After the season of good will, the season of bad omen. More Blu-Tack than tack sharp, Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer, stuck at the end of last week to her message that there was no such thing as a safe limit to alcohol consumption, but if you wanted to live dangerously, then she supposed up to 14 units a week was tops. On the Today programme, she was the worthy teacher cajoling the dull child, only to be out-smarted by J Webb, who popped the public health message balloon by pointing out that normal drivers face a similar lifetime risk of death as that implied by the new alcohol limit, yet the Government has yet to advise us that there is no safe level of driving, or that drivers should limit themselves to 14 miles a week. The balloon popped so far above Dame Sally’s head that she missed it. When Jay repeated the point, the response was of the ‘oh no, we don’t need to bother with that sort of nonsense round here’ kind, followed by more chugging rhetoric on the risk of dying from breast cancer.
