There is no substitute for personal experience. Here are some areas where as a media commentator I’ve felt conscious of its lack this week as I followed the news about the death of Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull: I do not know what it is like to man the cockpit of a US fighter jet seeking to attack and disable hostile forces in Iraq. I do not know what it is like to be part of a British armoured convoy on the ground, as two American Thunderbolt missiles strike. I do not know how operationally important it is to US security that videos like this should not be made public. It follows that I cannot judge the degree of incompetence that led to that strike, or the wrongfulness or otherwise of trying to stop the video being shown.

But of one thing I do have experience. I do know what it is like to be a civil servant in Whitehall, because for two years I was one. There is a culture there that sees the public as a damn nuisance. The culture is endemic and needs to be stamped on very hard indeed.

Civil servants in this case now appear to be playing with a Jesuitical distinction between saying that there was not a video, and not saying that there was one. This is immaterial. A video existed, the MoD knew about it and had seen it, and they kept this knowledge from Matty Hull’s family.

What would have been wrong with telling the truth: that the video existed and had been studied before judgments were reached; but that the Americans did not permit the release of such material. Someone in Whitehall decided not to admit this. This comes close to perpetrating a lie. A decision to mislead was taken. It will have been taken by a real person or persons. There will be names. There will be faces.

Who were they? Where are their photographs in the newspapers? Why do we protect the identities of civil servants when we would never do so in commercial institutions? Let them be identified, drawn through the streets of London in an open cart, and pelted by the families of Service personnel.

- As I (rather nervously) chain-sawed to the ground a dead Scots pine in the hillside wood above my house in Derbyshire on Sunday, I reflected on the importance of locally accessible A & E units. If I cut off the end of my finger or get sawdust in my eye, it really matters that the Whitworth Hospital is only 15 minutes away.

But yesterday’s Times map showing where community hospitals are under threat reveals an alarming cluster of red and blue dots all centred on where I stood, chain-saw in hand. It seems Patricia Hewitt has been using a map of Derbyshire for target practice: Matlock, Buxton, Bakewell, Ripley, Ilkeston, Clay Cross, Bolsover, Heanor, Babbington, Ashbourne. . . what have we done to deserve this? Nigel Hawkes, our science editor, wrote a refreshingly blunt analysis, but I take issue with his opening sentence: “Community hospitals are a great place to be if there is nothing much wrong with you.” Nigel implied that this was an argument against them.

It is not. Most approaches to the medical profession turn out to be by those who have nothing much wrong with them. The vast majority of health woes are not serious. It is in the nature of a health service that at any one time only a tiny minority of its clients will be suffering from a life-threatening complaint for which it is possible to give critically important treatment. The rest will range from malingerers and hypochondriacs to patients with burns and cuts and bruises, and coughs and sneezes and slight temperatures, and worried elderly people, and little lumps, and bits of smut in the eye, or an ache that may be something but probably isn’t, and wounds that need a bit of stitching up or disinfecting.

I suppose about three quarters of the advice and treatment being given by our NHS every day falls into the category marked “minor”. And here, accessibility, familiarity, proximity — the convenience, affection and trust of which Nigel rather makes light — are a vital part. To dismiss such facilities as secondary would be like dismissing nurses as secondary because doctors and consultants do the really serious stuff.

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