LONDON: A nurse credited with helping to save Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s life last year has quit the UK health service in protest at the government’s lack of “respect” for frontline staff.
New Zealand-born Jenny McGee was one of two intensive-care nurses who gave Johnson round-the-clock treatment a year ago in a central London hospital when he was struck down with Covid-19.
The prime minister said later that he only pulled through thanks to their care, but his government has since faced fury from nurses for offering a pay rise of just one percent — effectively a cut, after inflation.
“We’re not getting the respect and now pay that we deserve. I’m just sick of it. So I’ve handed in my resignation,” McGee says in a Channel 4 television documentary airing next Monday.
She refused to take part in a Downing Street photo opportunity last July, noting: “Lots of nurses felt that the government hadn’t led very effectively, the indecisiveness, so many mixed messages. “It was just very upsetting.”
Keir Starmer, leader of the main opposition Labour party, said McGee’s resignation was a “devastating indictment of Boris Johnson’s approach to the people who put their lives on the line for him and our whole country.”
But a Downing Street spokesperson said “this government will do everything in our power to support” staff of the National Health Service (NHS), stressing they had been excluded from a pay freeze affecting other public sector workers.
In the documentary, McGee says it was “surreal” seeing the prime minister in her hospital. “All around him there was lots and lots of sick patients, some of whom were dying,” she recalled. “I remember seeing him and thinking he looked very, very unwell. He was a different color really.
“They are very complicated patients to look after and we just didn’t know what was going to happen.”
A worse wave of the pandemic hit Britain in the winter months, and McGee said the situation on her wards leading up to Christmas “was just a cesspool of Covid.”
“At that point, I don’t know how to describe the horrendousness of what we were going through,” she said.
In a statement Tuesday, McGee said she plans to take up a new nursing job in the Caribbean, but hopes to return to the NHS in the future.
Nurse who helped saved Boris Johnson’s life quits in protest
https://arab.news/g2cs4
Nurse who helped saved Boris Johnson’s life quits in protest
- She refused to take part in a Downing Street photo opportunity last July, noting: “Lots of nurses felt that the government hadn’t led very effectively, the indecisiveness, so many mixed messages
Trump warns against infiltration by a ‘bad Santa,’ defends coal in jovial Christmas calls with kids
- Take potshots at his critics, "including the Radical Left Scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our Country, but are failing badly”
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida: President Donald Trump marked Christmas Eve by quizzing children calling in about what presents they were excited about receiving, while promising to not let a “bad Santa” infiltrate the country and even suggesting that a stocking full of coal may not be so bad.
Vacationing at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, the president and first lady Melania Trump participated in the tradition of talking to youngsters dialing into the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which playfully tracks Santa’s progress around the globe.
“We want to make sure that Santa is being good. Santa’s a very good person,” Trump said while speaking to kids ages 4 and 10 in Oklahoma. “We want to make sure that he’s not infiltrated, that we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa.”
He didn’t elaborate.
Trump has often marked Christmases past with criticisms of his political enemies, including in 2024, when he posted, “Merry Christmas to the Radical Left Lunatics.” During his first term, Trump wrote online early on Dec. 24, 2017, targeting a top FBI official he believed was biased against him, as well as the news media.
Shortly after wrapping up Wednesday’s Christmas Eve calls, in fact, he returned to that theme, posting: “Merry Christmas to all, including the Radical Left Scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our Country, but are failing badly.”
But Trump was in a jovial mood while talking with the kids. He even said at one point that he “could do this all day long” but likely would have to get back to more pressing matters like efforts to quell the fighting in Russia’s war with Ukraine.
When an 8-year-old from North Carolina, asked if Santa would be mad if no one leaves cookies out for him, Trump said he didn’t think so, “But I think he’ll be very disappointed.”
“You know, Santa’s — he tends to be a little bit on the cherubic side. You know what cherubic means? A little on the heavy side,” Trump joked. “I think Santa would like some cookies.”
The president and first lady Melania Trump sat side-by-side and took about a dozen calls between them. At one point, while his wife was on the phone and Trump was waiting to be connected to another call, he noted how little attention she was paying to him: “She’s able to focus totally, without listening.”
Asked by an 8-year-old girl in Kansas what she’d like Santa to bring, the answer came back, “Uh, not coal.”
“You mean clean, beautiful coal?” Trump replied, evoking a favored campaign slogan he’s long used when promising to revive domestic coal production.
“I had to do that, I’m sorry,” the president added, laughing and even causing the first lady, who was on a separate call, to turn toward him and grin.
“Coal is clean and beautiful. Please remember that, at all costs,” Trump said. “But you don’t want clean, beautiful coal, right?”
“No,” the caller responded, saying she’d prefer a Barbie doll, clothes and candy.
