Good news often doesn't attract very much attention, and so you might have missed today's story about hospital MRSA cases falling by more than a third over the last year. But what intrigued me was Gordon Brown's decision to celebrate the news by writing a letter addressed "To all NHS staff".
You can read it here. There are around 1.3 million people working for the NHS – making it the biggest employer in the world, apart from the Chinese Red Army and the Indian Railways – and so Brown's letter is the mother of all herograms. Staff are not all getting an individual copy, but the NHS is meant to be distributing it widely.
The danger, of course, is that it leaves Brown open to ridicule. "This tremendous achievement is down to you, the staff of the NHS, and I wanted to write to thank you on behalf of everyone who relies on the NHS for your efforts over the course of the last year," Brown writes. When Private Eye last year started writing its weekly Message from the Supreme Leader, the Brown spoof seemed far-fetched. These days it's so realistic it barely registers as satire.
But I think it's unwise to mock. It's better to be thanked than not to be thanked. And 1.3 million people is a lot. Maybe it was a smart move after all.
