We need to retain a sense of proportion about this. It is not necessarily the case that every doctor in Britain wishes to kill you and is furthermore urged to do so by his or her trade union, the General Medical Council. Most just do it accidentally. You go into hospital for a routine procedure and come out missing a leg, or with one of those exciting new viruses which turns your flesh to the consistency of cheese. Or in a wooden box.

Impossible to tell if there was intention on the part of the surgeon or if he was just utterly useless. The GMC won’t help you. Homicidal maniac or mere incompetent, the chap will probably be back working within the month, with the GMC’s blessing. It took them ages to strike off Harold Shipman – although eventually they did so, grudgingly. Hell, anyone can make a mistake, live and let live, etc. They knew Shipman was a druggie long before he was struck off.

If you’re very unlucky, you may soon be treated for that troublesome ingrowing toenail by a certain Dr Amit Misra. If so, make sure you’ve put some money by for a decent headstone. Dr Misra was found guilty of killing Sean Phillips, aged 31, by gross negligence. Sean went into hospital for a routine knee op and somehow acquired an infection, which Misra failed to diagnose. When he did notice that his patient was dying, he didn’t tell anyone because he was “too proud”.

He escaped a prison sentence because his counsel argued that his medical career was in ruins. Au contraire: he was suspended for a year, but now the GMC has decided to let him continue practising – a verb with a piquant double-meaning for Misra. The GMC decided to let him loose on us despite finding during a performance assessment that his techniques were “unacceptable” in three out of four areas – as the relatives of Sean Phillips might have been only too happy to testify.

The medical profession kill some 30,000 British people every year, making them rather more lethal, statistically, than pneumonia and Aids combined. They get very cross when you quote those figures, but they’re true nonetheless. They are still, however, amply protected by the GMC. I can think of only one other profession in which someone as criminally incompetent as Dr Misra would be allowed to continue working. Come on, let’s concede he’d still be practising at the Bar.

Dame Janet Smith in her inquiry into the Shipman affair called for the reform of the GMC for its failure to deal with “fitness to practise” issues. “Expediency,” she said, “has replaced principle.”

Much the same has been said by both the GMC’s former boss, Sir Donald Irvine, and Britain’s top doctor, Sir Liam Donaldson. But it continues to defend the indefensible and put the rest of us at risk. Why is it, alone, so impervious to reform?

This not very charming man

‘I think Enoch’s right . . . throw the wogs out,” the world’s most politically astute guitarist, Eric Clapton, once told an audience in Birmingham – thus bringing upon himself 30 years of contempt. Nothing inflames the music press so much as a pop star who appears to be a bit right of centre, from that airhead also-ran Dannii Minogue dissing asylum seekers to Neil Young tentatively endorsing Ronald Reagan for president. And David Bowie saying Britain needed a good dose of fascism (though I reckon the old tart just liked the uniforms).

Morrissey is now taking legal action against the NME for allegedly misreporting his comments about immigration. He says he was “stitched up”. But the son of Irish immigrants has form. In 1992 he told a magazine he thought everyone was inherently racist: “I don’t really think black people and white people will ever really get on or like each other.” His other contributions to the debate have included wearing bovver boots and singing songs called National Front Disco and the anti-integrationist Bengali in Platforms. His latest, more nuanced, comments about Britain’s supposed loss of identity as a result of mass immigration suggest that, if anything, he’s swung a little to the left in recent years.

The world’s most irritating woman, the Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, was on BBC1’s Question Time last week, persuading millions of people never, ever, to vote for her party – and quickly to switch off the television to boot. Such a pity. Just when you thought it was okay to support the Lib Dems – having applauded Vincent Cable’s excellent performance in the House of Commons and even feeling mildly well-disposed towards Chris Huhne – along comes this bowl-faced receptacle of jabbering fifth-form outrage and whining sanctimony to remind you why you hated them in the first place.

Glib, didactic and – on almost every issue – both ineluctably wrong and full of conviction and self-righteousness. Hell, she made the UK Independence party’s Nigel Farage appear statesmanlike. Not many people can do that.

On the issue of Gillian Gibbons, the teacher sentenced to 15 days in prison for allowing her pupils to call a teddy bear “Muhammad”, Sarah revealed that this was “nothing to do with Islam”. Ah. So why does she think there was such a fuss over all those Danish cartoons a while back, protests, death threats and the like? I hope her own teddy bear, which I believe is also called Muhammad (take note, jihadis), put her right as soon as she got home.

Nobody will swallow this hypocritical nannying

All television adverts annoy me, especially those for dairy products that supposedly alleviate constipation in women and instead make them smile like Stepford Wives who’ve just been touched up. And car adverts which use French footballers as a symbol for style, grace and elan – when we all know that if a car was really like a French footballer it would throw itself into a ditch and roll over and over if it saw another car coming in the opposite direction.

But nothing annoys me more than the Diageo advert and its depiction of some rat-arsed slattern feeling the worse for wear after a night on the binge. Here is a sort of apogee of hypocrisy and sententiousness: one of the world’s biggest alcoholic drinks manufacturers attempting to have it both ways by advertising its products and telling you in the next breath that they are very bad for you.

We know what the effects of alcohol are, thank you. That’s why a lot of people drink the stuff. Bad enough to be lectured by the government about binge drinking without having the bloody brewers wringing their hands, too. If you’re unhappy about the social effects of drinking, stop making the stuff.

Meanwhile, the government has issued guidelines to publicans so that people who are conspicuously drunk are no longer served with alcohol. The telltale signs to look out for are people who are “dishevelled and drowsy”, prone to “rambling conversation” and with “glassy eyes”. They may also be “fumbling with cigarettes”.

This is a chillingly accurate description of myself when sober. All they needed to add was “carries a teddy bear he refers to as Muhammad” and they’d have got me down to a tee.

Still, a couple of drinks usually sort things out, I find. Looks like I won’t be getting one henceforth.

rod.liddle@sunday-times.co.uk

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