Robert Hardman: Winston Churchill Would Be Proud Of £5m Mail Force
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 tour hà giang Highclere, home of Downton Abbey.
I have no doubt Churchill (pictured outside No10 Downing Street in April 1945) 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 in Britain's hospitals, care homes and hospices, writes ROBERT HARDMAN
Echoing one of Churchill's great mantras — 'Action this Day' — that is precisely what Daily Mail readers have done, writes ROBERT HARDMAN
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 No 1 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, tour hà giang từ hà nội 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.
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Above all, I have been left speechless by the softly- spoken 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.
Sheffield Lodge Care Home's head of care Maria Willis, 32, and Megan Wills, 21 with Resident David Stephenson, 88, after their Mail Force PPE delivery
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 £3 million. By last night, the fund had soared past the £5 million mark, bolstered by donations from some of our leading philanthropists, including £1 million 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 standard-bearer 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.
Mail Force's consignment of PPE medical equipment is pictured in Shanghai as it is loaded aboard a chartered plane to be brought to the UK
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: kynghidongduong.vn 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.
Staff nurse Christie Church, 23, is pictured with a Mail Force charity PPE Delivery outside CHAS's Robin House in Balloch, Scotland
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.