Quintin Jardine's blog

Almost as big as AJ v Dubois is the scrap between Prime and Netflix over their version of the Prince Andrew interview saga.

I’ve watched Scoop, the Flix movie and also A Very Royal Scandal, the Amazon series, and my favourite is …..?

For all that Ruth Wilson and Michael Sheen can outact Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell any day of the week, I have to go with Scoop. There’s less extraneous material, plus Billie Piper gives it added value, while her character is almost peripheral in the other.

Big thanks to Bob McDevitt and the team for an excellent event at Bloody Scotland 2024.

Thanks also to the outstanding Caro Ramsay, a queen of the craft for her mastery (mistressy?) as a chairperson, and to Neil Lancaster, an affable co-panellist.

I was in at the start of Scotland’s national festival of crime fiction. It was good to be back.

Looking at an inflight magazine that’s meant to sell me Lancôme (for my wife), I find myself thinking that the older Julia Roberts grows, the more she resembles the alternative glam of Cruella deVil. (I’m not being unkind here; I’m a fan of hers.)

A couple of days ago I ventured into my nearest German supermarket: you know the kind I mean: own label foodstuffs, full range of fruit and vegetables, and some household items, randomly arranged, famous for employing the minimum staff to allow them to operate.

Once I enjoyed shopping there. The quality was decent and value for money, and most of all the till procedure suited me; pile everything back into the trolley, pay for it and pack it at my own pace.

It was fine, until they installed self-operated check-out machines, and stopped calling everyone’Dear customers.’ We ain’t, not any more.

The point of these auto things is not customer convenience. They are a means of reducing payroll costs, allowing Aldidl to employ even fewer people. They are also a pain in the fundament, in that they throw too much information at the customer at once.

I find them exasperating, and I said as much to the person overseeing the operation. The response staggered me: ‘I don’t care. I have a job here and I’m not going to get into an argument about it.’

Fine. You won’t get an argument from me, not least because I don’t plan to repeat the experience any time soon.

As part of his grand strategy of blaming everything on the Tories, in particular the NHS, which he and his mate Wes says is broken, Sir Keir is avoiding a fundamental truth. It’s his fault.

When the Service was created, the world was fundamentally different. The population was smaller and we had only just entered the age of antibiotics. Since then everything has grown exponentially, the population, and alongside it, a vast range of treatments and therapies, many of them significantly costly. The assumption has always been that the public health system should provide, for everyone.

The fact is that the expectation of the population is no longer realistic. And yet it has been stirred by cynical politicians.

Those who can afford private health insurance should be incentivised to use it rather than being stigmatised as queue jumpers.

If the new government wants to heal public health provision it should do what it can to reduce the demands upon it. Removing benefit in kind taxation for occupational insurance would be a good start.

You don’t have to be a pioneering researcher to work out that most people expect to pay for dental care. Try finding an NHS dentist.

And try to find a consultant physician or surgeon who doesn’t have a private practice alongside his NHS work.

www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/31/nhs-queues-mean-most-britons-expect-to-pay-for-healthcare-says-report

Working this morning, until I was diverted by Starmer’s awful grandstanding in the garden. Just do the ******* job, Keir; stop making excuses in advance.

Seeking to calm myself, I took refuge in Oscar Peterson, imho the greatest jazz pianist who ever lived, in live collaboration with Joe Pass, my favourite jazz guitarist.

Now I am so coooool, I can’t get back to work.

www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce80nm88kjpo

A long time ago, while driving through France and radio-hopping, I happened upon the Gallagher brothers being interviewed by an American presenter, doing instant translations, with phone-in content.

I didn’t care for them before, but when they called a a hapless French fan ‘a right ******* brown-nose,’ it put me off them for life.

Anyone else feel that Jermaine Jenas has been brutally treated by the BBC?

Having been subjected, apparently, to trial by Zoom, while on holiday with his family, he was sacked with full-on publicity while on air with a rival radio station.

Jenas admits that the messages he sent were ‘inappropriate but not illegal’ although their content has been withheld and the recipients have not commented. Let’s assume they were sackable. Let’s assume that he is a seedy little creep.

Does that justify the media crucifixion that the BBC HR department must have known would follow its cack-handed announcement of a matter that could have been handled privately?

I am left feeling that to an extent the guy is a victim himself, of the BBC’s determination to restore its reputation in the wake of Huw Edwards and the Strictly bullying scandal.

This is the organisation that employed and aggrandised Jimmy Savile for forty-odd years. Has that uncomfortable truth influenced its treatment of this case?

Whatever it’s as bad an example of crisis management as I have ever seen.

The following was written as a Facebook comment on the new location of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, an event at which I was privileged to appear for over 20 years and which remains close to my heart. I have decided to re-post it here in the hope that it reaches a wider audience. Who knows? It might spark a protest movement.

‘Charlotte Square was great precisely for that reason. (Its location.) EIBF should be about growth, and introducing newcomers to the world of books. The gardens afforded the space to do that properly. Most of all the location encouraged footfall to an extent that successor venues cannot. We are told that it (EIBF) moved because the pressure of the structures and their contents, for two weeks out of fifty-two plus the construction time, were damaging the tree roots, in a space which is private for the rest of the year. Take a walk to the other end of the dumbbell and see how St Andrews Square is being used, and what it contributes to city life. When I first appeared at the festival, in the last century, it had only just become an annual event and casual visitors had to pay to go on site. The event began to flourish when access to the space was offered free to all. It became arguably the biggest and best on the planet, until the crazy decision to move to a part of the city that is notoriously inaccessible. Those who love the book festival, as I do, should be pressing for its return to its traditional home. Where I live we took a tree out because its roots were threatening to damage a house. Let’s get our priorities right.’

Cover imaging for ‘Secrets and Lies’, the new Skinner, is about to be uploaded. Look out for it.