Moron

Fact: Richard Branson is figurehead of Virgin Health, a private health concern.

Fact: Richard Branson's daughter, who works in the same company (why help every patient when you can just help the rich ones who can afford it?) has recently been in the news in a positive light.

Fact: Richard Branson is advising the NHS.

All three of these facts resolve themselves into an big, fat truth, unfortunately. In the above story, There are two moronic, but quite funny, facts to pick up from the story. Firstly, Beardie complains government ministers mess around with health policy too much before... yes. Saying how he wants to fiddle with health policy. His grand scheme is to test (presumably by swab x3) every single person who works in the health service for MRSA. Not only would this be massively time consuming (compared to, I don't know, maybe HAND WASHING) it would also put a huge strain on the resources of microbiology. Saying that, perhaps Beardie would put the contracts out to tender. Perhaps Virgin Health would get them...

His second - most hilarious - point is that the health service could learn a lot from the airline and train industries. I don't know a huge amount about the airline industry, but - as any fule does know (or Private Eye reader, for that matter) Beardie makes large bags of cash from Virgin Trains. Most of this cash doesn't come from actually running the trains. It comes from contract negotiation and gobbling up appetising subsidies. Maybe that is his point, then. Perhaps the health service should be sold off to private concerns (at a snip, for them) and continue with massive problems in the infrastructure (whilst all the separate companies complain that beds aren't actually their problem) remaining unaddressed whilst the companies still grow fat off of massive public subsidies. Once they had their finger in this pie, they could justify increases in the cost of subcutaneous injections by whining about the price of oil, leaves on the lines of their delivery trains (private, of course) and, of course, the state of the economy!

Cunt.