With Bio-Waste Spreader: "As combine harvesters roll across the UK's 7.8m acres of arable land, universal gloom has set in among grain producers. Many have experienced significant unexpected cuts in subsidy receipts this year, and grain prices are at an all-time low in inflation-adjusted terms. How long will it be before UK growers – stripped of adequate subsidies to compensate them for their financial losses –throw in the towel and thereby increase the UK's reliance on imports?…"
With M.D.: "A review commissioned into physician associates (PAs) ordered by Streeting and authored by Professor Gillian Leng, president of the Royal Society of Medicine, concluded there had been cases where PAs had been used as a substitute for doctors in the NHS, which was 'clearly risky and confusing for patients'. Leng analysed coroners' reports and found six examples where deaths have been linked to contact with PAs…"
With Dr B Ching: "Fresh evidence has emerged of the conflict at the heart of government that has made it harder to reduce rail subsidies and improve railway efficiency. A three-year review after the chaotic May 2018 timetable update concluded that the network's fragmentation made it 'more difficult and expensive to perform the essentially collaborative task of running trains on time' and inhibited investing in 'affordable, necessary schemes without gold-plating or missing simpler, more efficient solutions'…"
With Remote Controller: "This year's 50th anniversary of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest has not prompted ITV to confine soap actors and comedians in a mock mental hospital where Anna Maxwell Martin as Nurse Ratched conducts contests to decide which TV personalities will be subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. The other classic 1975 movie has, though, resulted in the anniversary celebration, Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters, the title picked out in the opening credits in the blood-red letters on ocean blue…"
With Old Sparky: "Energy secretary Ed Miliband's statement last week on 'the state of the climate' was most remarkable for the extreme hype he gave it beforehand – and its almost total lack of content. It was to be 'unprecedented, passionate', he gushed; 'an exercise in radical truth-telling' in which he would 'explicitly call out politicians who reject net zero policies for betraying future generations'. But it was the dampest of damp squibs because Miliband is being thwarted by setbacks on all sides…"
With Lunchtime O'Boulez: "The Royal Opera's dubious decision to welcome back Anna Netrebko for its coming season has been widely questioned given the Russian soprano's past support for president Vladimir Putin's regime (see last Eye). And pressure is mounting as Yulia Navalny, widow of opposition leader Alexei, who died in an Arctic prison last year, campaigns to stop banned pro-Putin artists from being quietly 'rehabilitated'. Navalny has so far targeted Valery Gergiev…"
With Slicker: "Ringfencing the retail business and customer deposits of UK banks from their riskier investment banking and foreign operations was proposed in 2011 by the Independent Commission on Banking in the wake of the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS near-death experiences during the global financial crisis. Banks were given until 2019 to comply. Six years on, chancellor Rachel Reeves is considering taking down the fence…"
Letter from Yerevan
From Our Own Correspondent: "As the world's oldest Christian nation, we Armenians have seen a lot when it comes to church and state relations. Still, few in the 1,700-year history of the Armenian Apostolic Church could have foreseen events last month, when our prime minister Nikol Pashinyan offered to show his penis to the head of the church, Catholicos Karekin II. The indecent proposal came after one of Karekin's aides had called for Pashinyan to be excommunicated…"