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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?

RELATIVES of Ronnie Biggs say that the release of the Great Train robber will make a big 'spiritual' difference to the family.

Well, that's nice.

I'm sure that the family of train driver Jack Mills, who never recovered from being beaten up during the 1963 robbery, will be delighted.

Mr Mills, you may recall, was 58 at the time of the attack.

He was battered with the handle of an axe, and handcuffed.

He never returned to work. In 1970 he died of leukaemia.

Biggs was handed a 30-year sentence but escaped after 15 months and went on the run for more than 30 years.

The vicious thug lived the high life in Australia and Brazil, held up two fingers to Britain and was treated like a VIP when he decided to come back for free medical treatment in a stunt engineered by The Sun.

Now he is all over the national news, thanks to Justice Secretary Jack Straw's shameful U-turn.

After previously blocking the release, saying that Biggs had shown no remorse, Mr Straw decided to let the robber go on "compassionate grounds" - because he is frail and suffering from pneumonia.

Michael Biggs says his father has expressed regret for the robbery, but does not regret "living the life he had".

Jack Mills, of course, has been all but forgotten in the mass hysteria.

He did not have chance to live the life he might have had.

THEY say there is no fool like an old fool.

Certainly, there is no fool like an old football manager.

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Ron Atkinson, the former West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa coach, did not win many friends when he unwisely uttered remarks about black footballer Marcel Desailly live on television.

The Cafe Latte society immediately labelled him a racist.

This despite the fact that he has been instrumental in encouraging black footballers throughout his career.

Now you might think that the old adage 'once bitten, twice shy' is sensible.

Not Atkinson.

He agreed to appear in a forthcoming fractious episode of Channel Four's Celebrity Wife Swap, which will be aired next month.

The Conservatives want to launch dozens of new TV stations across the nation to broadcast local news.

Why?

If existing regional TV news programmes have any useful function at all it is to demonstrate that television is totally ill-suited to localised news.

In some areas both BBC and ITV regional news is little better than a joke.

And even at this level ITV says it can no longer afford to produce and transmit the service.

Which is why the Government wants to slice £80 million a year off the cash received by the BBC from licence payers in order to keep ITV regional news on air.


There are more than a million unemployed people in this country who have not worked a day since New Labour came to power twelve years ago.

The best part of another two million have been without work for seven years or more.

There are any number of explanations for these bleak statistics just revealed by the Department of Work and Pensions.

Some of the jobless are, of course, simply bone-idle and enjoy sitting on their backsides while living off the rest of us.

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Ronnie Biggs is a despicable old crook who deserves to die in prison.

But Justice Secretary Jack Straw's decision to ensure he does just that poses one very large question.

What about the rest of them?

Biggs was given 30 years for his part in the Great Train Robbery back in the Sixties.

The irony is that under our laughable parole system all he had to do was behave himself, say he was sorry and in 10 years he would have walked free.

That would have been a quarter of a century ago.

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The Home Office is inviting us to be shocked and amazed that the number of women fined for being drunk and disorderly has risen by a third in the past three years.

What we should be outraged about is that the numbers aren't even HIGHER.

The statistics show that total number of females who paid a penalty for being legless reached just 7,930 in twelve months.

That's a mere 21 a night for the entire nation.

An enthusiastic young copper could find that many female drunks in any town centre on any Friday night.

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Boys as young as 12 are to be given "condom cards" so that they can pick up free contraceptives.

TV celebrity Bear Grylls has been appointed as the new Chief Scout. Mr. Grylls is the star of Channel 4's got-up action series "Born Survivor".

The show features the 34 years old supposedly surviving in hostile territory. But it has already been admitted that when he was portrayed as roughing it in the wild places of California he was in fact spending his nights in a luxury hotel.

The "sulphuric gases" that surrounded him turned out to be the work of his production crew and a smoke machine.

So presumably the nation's 450,000 Scouts can expect some fascinating new celebrity-style challenges under the guidance of their youngest ever leader.

Perhaps bracing outdoor weekends will in future be centred on the requirement to leave a hotel bedroom window open at night. And tough tests of enterprise will involve Surviving For 48 Hours Only On What Can Be Purchased From Waitrose.

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Authors

George Tyndale

George Tyndale - Sunday Mercury columnist

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