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First of all this week, an apology to those of you whose comments on last week’s piece disappeared into cyberspace.

The good people who host this site were apparently doing something called transferring it to another server, so presumably while packing it all away in cardboard boxes and carrier bags, your wise words went the way of all precious china.

Naturally, I’d like to say that this move will improve my service to you, but that, of course, would be total bollocks. All, allegedly, is now back to normal.

Now, among the lost words were those of Sister Wizard Woman, who kindly said she enjoyed last week’s attack on the ludicrous Michael Gove. She suggested that this week Jeremy *unt should be the subject.

Well, I rather like the idea of doing requests (though I can imagine the sort of request I’m going to get from the likes of you), so do feel free to submit suggestions for vicious, quite possibly unreasonably abusive, attacks.

And here we go: Jeremy *unt.

In many ways, it’s not his fault. He’s another of Cameron’s rich white public school boys. The son of Admiral Sir Nicholas Hunt, he enjoyed a privileged upbringing that saw him educated at Charterhouse. He went on to read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Cameron and Boris Johnson.

Having known no difficulty in his life, he has no idea of what is of value to people who do not come from privileged backgrounds and inhabit a comfy bubble of power and wealth.

Therefore, for example, though he is apparently now our health secretary, he is able to countenance privatisation of the NHS – and no, that’s not me exaggerating.  

He intervened in the take-over of NHS services in his constituency in Surrey by a private company, Virgin Care (presumably Richard Branson knows as much about health as he does about trains and hot air balloons). The Guardian reported: “Virgin Care subsequently agreed on a five-year contract in March to run seven hospitals along with dentistry services, sexual health clinics, breast cancer screening and other community services. The takeover took place despite concerns being raised in the local NHS risk register about the impact on patient care.”

This is not a rare example of his attitude to the NHS. *unt was one of 23 then young Conservatives who contributed to a 2005 book called Direct Democracy: An Agenda for a New Model Party, in which one passage proposed: “We should fund patients, either through the tax system or by way of universal insurance, to purchase health care from the provider of their choice. The poor and unemployed would have their contributions supplemented or paid for by the state.” Note “supplemented”.

It is not made clear whether everybody will have equal access to equal funding; nor is it made clear whether an unemployed black hoodie from Streatham would be enabled to buy the care he or she chooses from, say, Guy’s. I may like to go to a nice hospital in London, but I do not know whether Mr *unt would support the freedom of choice of somebody without as much money as him.

The idea is, of course, inflammatory, as is another of the book’s statements on the NHS: “But we know today that monopolies rarely act in the best interests of consumers.” Now that’s inflammatory on all sorts of levels. Consumers? Or patients? And how would Mr *unt compare the monopoly of the NHS to the private monopoly of British Telecom, for example? Or to the effective monopolies of the providers of our power, gas, water? Are these replacements of former state monopolies acting in the best interests of the consumer, then?

It must be said that “a source close to Mr *unt” denied that the new health secretary wrote the passages on the NHS and insisted the words “do not reflect his views”, a familiar problem to all of us who contribute to books. I mean, there you are, deciding to contribute to a book full of ideas with which you do not agree, running the risk of the book you’ve helped to write not reflecting your  views.

Dreadfully difficult – but then, an accurate portrayal of the intellect of Jeremy *unt. Clearly the man has a brain that is the equal of Michael Gove’s. He has, for example, been a proponent of homeopathy, a branch of medicine discredited by, well, just about anybody with the weakest grip on reality. He has voted in favour of reducing the time limit on abortion to 12 weeks, another example of his commitment to health, welfare and freedom.

It has also been suggested that *unt tried to get Danny Boyle to tone down the section on the NHS in the Olympic Opening Ceremony, an event that met with praise from all except right-wing Tories.

We must hope that other views of the Direct Democracy movement within the Tory Party are not shared by one of the authors of the group’s policy statement: “Our ambition is to devolve, decentralise and democratise the public services as effectively as Margaret Thatcher did the economy in the 1980s.”

Ye Gods! There, truly, are words of which we should be very afraid. They want to do to us what Thatcher did to our economy in the 80s and 90s. Look what devolving and decentralizing did for our economy! Her economic theories and policies are now almost universally discredited, her slavish devotion to the free market almost universally cited as one of the drivers of the mess the world is in today, her elevation of greed to a religion almost universally reviled as morally bankrupt. Sane Tories have tried to keep her out of the public eye for the past 20 years, yet *unt comes from a branch of the party that still idolizes her!

And you should be afraid, for with Cameron so keen on supporting his rich friends, the lunatic fringe can all too easily become the mainstream. Here’s the thoughts of *unt’s movement on education: “We would set schools free from Whitehall and County Hall diktat and give parents a new legal right that would allow them to take their custom (and their share of state funding) to schools not controlled by the state.”

And isn’t that the sort of crazed dogma being pursued by the repellent Gove? His “freeing” of schools, for example, has led to a situation in which ‘free’ academies can ignore nationally-agreed nutrition standards created in the wake of Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve our children’s health. The Daily Mail (Yes! The Daily Mail!) reported:

“A survey of 108 academies found more than a third – 37 – are selling at least one of the items banned from schools under local authority control, according to the investigation by the Channel 4 Dispatches programme.

“Crisps, sweets, fizzy drinks and even high-calorie energy drinks are available in canteens or from vending machines, according to the investigation. 

“Concerned parents and teachers have also reported an explosion in the number of take-away shops opening up around schools and taking business away from school canteens.

“Some local councils have tried to stop the tactic by banning fast food chains including the likes of Domino’s pizza.

“One branch of the chain recently opened directly opposite a secondary school in Brighton after winning an appeal against the local council’s refusal to grant it planning permission.”

I’m sure we will all accept Mr Gove’s assurances that there is nothing wrong with this additional factor in the story:

“Between November 2005 and December 2011, Mr Gove’s Surrey Heath constituency party accepted £49,541.25 from Moonpal Singh Grewal – the largest single shareholder in Domino’s in the UK – or companies owned by him. The businessman, whose family owns 76 Domino’s outlets,  is also chairman of Mr Gove’s constituency party.”

As entirely proper and unconnected as, for example, was proved to be the case in Jeremy *unt’s manoevrings in the Murdoch / B Sky B takeover saga. Mr *unt was revealed by the Leveson inquiry into media standards to be very close to the Murdoch empire. He was independently adjudicating over its business proposals while exchanging cosy texts and e-mails with senior Murdoch executives. But Mr *unt, Mr Cameron has ben showing us in his words and deeds, was exonerated by the inquiry. Actually, Leveson’s verdict has not yet been made public and many senior figures called for *unt to resign. Even the Liberal Democrats couldn’t stomach voting in support of him. But Cameron, in this strangest of all strange worlds, promotes him and leaves in place George Osborne, the only two men capable of intruding on the feelgood atmosphere of the Olympics by their very presence (and wasn’t that mass boo-ing by the crowd a moment of great joy?).

But, as I said at the start, it’s not really *unt’s fault. He knows no better. He’s never known any better. We permit him, for the time being, to remain, and we permit Cameron to stick up two fingers to the electorate by promoting the likes of *unt, Osborne and Gove. Jeremy *unt is our fault.

Men excluded?

Brother Hamster sent us a link to a BBC News article, “Does the sex debate exclude men?”, by Sarah Dunant, with the comment “They haven’t been in the pub on a Tuesday night, then”. Visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19516237 and see what he’s on about: she suggests “It’s difficult – getting men to talk honestly about sex.” Hmm.