Liz Truss faces a mammoth task as PM but public attitudes need to change - Bernard Ingham

It is just about everything you can think of - the economy, cost of living crisis and levelling up the regions; reducing taxes when there is no money in the kitty; stopping illegal immigration and boosting housebuilding and home ownership; reforming the NHS and social care; making a manifest success of Brexit; producing a viable energy policy; seeing off the trade unions; ending the crime wave; putting the wokerati to flight; saving the UK from the nationalists; making sure teachers educate rather than indoctrinate; and meeting the challenge of Russian and Chinese expansionism - again without any money in the bank.

That's all. Talk about the Labours of Hercules. They had nowt on this.

But there is another serious problem which is only mentioned in passing yet affects our ability to make progress. It is public attitudes, contempt for public duty and self-indulgence.

The outstanding example of this are GPs who have clearly no abiding concern for their patients or their fellow doctors in A&E departments, plus doctors who choose to retire early during a crisis in public health because of punitive pension arrangements.

I don't think they should be penalised for working on but nor do I think they should desert the front with millions on waiting lists. Where have they put their responsibility?

It is scarcely credible to me that we have got into this situation when I think of the devotion to his patients of Dr Alan Hardy Clegg, a one-man practice in my native Hebden Bridge.

But what puts the tin hat on their arrogant contempt for the public is the recent report that doctors' salaries rose steeply - by no less than 17 per cent or £20,000 - during the pandemic to an average of £142,000.

You could forgive Ms Truss wondering why she bothers to face up to her mammoth challenge on her £150,000 salary.

It is more than the average GP, full or part-time, is doing. NHS figures show that before the pandemic 80 per cent of patient consultations took place in person. It is now down to 65 per cent, which seems high considering the public's complaints about not being able to see a doctor and my personal experience.

Now the BMA conference has threatened a strike over a contract that would force some practices to open on Saturdays. And what about Sundays? Illness is no respecter of the Sabbath.

In light of all this it is difficult to believe that doctors still regard themselves as a profession.

All the evidence suggests they are using the pandemic as an excuse to ease their lot at the expense of the vulnerable. It is quite simply a dereliction of public duty.

Which brings me to academia. It is, of course, diverting to see Tony Blair's son, Euan, making a mint out of encouraging youngsters to become apprentices while he (Blair) wants to see 70 per cent of youngsters in universities, regardless of whether they will benefit from it.

At the same time universities are agitating for an increase in the student's deferred payment tuition fee of £9,250 regardless of the soaring outstanding bill of £182bn that is forecast to reach £460bn in 20 years' time.

Meanwhile, doctors are mere paupers compared with university vice-chancellors who trouser three times the average GP salary - and, of course, leave with massive golden handshakes.

Where did they put their public duty to educate youngsters for a career, given the prevalence of gash degrees that are of little value in the marketplace?

It is difficult to believe they have the welfare of the individual or nation at heart, especially when they fill their courses with.premium-paying foreign students, especially from such hostile states as China.

Striking criminal barristers have obviously no regard for the victims of crime or the country's penury.

As for Civil Servants I am rendered almost speechless, as one of their kind for 24 years, by their working from home when the country is in such a mess and services for which the public pay through taxes are not delivering.

Have they no shame, especially when their gold-plated pensions are piling up further debt and they have job security not given to the private sector?

I rest my case. Where did Britain put its responsibility, public duty and their fellow men? They are no asset to Liz Truss, poor lass, or us.