Breathtaking is a gritty three-part drama, starring Downton Abbey actress Joanne Froggatt and depicting life and death in an NHS hospital during the first six months of the Covid outbreak.
But while the ITV show has had rave reviews in some quarters, other critics have accused it of being a slickly produced piece of propaganda. The series is based on a book by doctor — and vocal Left-wing activist — Rachel Clarke, a 52-year-old palliative care specialist.
No stranger to publicity, in the past week she’s been on an extensive tour of TV and radio studios to promote the drama, never passing up a chance to attack the Tories.
Only this week, she wrote online: ‘Boris Johnson looked the public in the eye and said that at no point was the NHS overwhelmed during Covid. That was a downright lie — from a man who was happy to let the bodies pile high in their thousands. This was the horrific reality. Please don’t forget. #BREATHTAKING.’
There’s much more of the same — but then Clarke has had plenty of practice as an anti-Tory mouthpiece.
Gritty three-part drama Breathtaking is based on a book by doctor — and activist — Rachel Clarke, a 52-year-old palliative care specialist
As fresh doctors’ strikes begin today, we can expect to hear even more from her.
Just yesterday, she published a self-congratulatory column in The Guardian about the show — ‘Never in my wildest dreams did I expect the reaction’ — while taking time to bemoan the closure of ‘NHS staff mental health and wellbeing hubs’.
In a previous, sympathetic Guardian interview, Clarke allegedly claimed to have been ‘the first medical student to have a baby while studying’ at Oxford.
This struck some as unlikely: as a reader of the newspaper swiftly wrote in to point out, female medical students at his London university 50 years ago were regularly giving birth and ‘nobody seemed to regard it as exceptional’.
Yet a fondness for hyperbole is typical of Clarke’s decidedly partisan worldview.
During the recent wave of NHS strikes, she has repeated the BMA’s claims that a junior doctor’s starting salary is £14.09 per hour, supposedly less than workers make in high-street food store Pret A Manger.
Awkwardly for Clarke and the doctors’ union, the charity Full Fact has dismissed this figure, which it says represents only the hourly basic pay for the lowest-ranked doctors, who make up just a tenth of all junior doctors. It also doesn’t include additional pay for working nights and weekends.
By her own admission, she was deeply affected by the junior doctors’ strike in 2016: ‘I was acutely politicised overnight.’
A public face for the strikers, she conducted TV interviews from her living room, balancing media appearances with medical shifts and staging a 24-hour ‘sit-in’ outside the Department of Health to protest planned new contracts for junior doctors, in particular a change to overtime payments.
Brexit was her next campaign. The day after the referendum in June 2016, she tweeted: ‘Born and bred in UK. Never felt more foreign. Sold out by the politics of fear and racism that wasn’t even veiled. Distraught.’
Refusing to accept the result, she joined the ‘People’s Vote’ campaign demanding a second referendum. Ludicrously, she claimed that ‘one third’ of NHS beds at her facility had been closed due to Brexit — before Britain had even left the EU.
The ITV drama stars Downton Abbey actress Joanne Froggatt who plays an A&E consultant
As a vocal Left-wing activist, Rachel Clarke is known for attacking the Tories
In 2018, she told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire: ‘We have had to close a third of our in-patient beds because some of our very best European nurses from Italy, Portugal, Spain, have already gone back home because they have been made to feel so unwelcome and so unwanted post-Brexit [sic].’
Sadly, her ardour was not matched by any meaningful results. Her own ‘petition’ calling for a second referendum attracted fewer than 6,500 signatures.
In the 2019 general election, she appealed in vain for people to vote out the Tories and end what she called a ‘nine-year track record of sheer NHS vandalism’. Unfortunately, the electorate did not listen to her. After Boris Johnson became Prime Minister that summer, Clarke complained of his ‘abject debasement of public office’.
Coming from a medical family — her father was a GP and her mother a nurse — Clarke is widely reported to have studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, before going into broadcasting: ‘I went off to the Democratic Republic of Congo to make a documentary there about the civil war.’
At the age of 29 and by then married to Dave, who works in commercial aviation, she reportedly went to University College London before, according to The Guardian, ‘moving to Oxford for love and more medical school’. She has two teenage children.
In 2016, she began working in palliative care, initially in hospices but switching to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and Banbury’s Horton General Hospital during Covid. So which NHS hospital is she registered with now? Not the two above. She had also spent time at Katharine House Hospice in Oxfordshire: does she still work there? The hospice said yesterday: ‘We can’t say anything about that.’
Clearly, her non-medical work takes up much of her time: Her fourth book comes out later this year. Though she is a passionate cheerleader for Britain’s state-funded health service, she nonetheless believes it’s riddled with prejudice. ‘The NHS, sadly, is as institutionally racist as elsewhere in Britain . . . huge amounts of evidence back this up.’
This trenchant view might explain one of the lines in the second episode of the programme, when an emotional doctor demands of a hospital director: ‘Do you know who’s dying down there? It’s certainly not the white people.’
During Covid, she clashed with Daily Telegraph cartoonist Bob Moran, who had been an implacable critic of the government policy of wearing masks in public places — ferociously championed by Clarke. Moran was widely condemned when he said that Clarke ‘deserves to be verbally abused in public for the rest of her worthless existence’.
Clarke threatened to ‘crowd fund legal action against’ the cartoonist, asking her followers if they would be ‘willing to help me’ do so. Moran, who was sacked by the Telegraph over the farrago, apologised. He pointed out, however, that his severely disabled eight-year-old daughter had suffered terribly from the impact of repeated lockdowns, despite being at no risk from Covid, and adding: ‘We have almost lost her several times.’
He went on: ‘This is what “public health policies” . . . promoted by high-profile figures like Dr Clarke have meant for my family and many others like us. Children have died as a result of lockdowns in the UK and around the world. This is an undeniable fact and one which I find sickeningly immoral.’
In the past, Clarke has praised Nicola Sturgeon, the now-disgraced former Scottish First Minister, as ‘the Prime Minister I wish we had’. She has also waxed lyrical about Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s ‘supreme eloquence’, and the Green party MP Caroline Lucas’s ‘passion and steeliness’.
No such warm words for Tory politicians. In October she attacked Conservative plans to keep trans-identifying individuals out of single-sex wards as ‘disgusting’, accusing then-Health Secretary Steve Barclay of ‘openly weaponising trans rights to try to whip up an anti-woke frenzy’.
In the same month, she accused then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman of ‘nasty values’ for trying to ensure that biological males were kept out of female-only hospital wards, telling the minister to ‘butt out’.
As for Rishi Sunak, earlier this month Clarke jumped on the bandwagon when Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer falsely accused the Prime Minister of making transphobic jokes in the Commons while the mother of the murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey was in Westminster.
‘To make transphobic jokes in Parliament is bad enough. To make them in front of the grieving mother of a child murdered in a transphobic attack is absolutely reprehensible. Shame on Sunak,’ she declared. (Brianna’s mother Esther was not in the Commons public gallery.)
A regular — inevitably — on the BBC, Clarke is often asked about waiting lists, strikes and other problems in the NHS.
But while she can unfailingly be relied on to deliver soundbites attacking the Tories, the BBC never points out her political leanings when it wheels her out on its programmes. I wonder why.