the new man for the job is me. I appreciate that this will be somewhat shocking news to the incumbent,…

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Poets Cornered?

Does the rise of the chatbots threaten the nation’s poets? Not for the first time, Insight has arrived somewhat late to the party, in this instance, the rave that is ChatGPT. Depending on your point of view, this latest bit of artificial intelligence, (full name, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) will either debase the art of…

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Missing the point?

Did the Lancashire Constabulary get it right? This blog was originally written before the discovery of a body on the River Wyre over the weekend. Sadly, it seems inevitable that it will turn out to be that of missing mother, Nicola Bulley. In the week prior to this, the British media had gone into one…

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