Any chance Sir Liam Donaldson will give us back our billion quid?

I dealt with quite a few lawyers when I was at the BBC. They fell into two major categories: the helpful and the unhelpful. 

The helpful ones told you what you could probably get away with (particularly handy when you phoned them to read out a script or play them an interview clip three minutes before the report you were producing was due to be aired on the main evening news bulletin): the unhelpful ones – who didn’t tend to work in News -  took an age to deliberate, then presented you with an endless back-covering list of every possible legal objection to achieving what you wanted to achieve. The first group gave every indication of wanting the show to go on: the second group seemed permanently outraged that anyone in the BBC actually wanted to launch any programmes or services.

The first category comprised, as far as I was concerned, good lawyers – they understood that you needed a quick answer, and didn’t automatically say “No” just to cover themselves: they were willing to use their judgment as well as their knowledge. The second category were bad lawyers, more interested in protecting themselves than in serving the needs of the organization they were supposed to serve.

I feel much the same way about senior government appointees asked to make big calls about potential crises. The helpful ones weigh the evidence, consider the risks, look at the big picture, and then suggest the most helpful way forward - preferably one that won’t make us any more bankrupt than we already are, won’t disrupt too many people’s lives, and won’t terrify everyone unnecessarily. The unhelpful ones immediately panic, choose a doomsday scenario as the most likely outcome of a failure to act (not acting is always seen as a failure in Quangoland), and then recommend vastly expensive, disruptive measures entirely designed to stop them being accused of committing the ultimate sin - not doing enough!

Sir Liam Donaldson, Chief Medical Officer for England, and Chief Medical Adviser for the United Kingdom, retired last week. Thank goodness! Last July, he warned us that 65,000 Britons could die of Swine Flu and half of the nation’s children could catch it. Six months later, a total of 360 Britons had died – and some of those probably died of conditions other than Swine Flu. That represented a shortfall of at least 64,640 deaths compared with Donaldson’s original doomsday scenario. The rate of death from Swine Flu turned out to be far lower than normal influenza outbreaks. More people probably died of the terror brought on by our CMO’s hysterical ravings than of influenza.  

More than a billion pounds were wasted on vaccine to combat the actually-not-particularly-deadly virus.

In case you thought Sir Liam had been eased out of his job because of his ridiculous overreaction to what turned out to be a non-crisis, you’d be wrong: he had been due to retire last year, but was asked to stay on to – yes, you guessed it – deal with the Swine Flu pandemic!

Now, of course, Sir Liam can claim that his swift, decisive actions saved tens of thousands of lives – but they did no such thing. All they will have done is divert money and attention away from those dull, unsexy, terminally (geddit?) uncool diseases and viruses that kill us all the time. For instance, an extra billion spent on bringing down the numbers killed by hospital superbugs would actually have saved far more lives than were lost to Swine Flu – but Sir Liam wouldn’t have received quite as many column inches. 

And now he can retire safe in the knowledge that he managed to cover his own arse while looking like an action hero. Which is exactly the sort of behaviour the last government encouraged its handsomely remunerated “experts” to indulge in. 

Hence, the billions lost by various airlines and the disruption to the lives of over a million British passengers caused by the Civil Aviation Authority and the Met Office’s ludicrous overreaction to an Icelandic volcano blowing its top. All of this tomfoolery has now been proved to have been utterly unnecessary. 

Is it my imagination, or did people used to get fired for getting things this spectacularly, stupidly wrong?

I doubt if Sir Liam has a billion quid handy, but, as the nation’s a bit short at the moment, maybe he’d like to cough up whatever he’s got as some recompense for his i massively costly scaremongering  tactics?