September 2010 Archives

ANOTHER celebrity baby, another picture on Twitter ... as if we hadn't had enough of these blatant self-publicists.

Telly cook Jamie Oliver celebrated the arrival of his fourth child by posting an image of the shrivelled thing on the micro-blogging site, there to be gawped at by all manner of freaks, geeks and weirdos.

Oliver is walking a dubious, well-trodden path, with TV airhead Dannii Minogue using Twitter just recently to display pictures of her new sprog.

Of course, these people know full well that the pictures will be picked up by newspapers and therefore sent around the world on websites.

Poor little Buddy Oliver. Not only has he be saddled with a ridiculous name but he's also had a picture of his bum splashed around the worldwide web.

His dad's life may be a media circus but I really cannot see the point in subjecting a child, let alone a newborn baby, to such intense scrutiny.

Isn't it enough for celebrities to be joyful at the birth of a healthy baby?

Do they really need to bask in the reflected publicity and wallow in some bizarre display of virility?

Give it a few months and Oliver and wife Jools will be complaining, like they all do, about press intrusion. Total twits.

WORRIED about your over-worked, under-stress GP? Don't be.

A staggering 950 family docs now earn over £200,000 a year.

There's a super-rich set of 700 gold-plated pill dispensers who were paid between £200,000 and £250,000 in 2008-09 - and that's an increase of 50 on the previous year.

The size of the West Midlands means that a substantial number of GPs working here have to clock in for only five years in order to earn £1 million.

The figures, released by the NHS Information Centre, also reveal that the average salary of a practice medic is now a very healthy £105,300.

This is a drop of £800 on the year before so thousands of impoverished GPs will have had to cancel orders for Versace medical bags and golden stethoscopes.

The size of GPs' salaries is an affront to workers throughout both the public and private sector, where cuts and belt-tightening are the order of the day.

The coalition Government is to impose a two-year pay freeze on NHS staff earning more than £21,000, but it is unclear how this will apply to GPs.

The genie was let out of the bottle by the discredited Labour government, which bungled the renegotiation of doctors' contracts and introduced a performance-related bonus scheme that was so generous it would make a Premiership footballer blush.

But wait. We now learn GPs aren't up to the job when it comes to dealing with the most vulnerable patients. A Government-backed review, led by Prof Sir Ian Kennedy, has concluded children's service are a "sea of mediocrity".

Ever feel like you've been taken for a ride?