‘About a third of the billions poured into the NHS pours straight back out again into the Cayman Islands’

• AS we wait to see if the NHS disintegrates faster than the Tory government or vice versa, one can only assume, in light of his proclamation that a few days’ of strikes by nurses and paramedics have annihilated it, that Grant Shapps thinks we are all as thick as his own front bench.

Remainer hold-outs will blame Brexit because they blame Brexit for everything, but successive administrations have been presiding over the rot for decades.

Following John Major’s lead Tony Blair mortgaged the whole thing to private equity spivs in tax havens, under the egregious PFI, private finance initiative, whereby about a third of the billions poured into the NHS pours straight back out again into the Cayman Islands.

Even what money remains is not regarded as a potential for good by the medical supplies community but as a chance for further plunder: the pharmaceutical industries (£10 per paracetamol; cancer drugs the sky’s the limit); IT suppliers (hundreds of millions in dodgy IT and software that doesn’t work); staff agencies (£2,500 per shift, a couple of hundred to the medic; pocket the rest) etc, etc.

Then, just as we naively assumed things couldn’t get any worse, the stupidity of lockdown simultaneously exposed how threadbare the NHS had become and inspired our business community to even greater heights of greed in supplying hundreds of tons of condemned PPE, personal protective equipment, which they have now been awarded even more lucrative contracts to burn.

We will have a new Labour government in a year or two on the utterly desperate grounds that nothing could possibly be worse than this… could it?

Happy new year!

MARTIN KENNEDY, W1