This is PharmaTimes, folks, but we are in the midst of truly CuriousTimes in which stranger and stranger-er things are unfolding.
We are living through a neo-political climate in which sketchy concepts and 3am jamming session ideas become serious blueprints for things like peace, economics and even existence itself.
Don’t, therefore, be entirely surprised when Stephen Mulhern is revealed as the new Health Secretary, or when Lorraine Kelly is unveiled as Head of the Armed Forces (actually, the more you say it, the more sensible it seems).
The international political soap opera these days seems more like a bad episode of The Apprentice or, if you will, ‘an episode of The Apprentice’. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s international band wagon rolls from country to country, making friends, while knowing the whole thing is held together with Jammie Dodgers and Kit Kat fingers.
‘I, Kier’ wears his smile heavily, for he knows we are wrestling with our own domestic hall of shame. Indeed, the spectre of the NHS and its myriad problems cannot be camouflaged by fancy glasses, elocution or hair products.
The re-style surely begins with an admission that the NHS is seeded in decade’s old fake news – in the catchphrases that it is ‘free’ and ‘the envy of the world’. If we liberate ourselves from these delusions, we can truly build something that is capable of upholding the pace and invention of UK pharma.
And make no mistake, the march towards a health service that ‘keeps it real’ must involve greater female representation in politics, across the NHS and throughout pharma.
Enjoy the magazine!
