How many remember the return of SS Canberra at the end of the Falklands War? The flotilla of small boats following the ship up Southampton Water as she berthed at the Ocean terminal, decks lined with soldiers and the small boats featuring well endowed young women bare breasted in their admiration for the achievement.

How long was it before those same men were let go from their service to survive unsupported in the community with their burns, their PTSD, their flashbacks? We didn’t need them any more, they were too expensive.

As we stand each Thursday evening clapping and banging the saucepans we need to remember that sometime soon we will be complaining once more about queues, negligence, lack of openness, the cost and confusion that is inevitable in an organisation as large, diverse, and mostly unaccountable as our NHS, notwithstanding that it is generally regarded as a “good thing”. Who, after all, can say that they have not benefitted from it in some way? Our Prime Minister certainly has and he has made it very clear. He might have died without the care that he was given recently. Unfortunately that makes him compromised.

When the pandemic is brought under control and we start to count the cost and begin to plan to regain control of our public finances we will need to make a number of difficult decisions that will return us to choices between the “must have” and the “nice to have”, between the “spend today” and the “spend tomorrow”. We will need a leader as much then as we do today and we will need one that is not beholden to any particular interest group, one that can say the country needs this action and this contribution without bias or personal agenda.

We should be aware that when drugs gangs and particularly the primordial drugs gang, the Mafia, deliver food and medicines to the local community they do it to gain a strategic advantage not because they are really nice guys under the skin. The community is compromised in its efforts to defeat them in the future.

Of course the NHS and the Mafia are not the same but we won’t get either one to serve our community better in the future if we owe them our lives. We should be looking for the right leader to take us out of the recession! We should start today!