AMANDA PLATELL: A nation that cares more about an old lion than old people
The world was rightly repulsed by the slaughter of Cecil, the 13-year-old lion lured from the protection of a Zimbabwe national park to be slaughtered by a wealthy U.S. dentist.
Walter Palmer wounded Cecil with a high-powered bow and arrow, leaving him to stagger off and endure 40 hours in agony before he was tracked down and finally put to death.
Such has been the worldwide outrage that Palmer’s dental practice has been boycotted, he has gone into hiding and Brits have donated some £300,000 to the Oxford University conservation team who had been monitoring Cecil.
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The world was rightly repulsed by the slaughter of Cecil, the 13-year-old lion lured from the protection of a Zimbabwe national park to be slaughtered by a wealthy U.S. dentist
Yet where was the national outrage when the Daily Mail revealed six years ago that thousands of elderly men and women were deliberately being left to die in harrowing conditions in our own hospitals on the Liverpool Care Pathway?
Under this system, fluids and food were withdrawn from patients with terminal conditions, leaving them to die, often in agony.
The suffering they endured in their final hours was every bit as barbaric as poor Cecil’s — and it wasn’t just one bloodthirsty dentist to blame, but the whole medical establishment.
When the Mail campaigned against the Pathway, it was vilified by doctors’ leaders, who accused it of ‘counter-productive’ reporting.
Now, finally, an official inquiry has endorsed the Mail’s findings and ruled that the practice must stop. Yet the fact that it was allowed to continue for so long is a national disgrace.
Dr Tony Cole, chairman of the medical Ethics Alliance, said he was contacted just last week by a man concerned about his elderly mother’s treatment in hospital.
She had not been given a drink of water for eight days, was distressed, and her tongue was so dry and shrivelled that it resembled a walnut.
As the saying goes: you wouldn’t treat an animal like that.
I’m all for protecting creatures like Cecil, but what a warped world we live in when the torment of an old lion provokes national outrage, while the cruel deaths of thousands of elderly people barely raise a murmur.
Look up the barmy judges
Two convicted Al Qaeda terrorists have won a five-year battle to prove they were unlawfully held in solitary confinement, where they’d been placed to stop them radicalising other prisoners, as judges ruled it breached prison rules.
One killed Detective Constable Stephen Oakes and the other plotted to blow up a plane, yet we must now foot the £500,000 bill for their improved conditions.
Perhaps if the judges had spent a single night in the same cell as these hate-filled fanatics, it might have helped them see sense.
Sky Sports presenter Kirsty Gallacher
Kirsty's bare cheek
In a body blow for other female sports journalists who struggle to be taken seriously, sublimely sexy Sky Sports presenter Kirsty Gallacher, 39, has stripped naked for a magazine shoot in Women’s Health.
I hope she doesn’t give Gary Lineker any funny ideas . . .
I was sad to learn of the sudden death of former Apprentice star Stuart Baggs. He may have been mocked, but there’s much to admire about a young man with the chutzpah to go on a reality TV show, stand up to the ludicrous Lord Sugar, then go on to set up his own business.
One of Stuart’s most famous one-liners was: ‘I’m not a one-trick pony, I’m not a ten-trick pony, I’ve got a whole field of ponies.’ I do hope they put that on his headstone.
Another depressing week for the sanctity of birth: a married lesbian couple both getting pregnant by a donor they’d recruited from the internet, and Britain’s most prolific sperm donor boasting of the ten babies he’s sired in just four months for mums he’d met on Facebook. What next? Babies for sale on eBay?
Revving up for trouble
Police are hunting three people who blacked up for a charity parade as golliwogs. One is very tall, another looks like a girl, the third’s tiny — and all have enraged the PC brigade.
Case solved: It must be the Top Gear trio Clarkson, May and Hammond filming their new show.
Director Woody Allen reveals that when he initiated his relationship with his stepdaughter, Soon-Yi, he thought it would be ‘just a fling’.
She was 21 at the time, had been a child in his care and was 35 years younger than him. Bad enough that he seduced her. Worse still that she meant so little when he did so.
Lights, camera, matrimony!
Having walked away with around £50 million after his divorce from Madonna, Guy Ritchie has married again in a high- profile ceremony conveniently timed to coincide with a PR blitz for his new film, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. As well as a private viewing of the film for his guests, Guy insisted on overseeing all the wedding details, down to the flowers and even the brides-maids’ dresses.
And you thought Madonna was the control freak!
Much hand-wringing from the Left over plans for overweight people to have disability benefits cut if they refuse to go on a diet. What’s more outrageous is they were on benefits in the first place.
I know plenty of plump people who do great jobs. It’s an insult to them and all larger folk that anyone should deem them incapable of work and in need of handouts.
It turns out Tom Cruise's ‘secret fiancee’ Emily Thomas had a boyfriend all along
Amazing Tom Cruise didn’t need a stunt double to perform his terrifying feats in the latest Mission Impossible film. A shame it seems he did need a stand-in to make him look good off camera.
It turns out his ‘secret fiancee’ Emily Thomas had a boyfriend all along. A stunt too far, Tom?
Having a jibe at the Duchess of Cambridge, celebrity stylist Nicky Clarke says it’s a ‘disaster’ for any woman to show a few grey hairs until she is elderly.
Not quite as much of a disaster as a hairdresser pushing 60 with a risible bouffant orange barnet sneering at our most glamorous royal. Who does he think he is? Fergie?
Having a jibe at the Duchess of Cambridge, celebrity stylist Nicky Clarke says it’s a ‘disaster’ for any woman to show a few grey hairs until she is elderly
Prince Charles has warned the world it must ‘go green or die’. Now, my colleague Sebastian Shakespeare has revealed Charles took four gas-guzzling royal helicopter flights to watch polo. So now we know what the HRH stands for: His Royal Hypocrite.
Once, she was the Oscar-winning star alongside Leonardo DiCaprio. Now, Kate Winslet is reduced to re-enacting that arms-outstretched pose with, er, Bear Grylls, for a survival show. Proof her career is sinking faster than the Titanic.
A BBC journalist covering the Calais crisis has been accused of racism after asking people foiled trying to enter Britain illegally if they were ‘returning to the jungle’.
That’s actually what the migrant camp is called by its inhabitants. What should Paul Adams have asked: ‘Are you returning to Disneyland Paris?’
Westminster Noticeboard...
- The director of Anti-Slavery International says most cotton garments we wear have been produced using slave labour. I wonder if that includes the cotton vests Jeremy Corbyn (pictured) buys from his local market. At £1.70 a pop, I’d wager they’re not woven by workers growing rich on the back of Comrade Corbyn’s patronage.
- Never mind the troubles that he’s caused in Westminster. The cocaine-snorting, prostitute-procuring Lord Sewel’s greatest betrayal was to his wife Jennifer and his four children — including two stepchildren, who so looked up to him they changed their name to his. Yes, he’s a disgrace to democracy — but we should never forget his sordid antics also ripped the heart out of a loving family.
- How appropriate that Dave’s had an orchid named after him. My least favourite flower, it is hot-housed, rarely able to live in the real world, has no scent and is only truly popular among the metropolitan elite.
- It is bad enough peers are pocketing £300 a day for turning up for work, even if they live only a short walk away. Now we learn Labour peer Lord Paul claimed £40,200 expenses despite making just three speeches. You’d have thought with his £2.2 billion fortune he could pay his own way. The peer attended the House of Lords 134 times and, judging by his girth, was chiefly there for the subsidised lunches.
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