Overworked NHS staff let down by miserly governments

Overworked NHS staff let down by miserly governments
Sir: Charles Hopkins (letter, 23 March) properly admonishes those who do not recognise that the NHS has been and is very cheap – taking approximately 6.4 per cent of GDP compared with the health spending of other Western democracies of between 8 and 12 per cent, the highest being Canada and the USA. When it got to the “Any last questions?” stage, I said, blithely: “So, are you a mad axe murderer?” Somewhere behind his eyes, for a microsecond, there was a wild but utterly unmistakable glint, like a stoat’s in the undergrowth baring its blood-spattered fangs.When we turned him down for the job he phoned my boss, spluttering with rage and obscenities. Didn’t we bastarding bastards realise that he’d had to change train three times to come to see us and he’d bought a brand new tie for the interview, so we’d better effing well refund him? Even as I write, he is probably squatting in a multinational’s stationery cupboard, lapping at the entrails of the tea-boy.He came to mind when I watched an episode of The Apprentice, the programme where would-be tycoons and assorted sociopaths perform straightforward business tasks with incredible ineptitude for Sir Alan Sugar. Instead, she was repeatedly raped and forced to work as a prostitute in London, Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester and Sheffield. She changed hands seven times, sold from one gang of traffickers to another, until she ran barefoot from a nightclub in Sheffield to a local police station. The men found guilty of trafficking her were illegal immigrants from Kosovo and Macedonia, whom the judge ordered to be deported when they complete their prison sentences.

A couple of weeks ago, three men were jailed for a total of 40 years at Sheffield Crown Court for selling a teenage girl as a sex slave. The 15-year-old came to Britain from Lithuania in the summer of 2004, believing she had found a holiday job in a restaurant. The Solicitor General, Harriet Harman, mentioned it in a major speech last week – and another case in which a 17-year-old Russian woman was provided with a false Lithuanian passport and offered a job as a waitress in Spain. She was actually taken to Belgium, where she was forced to work as a prostitute and sold to an Albanian man called Dimitrov, who brought her to London. She was finally rescued with the help of a cleaner.The involvement of so many east Europeans, whether as members of criminal gangs or their victims, provides a screen for the other essential component in trafficking: the punters. “It would be more comfortable to just focus on the traffickers and their victims,” Harman said last week, “but we must focus on the men who use these girls as well.” She is right: it is local demand – British men who visit anonymous flats and houses to have sex with terrified young women – that creates the trade from which traffickers get their profits But Harman didn’t stop there.

She pointed out that men who have sex with trafficked women are committing criminal offences, and called on the police to charge them (and the traffickers) with rape.It is a relief to hear one of the Government’s most senior law officers come out and say this. I told him that I presumed he’d had many a famous face wander in here since this was essentially North Hollywood by the sea.”Clint’s been in here a couple of times and Bill Clinton ate here once.” Clinton has been everywhere I’ve ever eaten in the States. I was half tempted to hand Pepe a Trigger Happy TV signed photo to encourage some new blood, but I knew that Niven would have hurled it into the Med, so I desisted.Back in Monterey I had a marvellous meal of New Zealand mussels in spicy linguini washed down with a gorgeous local Navarro white. I started chatting to the owner, a youngish Italian guy who had taken the place over from his dad, whose pictures strangling various large unfortunate fish were festooned all over the walls. There are still two pictures of Niven on the walls along with many a long gone Hollywood star and some slightly more dodgy French “celebrities”.A couple of years ago and the place was still going, having survived years of conflict remarkably unscathed.

This is another essential for this type of restaurant: it must have seen better days.It would have particularly flourished in the late Fifties and early Sixties when movie stars patrolled the international playboy circuit and didn’t sit around doing Vegan t’ai chi in their gated mansions in Beverly Hills.Growing up in Lebanon there was a place in Byblos called Pepe Abed’s which was very much on that circuit. I looked around the walls at the pictures and there was no sign of Niven. I could see that George Hamilton and Sophia Loren, among others, had graced the place, but no Niven. I called Captain Bird’s Eye over and asked him whether Niven had ever supped here. Sure enough, at the mere mention of his name, he brought out a big picture of Niven winking at the camera, with his arm round a much younger Long John Silver. “David Niven, Gregory Peck, Orson Welles, they have all been to my restaurant, but now everything change [sic], nobody comes no more.” He looked my table up and down with his one good eye in undisguised contempt. The food was gorgeous and fresh but there was just something wrong.

It’s always near the port and it absolutely has to have a faded black and white picture of David Niven He really liked liked his fish suppers. I remember being terribly disappointed when I was in Chez Sams in Essaouira in Morocco It was a great place. Hidden behind the fishermen’s nets and detritus at the bottom of the port you can easily miss it.There was a beaming elderly owner who was a bit of a “character”, by which I mean he wore a captain’s hat and an eye patch. We stopped outside a nondescript place on the side of the road and he pointed inside I stepped in and all was well. There were the crisp white linen tablecloths, the black and white pictures on the wall and a man busy shucking oysters. Bingo, I knew there would be one somewhere, there always is.I’m in California on a bit of a road trip north of San Francisco in wine and weed country, but I just popped down south to Monterey for a day.