Getting Down in Tony's Bunker

There are some people whose privacy even the Vicar of Downing Street respects: rich and famous people, for example. The breakup of the relationship between William Windsor and Kate Middleton has "stunned the world" (with one or two exceptions) and has given rise to the usual crop of fascinating theories, including "Kate's background, William's army career, the Royal Family and the pressure of intense media attention". Appalled by the media intrusion into the lives of people who, after all, have contributed so much good to our society by providing fodder for Sky News and its ilk, his reverence has decreed, in characteristically joined-up prose, that the sundered lovers "should be left alone now without reams of stuff being written that I can assure you, from my experience of royal stories, most of which will be complete nonsense". People in public life, his reverence said, are generally prepared to accept a certain amount of press attention: "My experience of it actually", from long chats with the likes of Bono and the Bee Gees, "is that what concerns people is not so much the invasion of their privacy as such, because I think most people in public life accept that you are bound to be a public issue and item in that sense." Sounds jolly sensible of them. Many even put out press releases to facilitate the process. The real problem, his reverence said, is "more that usually whatever is discussed about you publicly is surrounded by a whole lot of other stuff that is either unfair or sometimes completely untrue and that is the thing that really gets people down".

An example of this very process emerged on the very same programme, namely the BBC's Politics Show (a title eminently suited to the New Labour style, not to mention the discussion of the affairs of William Windsor, who has presumably been specially bred to be above politics). Some beastly non-managerial types at the Royal College of Nursing are spreading the vile rumour that more than twenty-two thousand NHS jobs have been lost over the past eighteen months and that almost seventy-five per cent of newly-qualified nurses are unable to find work. Eighty-seven per cent of specialist nurses claimed that cuts are affecting patient care; forty-seven per cent claimed they knew of cuts in their particular specialty; and almost a fifth claimed to be at risk of redundancy. Of course, this is all either unfair or sometimes completely untrue and that is the thing that really gets his reverence down: "Actually, there have been only about 300 clinical jobs lost. "The fact is, today we have a workforce which is 300,000 more than it was in 1997." As a result, in a little more than eighteen months' time the issue of waiting lists will be "effectively dealt with", actually.