Scottish Daily Mail

Glorious proof Britons really can take...

It was Churchill’s battle cry – and after the remarkable response by our readers to the Mail Force campaign, wouldn’t he be proud!

- by Robert Hardman

AT THE height of the Blitz, Winston churchill glimpsed a sight which left him sobbing. Driving out of London, he saw people waiting patiently in line by the roadside and so he told his driver to stop.

He asked one of his private secretarie­s, John Martin, to investigat­e. Martin climbed back in to the car and reported that they were hoping to buy bird seed. As he noted in his diary: ‘Winston wept.’

What could be more British than a queue — in the midst of so much suffering and with enemy aircraft constantly on the prowl — in order to feed a hungry budgerigar?

it was simply the innate compassion and decency of the British people, captured in that snapshot moment, which so moved churchill that day.

it has stuck in my mind since reading Max Hastings’s biography of our greatest Prime Minister and i have been reminded of it time and again of late. churchill might well have had a similar tearful reaction if he had been around to see the quite extraordin­ary outpouring of public support for the National Health service in recent weeks.

There has been the weekly ‘clapping’ up and down the land from doorways in suburban streets, in car parks and through tower block windows. There have been those stirring blue illuminati­ons of everything from the Post Office Tower to Windsor castle and Highclere, home of Downton Abbey.

Then we have seen the phenomenal support for the irrepressi­ble captain Tom Moore on his sponsored walk around his garden.

HAviNG smashed assorted records for sponsorshi­p, the Yorkshire-born veteran has gone on to be the oldest singer of a No1 hit (a cover version of You’ll Never Walk Alone with West End star Michael Ball). And he must surely be the oldest officer in British Army history to be promoted to colonel — as he was on his 100th birthday this week.

There have been so many unsung heroes in all this, too, as i have been lucky enough to observe during this crisis. There have been the selfless volunteers i met in the West country and the North East, doing the cooking or shopping for the vulnerable; i have chatted to the shopkeeper­s and delivery drivers cheerfully keeping normality’s head just above the surface and anarchy at bay.

Above all, i have been left speechless by the softlyspok­en stories of gentle, modest, brave, day-to-day decency in our care homes and hospitals — like the nurse who has sat up all night stroking the trembling hand of an elderly covid patient who will not live to see the dawn.

As the Queen said in her historic address, there have been so many who, when called upon, have shown themselves every bit as worthy as the wartime generation that has gone before them.

so, i have no doubt churchill would be equally moved by the magnificen­t response to the call to arms by Mail Force, the brand new charity created by the Daily Mail and its partners to help tackle the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) in Britain’s hospitals, care homes and hospices.

For within hours of our initial call to action, the Mail’s famously generous readers had risen to the challenge. Within a day, we had raised some £3million. By last night, the fund had soared past the £5million mark, bolstered by donations from some of our leading philanthro­pists, including £1million from Hans and Julia rausing and £500,000 from stagecoach co-founder sir Brian souter.

The thinking behind this project has been both simple and urgent. NHs staff are risking their lives every day as they treat the cruel coronaviru­s. The one thing offering them a modicum of safety is their protective equipment. Yet this has proved to be in desperatel­y short supply, with the result that many staff have lost their lives.

The Government and its procuremen­t teams have endured intense scrutiny and blistering criticism. NHs workers and the public rightly want to know how on earth we could be sending these profession­als into the danger zone without the right kit. These are legitimate questions but the fact is that the whole world is after a finite, dwindling stock of PPE.

it has become received wisdom that Germany has been the European standardbe­arer in its handling of this pandemic. Yet just this week, German doctors have been reduced to posting naked pictures of themselves online in order to draw attention to their own lack of PPE. As yet, even the most outspoken members of our own health unions have kept their clothes on. However, the stark truth is that the whole world was unprepared for this emergency.

And having depended on china to manufactur­e most of the equipment, it is to china that the world now turns in desperatio­n.

As a result, this week, Mail Force delivered an entire airliner carrying 20 tons of masks and coveralls from shanghai.

Every seat and overhead locker was crammed with the stuff, while pallets of the same products filled the hold. This £1 million cargo was then despatched to the NHs’s main distributi­on centre and thence to those who need it most in the battle against the virus.

Watching that aircraft hit the ground at a near-deserted Heathrow Airport on a rainy evening was thrilling enough. To see its contents arriving on the front line was magical.

From nurses in major hospitals and paramedics at the ambulance depots to care home staff tucked away in the countrysid­e, the response has been the same: an overwhelmi­ng ‘thank you’.

As many have pointed out, even in those hospitals and care homes which have not yet run out of PPE, there is the lingering fear that they are only a few days away from an empty cupboard. Then what? So the knowledge that reinforcem­ents are on the way has been a very great comfort. And what has been just as inspiring as these scenes are the letters from our readers as they send in their donations. Time and again the message is the same. Yes, they accept that this is the Government’s job in normal times — but these are not normal times.

There comes a moment when it is no longer enough to sit there, moan, wag a finger and observe that this was all blindingly obvious. Instead, it is time to act. Echoing one of Churchill’s great mantras — ‘Action this Day’ — that is precisely what they have done.

Were you to follow certain dreary threads on social media, you would soon come to the conclusion that we are a nation of whingers.

You might get a similar sense at one of two of those daily Downing Street Press conference­s. It is very much the job of the Press to hold power to account — as this newspaper does, day in, day out. It is our job to question Government decisions that have a direct impact on the lives of our readers and to give room to dissenting voices.

However, we also recognise that if there is one thing the public dislike more than ineptitude and bungling by officialdo­m, it is wallowing in defeatism. OK, the situation is dire. But what are we going to do about it? What we have seen this week is that, in extremis, the doers outnumber the whingers.

That was the thinking behind Mail Force. From a standing start, a small team set out with a simple aspiration — buy a planeload of PPE — and then soon ran into some of the fiendishly complicate­d obstacles that lie in wait for anyone entering this murky global bazaar. We quickly found that there is a good deal of stuff on offer. But how much of it is any good? What does the NHS actually need? And how do you go about finding it without crashing in to other players on the same side?

We talked to the Department of Health to make sure we were being of genuine assistance. And they went out of their way to be helpful, from the top of the NHS to the coalface. A recurring public gripe is that Britain’s procuremen­t system is being stifled by bureaucrac­y and institutio­nal risk-aversion. But I have encountere­d able and dedicated public servants who are doing all they can round the clock.

I had conversati­ons with them at all hours, sometimes finding them at their desks at 11pm on a Saturday.

They seem too focused on the task in hand to worry about the sniping. Besides, every government is getting it in the neck at the moment. Imagine being the Canadian civil servant who despatched two airliners to Shanghai last week to pick up vital PPE only to see them fly home again empty. If you don’t know your way around the complexiti­es of Chinese customs — and I certainly don’t — then you can end up in terrible trouble.

Fortunatel­y, we have been helped all along by so many experts in their fields. Our partners, Salesforce, have been invaluable in dodging many of the pitfalls of shopping in the industrial heartlands of China.

The California-based software giant has already been sourcing PPE for American hospitals, and its staff on the ground are now veterans at this game. We have had great support from the aviation industry in both Britain and China.

Once our goods landed back on British soil, the Mail Force cargo was sped on its way through Uniserve’s customs clearance depot and on to the NHS’s cavernous Midlands hub. There, in a hangar run on military lines, truckloads of everything arrive for instant inspection and onward distributi­on. The big retail chains work in a similar way, of course, but no one is going to worry too much if a consignmen­t of grapefruit or cornflakes goes astray.

THE same does not go for the most essential items on every hospital shopping list right now: isolation gowns and masks. And since a change in NHS guidance means that coveralls can take the place of isolation gowns, these are in increasing­ly high demand, too.

Every bit of the system has played its part, including the Charity Commission, which enabled Mail Force to take shape at breakneck speed. All of these moving parts, however, are just emblematic of an overwhelmi­ng public desire to do whatever it takes to get as much of this stuff to as many essential workers as we possibly can — and fast.

Judgment Day will come soon enough. There will be a reckoning for those who could have or should have done things differentl­y — and it may be a painful one. Equally, those looking on from the stands will be full of the joys of hindsight.

All that is for another day. For now, the voluntary spirit unleashed by this pandemic is to be saluted and celebrated. It has manifested itself in so many of those poignant and memorable sights recently.

And it is epitomised by the spirit of Mail Force. The letters and emails from all those lining up to donate whatever they can to this great campaign are every bit as moving as the sight of those patient pet owners forming that orderly queue back in 1940.

It’s enough to make you weep — it really is.

 ??  ??
 ??  ??
 ??  ?? In safe hands: Care home resident David Stephenson with Maria Willis and Megan Wills and our safety gear in Shedfield, Hampshire. Top: Mail Force equipment leaving Shanghai, China
In safe hands: Care home resident David Stephenson with Maria Willis and Megan Wills and our safety gear in Shedfield, Hampshire. Top: Mail Force equipment leaving Shanghai, China

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom