There are some occupations you simply can not get fired from, no mater how mind meltingly bad you are at doing your job. I look to our esteemed friends in the banking racket. It helps to have friends in high places. It helps to have photographic evidence of these people getting high off their faces, in high places but for the financial finaglers, it just helps that they are where all the money is made. In other industries, you can stem the tide of public disquiet if you are the buffer that repels the ire which would otherwise smother and sink those higher up the food chain.
Take the man who runs the NHS for example. It seems hardly credible that he is still in the position to which he has become accustomed. Under his munificent leadership:
vigorously healthy people have come into the hospitals he is running just to read the meter and were carted out moments later in a zip lock bag; elderly people were fed through food blenders to fill the pies that the caterers couldn't find enough horse meat for and patients were asked to take their own pancreas out.
I made these stories up but I think you will agree that does not detract from how shocking they are.
Our political leaders appear to be unanimous in their praise of a man who managed hospitals that were so dangerous to the patients they were supposed to be helping that Dr Josef Mengele would have resigned. Thousands of people died unnecessarily, ineptitude was allowed to continue on a level that would have shamed the catering car on a British Rail express train, wave after wave of doctors and nurses voiced their concerns and not a blind thing was done about it, nor appears to be being done about it now. Except, of course, to massage the statistics to make the problem appear to go away and to silence those that seek to illuminate just how bad things have got.
You may think that because some of this dirty, infected, torn and bacteria ridden laundry is being aired in public that the problem with patient care in the NHS has been dealt with. If you think that, then you may be reading this in a secure facility.
The bosses at the NHS and their parliamentary overseers are still backing Sir David Nicholson despite the very real evidence that a rabid press has scented blood in the air and want their pound of mistakenly amputated flesh. They are writing articles with words like "appalling" and "scandal" and "deaths" in them and the NHS Commissioning Board appear to be of the opinion that they can simply dig their heels in, assert their authority and the issue will die away, like so many of their unfortunate patients. Perhaps they have not read the Daily Mail. They may be in for a nasty surprise. To see what a nasty surprise is like, they should book a procedure in one of their own hospitals.
If the answer is to keep the man in charge who oversaw the melt down in the first place, then what on earth must the question be? The only explanation that makes sense is that this person is a lightening rod of fury so that our ruling elite don't have to be.
It's genius - keep in place a man who is as popular with the public as a rectal examination and our elected representatives can sit back and watch him catch fire from the friction of our fury, so they don't have to. He will just have to soak up the suppurating pool of national indignation for a while before he gets his inevitable reward.
They have already made him a Sir, so it will be Lord Nicholson of the Overflowing Bed Pan before the year is out.