Pearson's poisonous medicine

Allison Pearson's newest column on the NHS is the latest in a long line of lies and distortions.

This week, I’m taking individual columns/news stories and subjecting them to close analysis; think of it as applying a scalpel to the still ribbiting frog of rhetoric. Today’s instalment covers Allison Pearson and the NHS so it’s likely to be as bloody…

Previously in this mini-series:

Tales from the Twat Controller
A front-page story from The Times is little more than a government press release.

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December 9 2022 was the third anniversary of waiting for Allison Pearson to prove that a picture of a child sleeping on the floor at Leeds General Infirmary was faked. The wait will never end as Pearson invented the Great Ormond Street nurse she said had “explained to [her] in detail [how the photo] was ‘100% faked’.”

Pearson’s promise on December 9, 2019, was that she had a “detailed explanation from paediatric nurses explaining why photo of child on the floor [sic] is ‘100% faked’” and that she would “put [it] in The Telegraph [the following] Weds.” She went to rage:

Stage a photo. Cause outrage. Castigate people who doubt it for showing insufficient compassion. Jesus. 

I don’t think he had anything to do with it.

When her next regular column appeared the following Wednesday, there was no sign of the damning explanation. Instead, Pearson’s lie having served its purpose of muddying the waters during a general election campaign, she dedicated it to an attack on the BBC and praise for Boris Johnson’s “magnificent victory”.

She did mention the photo but proof of her passionately held and widely-propagated theory had suddenly evaporated:

BBC bulletins led with angry Gotcha! stories like the one about the Prime Minister failing to respond adequately to a photograph of a child on a hospital floor. That wasn’t the most important news item of the day; it was spite masquerading as compassion.

“Spite masquerading as compassion” is an apt description of Pearson’s latest column¹ on the NHS. What she presents as anger on behalf of her readers is, in fact, glee at such easy material for her moist-eyed cynicism.

To lift from Dylan Thomas, let us begin at the beginning, though I’m taking you into the fevered space of Allison Pearson’s mind rather than the sleepy town of llareggub:

What is wrong with us? I mean, apart from RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) which felled most inhabitants of Pearson Towers over Christmas. RSV (coronavirus in bovver boots) leaves behind a persistent cough that sounds like a cement mixer attached to a piece of elastic. Don’t worry, I should be fine by March. 

Even in this, um, throat-clearing paragraph, Pearson’s deceptive rhetoric is at work.

She begins by assuring the reader that she too has suffered, giving the illness at “Pearson Towers” its specific and technical name to imply a depth of knowledge.

Her ‘Covid sceptic’ ideology is apparent — remember this is the woman who wrote a September 2020 column originally headlined My son has Covid-19. Good… — in that aside calling RSV “coronavirus in bovver boots”. Playing Top Trumps with viruses is all part of Pearson’s continuing effort to claim Covid measures were an overreaction and to justify the many times she has promoted and amplified pandemic conspiracies.

The description of RSV resulting in “a persistent cough that sounds like a cement mixer attached to a piece of elastic” is just bad writing; Pearson treats similes with the same level of respect she accords facts and objective reality.

Next comes a familiar method from the columnist’s toolbox — the confident assertion:

Seasonal illness aside, the real cause for concern is how the UK now has such pitifully low expectations of its health service that we are shrugging off the weekly loss of hundreds of our citizens. 

Who is shrugging off those deaths? Doctors and nurses aren’t. I’m not. You’re not. “We” is a very elastic concept in the hands of a newspaper columnist, used to damn and flatter in the space of a few lines or even in the same paragraph. Who is included in “we” depends entirely on the line being pushed in any particular column but it always includes the columnist and excludes their enemies (real and imagined).

Next Pearson cherrypicks a quote from an expert to make it seem that they support her assessment of the situation, even as it disproves her claim that “we” are shrugging:

Don’t take my word for it. According to Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), a collapse in ambulance response times, gridlock in A&E units and soaring rates of staff turnover are contributing to at least a quarter of the shocking number of avoidable deaths. “We think somewhere between 300 and 500 people are dying as a consequence of delays and problems with urgent and emergency care each week,” reported Dr Boyle with refreshing bluntness. 

Boyle’s words come from a Times Radio interview he gave on New Year’s Day. Here they are in context with his other comments:

What we’re seeing now in terms of these long waits is being associated with increased mortality, and we think somewhere between 300 and 500 people are dying as a consequence of delays and problems with urgent and emergency care each week. We need to actually get a grip on this.

If you look at the graphs, they all are going the wrong way, and I think there needs to be a real reset. We need to be in a situation where we cannot just shrug our shoulders and say ‘This winter was terrible, let’s do nothing until next winter’.

We need to increase our capacity within our hospitals, we need to make sure that there are alternative ways so that people aren’t all just funnelled into the ambulance service and emergency department.

We cannot continue like this – it is unsafe and it is undignified.

Pearson selects the section of Boyle’s comments about deaths because it bolsters
her arguments but doesn’t include his conclusions on why they are happening. The phrase “social care” appears once in her column — in a section that we will come to later — along with the implication that NHS Trusts are in complete control of beds in that sector. She knows they’re not but to say so would spoil her argument by seasoning it with the sharp flavour of complexity.

The pretence that only Allison cares continues:

If all these people have died unnecessarily since last Wednesday – real men and women, beloved fathers and mothers, adored husbands and wives who should still be alive – then that’s a national emergency, clearly. An almost unfathomable tragedy. But where are the TV anchors demanding immediate action? Where is the sepulchral BBC News tour of the morgues in which all those bodies are piling up? Why do these “avoidable deaths”, caused in no small part by managerial incompetence, excite so little outrage? Why do we stay silent rather than criticise the NHS? 

You can see the influence of Pearson’s other life as a purveyor of pappy novels here. It is in the phrase “real men and women” — as opposed to fictional ones — and the heartstring lunge of “beloved fathers and mothers, adored husbands and wives”. To delve further into who Pearson considers “real” would be to free dive into depths of bigotry so oppressive you’d end up face to face with some really weird-looking fish.

The same Allison Pearson who vehemently pushed a conspiracy theory that there was no pandemic in July 2020 and falsely claimed the hospitalisation rate from Covid was 0.5% in July 2021 (it was actually 1.67%) is now pantomiming upset over avoidable deaths. Incidentally, according to the government’s own figures on Covid deaths, 508 people testing positive for the virus died in the week commencing December 11 2022.

Pearson asking, “where is the sepulchral BBC News tour of morgues…?” is an echo of her column from January 2021 (After this grim milestone, we need a glimmer of hope) which castigated the corporation for “remorseless scaremongering”. Columnist heal thyself. Her implication that broadcasters are not covering the crisis is a variant of the old classic “the mainstream media won’t mention this” line.

Here are three examples of the BBC covering the situation from BBC Breakfast (which had reports from correspondents across the country this morning), BBC South East Today, and Newsnight, as well as an episode of the podcast Newscast dedicated to the story. Channel 4 News led with the story last night. Every newspaper and talk radio station is debating the issue. If Allison Pearson believes that “we stay silent rather than criticise the NHS”, she’s closing her eyes and ears to a lot of ‘content’.

Next, we come to the “theory” part of the column (or rather the “I reckon” section), where Pearson lays out her explanation for what’s going on, based on a feeling in her waters and a series of characters she just happens to have met recently who agree with everything she says. From the producer of the fictional Great Ormond Street nurse come… the “charming GP from Kent”, the “impressive young doctor” and “Lottie, the scared mum of an eight-year-old”, each with a story shaped perfectly to fit a gap in Pearson’s word count.

After two exhausting pandemic years, it feels like we are suffering from Catastrophe Fatigue. How else to explain the fact that a nation which whipped itself into a frenzy over daily reported Covid deaths, mainly among patients who had already passed the median age for mortality, now seems numb to the news that people with years of life ahead of them are dying every single day because our health service is in a state of abject collapse.

“Catastrophe Fatigue” and “the No Hope Service” are the two Fetches that Pearson is desperate to make happen in this column (the latter turns up twice). But her central argument — that “the nation” is numb to the crisis — is contradicted by the quotes from Lottie, the young mother, who she claims to have met:

“Third world” is how Lottie, the mum of an eight-year-old girl with a frighteningly high temperature, described the scene which greeted them in paediatric A&E 10 nights ago. Families with children covered the entire floor area – there were toddlers vomiting into paper cups, puddles of urine, babies crying inconsolably. You hit the jackpot if you bagged one of the hard plastic seats on which to sleep upright for six hours, nursing your fretful, feverish child. “It’s unreal,” Lottie said, shaking her head. “How can we call ourselves a civilised country?”

The scene described by ‘Lottie’ sounds very much like the situation at Leeds General Infirmary in December 2019 when the photo that Allison Pearson was so desperate to claim was staged was taken. But the Telegraph company line was different then; there was a general election in progress and a Boris Johnson government to support.

So who does Pearson identify as to blame?

“How can we call ourselves a civilised country?”

A very good question. So where, you may well ask, are all the highly paid NHS managers offering answers to this appalling crisis? Why the hell isn’t Amanda Pritchard, the £255,000-per-annum CEO of NHS England, and her team being hauled over the coals? They’re the ones in charge. Not that you’d know it. Shyer than the African aardvark, and even harder to spot, the NHS senior manager has perfected a camouflage so effective that it’s impossible to tell that he or she has any kind of responsibility for the NHS at all. We give them north of £150 billion a year to provide a health service that preferably doesn’t kill people, but there is zero accountability. Like Jeremy Corbyn at the funeral of a Palestinian terrorist, NHS managers are mysteriously “present but not involved”.

There was a recent opportunity for NHS bosses to be “hauled over the coals” — Amanda Pritchard appeared before the Public Accounts Committee on November 28 2022 — but the main function of NHS England’s CEO is to act as a fireguard for ministers, an expensive precaution to soak up all the blame.

If Pritchard did an extensive media round, Pearson would ask why she wasn’t getting on with her job. Incidentally, on the subject of “the African aardvark”, all aardvarks are African, there’s no other variety, and I suspect Pearson googled “shy animals” and picked the first one on the list.

We already know Pearson treats figures and statistics with the kind of care you’d expect from Harold Shipman rampaging through a nursing home, but “we give them north of £150 billion a year to provide a health service that preferably doesn’t kill people” is even more glib and deceptive than usual. As John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has written, while other countries have continued to grow health spending as a share of GDP, in Britain, it has steadily declined along with wages (nurses’ pay is now 12% below where it was before the 2010 election).

What Pearson is doing there is the classic “use a big number” trick. The reader sees £150 billion and is encouraged to think, “How can that possibly not be enough?” But capital expenditure in the NHS has been cut hugely over 12 years of Tory government and that means while the number of doctors and nurses has gone up, the number of beds has gone down and the equipment needed to get people out of them quicker hasn’t been supplied. Then you add the effects of the pandemic into the picture.

Notice as well that Pearson evokes Jeremy Corbyn as the bogeyman before she even mentions the Prime Minister. The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, a former long-serving Health Secretary is not mentioned at all. The purpose of this column is to play into the idea that “managers” — the perpetual baddies in right-wing rhetoric — are the only ones to blame for NHS failings.

The British public are being gaslighted by these non-managing NHS managers, I think. It’s all our fault, you see. During the Christmas period, NHS trusts had the cheek to issue press releases urging “self-care” over attending A&E. “Stay away from us with your ghastly illnesses! Don’t go out for a run in case you fall or have a heart attack. Avoid alcohol. No thoughtless consumption of sherry trifle! Keep perfectly still, everyone, just for a few months until the winter crisis has passed and please strive to avoid becoming a burden on your local hospital because we won’t send an ambulance to fetch you, you selfish spongers.”

After more evidence of the Telegraph’s continuing cull of sub-editors (“gaslighted”), we get some of Pearson’s patented “humour”. Professor Sir Stephen Powis, National Medical Director of NHS England said during the ambulance strikes:

… people can also help by taking sensible steps to keep themselves and others safe during this period and not ending up in A&E, whether that is drinking responsibly or checking up on a family member or neighbour who may be particularly vulnerable to make sure they are OK.

That became The Sun headline DON’T HAVE FUN and has now become “don’t eat trifle” in Pearson’s presumably RSV-addled mind.

She follows her outburst by saying, “That was basically the gist,” which could really be the motto for her column and the execrable Planet Normal podcast, which are both venues for Pearson to take facts and improvise around them like the world’s most hateful free jazzer.

It’s at this point that we come to her tactical ignorance around social care:

What is truly remarkable is how unremarkable anyone thinks this attitude is. In the past week, dozens of NHS trusts have declared critical incidents because they can “no longer provide safe levels of care”. They make it sound as if this were an act of God rather than a perfectly predictable consequence of not having enough social care beds into which thousands of recovered patients can be discharged. No board of a major company could get away with that “nothing-to-do-wiv-us, gov” attitude to corporate negligence.

Once again the government is freed from responsibility here because Pearson has her army of NHS manager strawmen to swing at; they’re the ones who should magic up the social care beds the government hasn’t invested in and fix the private care homes that consecutive governments of all colours have allowed to profit from suffering.

Our rivers and seas testify to how much corporate negligence is tolerated, as are the receipts for all the inadequate PPE the government bought from its pals.

“Unprecedented pressures caused by flu and Covid!,” cry managers like Chris Hopson, the chief strategy officer of NHS England. I heard Hopson on Radio 4’s World at One on Monday and rapidly became a potential cardiac arrest. Confronted with the tale of a 90-year-old lady with a suspected broken hip who had waited over 27 hours for an ambulance, he said that “everyone in the NHS works to provide the best quality of care possible blah blah…” but “we triage on the basis of clinical priority”. If you don’t have a “life-threatening” condition, if you are merely a frightened nonagenarian in excruciating pain, well, tough.

Andrew McFarlane, whose aged mother it was, had clearly been conditioned by years of NHS propaganda to accept that you mustn’t “put pressure on 999” if you’re “not at death’s door”. What a poignant contrast between McFarlane’s meek acceptance of his mother’s predicament and the chilling lack of contrition from Chris Hopson. Everything, it seemed, was to blame for the crisis in the NHS; except, of course, the NHS. Hopson bridled at the suggestion by the RCEM that between 300 and 500 people were dying unnecessarily each week because conditions in A&E and the ambulance service were so dire. “We need to be very careful about jumping to conclusions about excess mortality numbers,” he burbled complacently. Hospitals are at their most overwhelmed since the pandemic. It was a problem “every Western health system is facing”. Baby Boomers are reaching an age where a lot of them are ill. “We’ve still got 10,000 people who’ve got Covid in hospital beds.”

Having opened the column by talking about RSV — one of the trio of viruses along with increased cases of flu and Covid — Pearson airily dismisses Hopson’s reference to their effect on NHS capacity. She exploits the suffering of Andrew McFarlane’s mother for her own rhetorical purposes and insults McFarlane in the process.

I’ve gone back to listen to that edition of World At One. McFarlane wasn’t “meek”. He explained calmly and clearly the situation he, his mother, and his family were facing. Allison Pearson accusing anyone of peddling propaganda is like Joseph Goebbels complaining he’s been misrepresented. I know a little about what the McFarlane family is going through; my grandfather waited 12 hours for an ambulance and then spent 15 hours in the back of one before being admitted to the hospital.

I also listened to Chris Hopson’s interview. He has the bland, bloodness affect of a senior manager and he sounded undoubtedly glib about the suffering of Andrew McFarlane’s mother. To quote, The Thick of It: “Who was it that did [his] media training? Myra Hindley?”

However, his unwillingness to accept the mortality numbers estimated by Dr Adrian Boyle was justified and understandable. He didn’t “burble”, he outlined a long list of facts that contribute to the mortality figures. Unlike Pearson, he’s not in a position to just pick any number he fancies.

Inevitably, Pearson peppers the reader with more cherry-picked and distorted stats over the next few paragraphs (more than I can dissect in the remainder of this edition). She also conjures up a convenient anonymous NHS staffer, presumably not one of those monstrous managers:

“They’re desperate to get some traction on bringing in new restrictions,” confides a senior source in NHS England, explaining why managers are keen to talk up the very moderate problem now posed by Covid. Anything to distract the blame from where it actually belongs, eh?

When The Telegraph isn’t terrifying its readers with contemporary reds under the bed — “lefties and the woke” — it’s telling them the bone-chilling tale LOCKDOWN RETURNS! Luckily, the cardboard cutout senior NHS England source provides the perfect quote.

It’s not until the 20th paragraph of the piece that Rishi Sunak makes an appearance:

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry when I read that Rishi Sunak is “confident” the Government has provided enough funding to the NHS to cope with the ongoing crisis. A bit like the manufacturer of the Titanic pointing to the reassuringly lavish fittings in the lounge bar. The vast amount of taxpayers’ money thrown at the No Hope Service will do nothing to save this doomed vessel because the root-and-branch reforms required to stop it sinking this winter will take too long; besides, no one has yet found the guts to attempt them.

And here’s the intention of the column spelt out: The NHS is the No Hope Service and it should be dismantled and privatised because it is a “doomed vessel”.

But before that happens Pearson will condescend to her readers, pretending that they have the solutions to the NHS’ problems:

You know, it’s curious but in my experience ordinary people have got a far better grasp of what needs to be done than either cowering politicians or shameless NHS apparatchiks. Telegraph readers’ suggestions include reinstating those 40,000 care-home workers who were sacked for refusing to have the vaccine and giving a much-needed pay rise to social-care workers. 

Bring back the cottage hospital and the convalescent home for those in need of refuge and recuperation. Oh, and ban managers from telling hospital staff to “make sure” they take the six weeks’ paid sick leave to which they are “entitled”. Any or all of those would immediately help to improve staffing levels and free up the 11,000-plus hospital beds currently occupied by elderly patients who are medically fit to be discharged.   

The “40,000 care-home workers” number is often quoted as a result of the vaccine mandate (since rescinded) but it comes from a Nuffield Trust analysis of government figures published in December 2021. That report found that between April 27 and October 26 of that year, 42,000 staff had left the sector, and concluded that it was down to low morale, burnout, uncompetitive wages, a lack of career progression, existing understaffing and the impact of the mandatory vaccination requirement.

Pearson leans on the vaccine mandate explanation because it suits her agenda.

It’s extremely easy for a columnist to blithely talk about “[freeing] up 11,000-plus hospital” beds with a grab bag of solutions she’s selected from the Telegraph mailbag but the reality is complex. Luckily for Allison Pearson, reality is not where she lives.

In a column back in August 2021, she wrote that she’d “had enough of this Covid bollocks² and said she wasn't surprised that GPs were experiencing "a torrent of abuse", condoning and encouraging it. Today's column is a sequel:

… the British people must do something that goes against the grain. We must break free of the coercive control exercised over us by the NHS. We are not to blame for putting it under pressure. We are not at fault for expecting a feverish child or a 90-year-old with a broken hip to receive prompt attention. The NHS is to blame. No longer must we listen with hushed sympathy to the pathetic excuses of its elusive managers. We put tens of billions of our national wealth into healthcare; what we get in return is broken, embarrassing and dangerous. NHS, heal thyself.   

Notice, it’s neither the Secretary of State for Health nor the Prime Minister who she puts in the sights of her readers. If she did, she’d have to admit something about the party her newspaper perpetually supports. Allison Pearson doesn’t care about your pain or your family’s pain; she cares about keeping her editor and the proprietor happy; she cares about keeping her huge wage and private health coverage.

In a sick world, Allison Pearson will always be a purveyor of bad medicine.

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Thanks to DKD, TheResearchArena, EBlair_fan and JP Hill for reading today’s draft.

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1. I’ve used an Archive link here so you can hop over the paywall.

2. Actually, The Telegraph starred the word out but I assume my readers are adults and can cope with the odd swear word. Such as shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Thank you, Mr G. Carlin.