Breathtaking is a gritty three-part drama, starring Downton Abbey actress Joanne Froggatt and depicting life and demise in an NHS hospital through the first six months of the Covid outbreak.
However whereas the ITV present has had rave evaluations in some quarters, different critics have accused it of being a slickly produced piece of propaganda. The collection relies on a ebook by physician — and vocal Left-wing activist — Rachel Clarke, a 52-year-old palliative care specialist.
No stranger to publicity, previously week she’s been on an intensive tour of TV and radio studios to advertise the drama, by no means passing up an opportunity to assault the Tories.
Solely this week, she wrote on-line: ‘Boris Johnson seemed the general public within the eye and mentioned that at no level was the NHS overwhelmed throughout Covid. That was a downright lie — from a person who was pleased to let the our bodies pile excessive of their hundreds. This was the horrific actuality. Please don’t overlook. #BREATHTAKING.’
There’s far more of the identical — however then Clarke has had loads of apply as an anti-Tory mouthpiece.
Gritty three-part drama Breathtaking relies on a ebook by physician — and activist — Rachel Clarke, a 52-year-old palliative care specialist
As recent docs’ strikes start in the present day, we will anticipate to listen to much more from her.
Simply yesterday, she printed a self-congratulatory column in The Guardian concerning the present — ‘By no means in my wildest goals did I anticipate the response’ — whereas taking time to bemoan the closure of ‘NHS employees psychological well being and wellbeing hubs’.
In a earlier, sympathetic Guardian interview, Clarke allegedly claimed to have been ‘the primary medical pupil to have a child whereas learning’ at Oxford.
This struck some as unlikely: as a reader of the newspaper swiftly wrote in to level out, feminine medical college students at his London college 50 years in the past had been often giving start and ‘no person appeared to treat it as distinctive’.
But a passion for hyperbole is typical of Clarke’s decidedly partisan worldview.
Through the current wave of NHS strikes, she has repeated the BMA’s claims {that a} junior physician’s beginning wage is £14.09 per hour, supposedly lower than employees make in high-street meals retailer Pret A Manger.
Awkwardly for Clarke and the docs’ union, the charity Full Truth has dismissed this determine, which it says represents solely the hourly primary pay for the lowest-ranked docs, who make up only a tenth of all junior docs. It additionally doesn’t embrace extra pay for working nights and weekends.
By her personal admission, she was deeply affected by the junior docs’ strike in 2016: ‘I used to be acutely politicised in a single day.’
A public face for the strikers, she carried out TV interviews from her front room, balancing media appearances with medical shifts and staging a 24-hour ‘sit-in’ exterior the Division of Well being to protest deliberate new contracts for junior docs, specifically a change to time beyond regulation funds.
Brexit was her subsequent marketing campaign. The day after the referendum in June 2016, she tweeted: ‘Born and bred in UK. By no means felt extra overseas. Bought out by the politics of concern and racism that wasn’t even veiled. Distraught.’
Refusing to just accept the end result, she joined the ‘Individuals’s Vote’ marketing campaign demanding a second referendum. Ludicrously, she claimed that ‘one third’ of NHS beds at her facility had been closed as a consequence of Brexit — earlier than Britain had even left the EU.
The ITV drama stars Downton Abbey actress Joanne Froggatt who performs an A&E advisor
As a vocal Left-wing activist, Rachel Clarke is understood for attacking the Tories
In 2018, she instructed the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire: ‘We’ve needed to shut a 3rd of our in-patient beds as a result of a few of our best European nurses from Italy, Portugal, Spain, have already gone again dwelling as a result of they’ve been made to really feel so unwelcome and so undesirable post-Brexit [sic].’
Sadly, her passion was not matched by any significant outcomes. Her personal ‘petition’ calling for a second referendum attracted fewer than 6,500 signatures.
Within the 2019 basic election, she appealed in useless for individuals to vote out the Tories and finish what she known as a ‘nine-year monitor report of sheer NHS vandalism’. Sadly, the voters didn’t hearken to her. After Boris Johnson turned Prime Minister that summer time, Clarke complained of his ‘abject debasement of public workplace’.
Coming from a medical household — her father was a GP and her mom a nurse — Clarke is extensively reported to have studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, earlier than going into broadcasting: ‘I went off to the Democratic Republic of Congo to make a documentary there concerning the civil struggle.’
On the age of 29 and by then married to Dave, who works in industrial aviation, she reportedly went to College School London earlier than, in accordance with The Guardian, ‘shifting to Oxford for love and extra medical college’. She has two teenage kids.
In 2016, she started working in palliative care, initially in hospices however switching to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and Banbury’s Horton Normal Hospital throughout Covid. So which NHS hospital is she registered with now? Not the 2 above. She had additionally hung out at Katharine Home Hospice in Oxfordshire: does she nonetheless work there? The hospice mentioned yesterday: ‘We are able to’t say something about that.’
Clearly, her non-medical work takes up a lot of her time: Her fourth ebook comes out later this yr. Although she is a passionate cheerleader for Britain’s state-funded well being service, she nonetheless believes it’s riddled with prejudice. ‘The NHS, sadly, is as institutionally racist as elsewhere in Britain . . . enormous quantities of proof again this up.’
This trenchant view may clarify one of many strains within the second episode of the programme, when an emotional physician calls for of a hospital director: ‘Have you learnt who’s dying down there? It’s actually not the white individuals.’
Throughout Covid, she clashed with Every day Telegraph cartoonist Bob Moran, who had been an implacable critic of the federal government coverage of sporting masks in public locations — ferociously championed by Clarke. Moran was extensively condemned when he mentioned that Clarke ‘deserves to be verbally abused in public for the remainder of her nugatory existence’.
Clarke threatened to ‘crowd fund authorized motion towards’ the cartoonist, asking her followers if they’d be ‘prepared to assist me’ achieve this. Moran, who was sacked by the Telegraph over the farrago, apologised. He identified, nevertheless, that his severely disabled eight-year-old daughter had suffered terribly from the influence of repeated lockdowns, regardless of being at no danger from Covid, and including: ‘We’ve virtually misplaced her a number of occasions.’
He went on: ‘That is what “public well being insurance policies” . . . promoted by high-profile figures like Dr Clarke have meant for my household and plenty of others like us. Kids have died on account of lockdowns within the UK and all over the world. That is an indisputable fact and one which I discover sickeningly immoral.’
Previously, Clarke has praised Nicola Sturgeon, the now-disgraced former Scottish First Minister, as ‘the Prime Minister I want we had’. She has additionally waxed lyrical about Labour’s Shadow Dwelling Secretary Yvette Cooper’s ‘supreme eloquence’, and the Inexperienced get together MP Caroline Lucas’s ‘ardour and steeliness’.
No such heat phrases for Tory politicians. In October she attacked Conservative plans to maintain trans-identifying people out of single-sex wards as ‘disgusting’, accusing then-Well being Secretary Steve Barclay of ‘overtly weaponising trans rights to attempt to whip up an anti-woke frenzy’.
In the identical month, she accused then-Dwelling Secretary Suella Braverman of ‘nasty values’ for attempting to make sure that organic males had been stored out of female-only hospital wards, telling the minister to ‘butt out’.
As for Rishi Sunak, earlier this month Clarke jumped on the bandwagon when Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer falsely accused the Prime Minister of constructing transphobic jokes within the Commons whereas the mom of the murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey was in Westminster.
‘To make transphobic jokes in Parliament is dangerous sufficient. To make them in entrance of the grieving mom of a kid murdered in a transphobic assault is totally reprehensible. Disgrace on Sunak,’ she declared. (Brianna’s mom Esther was not within the Commons public gallery.)
An everyday — inevitably — on the BBC, Clarke is commonly requested about ready lists, strikes and different issues within the NHS.
However whereas she will unfailingly be relied on to ship soundbites attacking the Tories, the BBC by no means factors out her political leanings when it wheels her out on its programmes. I ponder why.
