We are seeing the first blowback from the introduction last autumn of the Government’s absurdly over-egged Vetting and Barring scheme. Children scheduled for surgery are having their operations cancelled by zealous apparatchiks blocking surgeons who – despite CRB clearance in one trust – are being refused entry to others, where they would otherwise be able to operate. The var, one might say, between stooge and surgeon is on, and all operation bets are off.
On a benign view, this is an example of goal displacement – a triumph of process over outcome. One could leave it at that, were it not for the fact that this triumphant process has trumped real kids needing real operations by real surgeons. And so we have a scheme designed to protect children perversely achieving the opposite result – harm to children.
GMC Revalidation pilots have started. Dr No’s agents have been secretly filming progress, and a transcript of a recent ‘revalidation event’ follows.
For many of its long and illustrious years, the Orient Express travelled across Europe from Calais via Zurich to exotic Eastern destinations. Were it still running today, it might well have found itself doing a brisk trade in one-way tickets to Switzerland, following the DPPs final guidance on prosecuting cases of assisted suicide issued today.
BMA Press Office
One of the more striking and duplicitous bits of Nazi propaganda was their use of the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” – ‘work makes you free’. It was widely used, but never with more cynical and chilling effect than over the entrance gates to the death camps. Dr No cannot help but notice that the Obersturmführers of medical revalidation have already started a creep towards similar twisted propaganda.
We shall probably never know whether Ray Gosling was an inspired stage name, or the portentous real name for a lad who, after a TV life rich in sauce and stuffing, would spend much of his later life stuffed and trussed, before – in a final defiant gesture – spatchcocking himself on camera in a lonely graveyard. 
Unless, that is, you happen to be one of Ray Gosling’s unidentified lovers who happens to be seriously ill. Then you are very likely to find not only that you are an island, but a very small island; in fact a mere clod, about to be washed away by the sea – or, since it is more practical, smothered, while an obliging and obsequious doctor – would you Adam and Eve it – steps outside for a gasper.
Totalitarianism does not arise spontaneously. It arrives instead by a series of steps, each one small enough; and, like the journey of a thousand miles that begins with a single step, many small steps can take us a long way from home; until one day we arrive in a strange world where the pigs walk on two legs, all are equal, but some more so that others, and the clocks strike thirteen. 
Today is St Valentine’s day. It is also, by coincidence, the first anniversary of Dr No’s 
The trouble with love is that it can cover a multitude of sins.