Insufferable bastards

Public Health England had their annual conference last week with 1,600 delegates. It's probably best not to think about how much it cost the taxpayer.

Head honcho Duncan Selbie (salary: £220,000) kicked off proceedings with a speech in which he paid tribute to my Twitter #content. You can watch it below from 11 minutes 43 seconds...


The best of the quotes pertains to PHE being "insufferable bastards". Whilst I wish I had said this - and it does sound like the kind of thing I might say - I can't find any evidence that I did. And whilst I did indeed call Selbie an overpaid, parasitic quangocrat, this was in relation to his decision to stop everybody smoking by 2030 and not, as he claims, the recent advice to have two days off drinking a week. 

This suggests - not for the first time - that Big Dunc might not have full mastery of the facts. But there is no doubt that he is doing an outstanding job by his own criteria...

"But we need to work in world where people are and if we're not irritating someone, we're not doing our job properly." #PHEConf18

— Public Health England (@PHE_uk) September 11, 2018