More trouble for George Galloway it seems as now even his wife has had enough of him and plans to file divorce papers in the next few days.

It appears that George may have added a few ‘away fixtures’ to his schedule while out campaigning, leading to his wife getting a number phone calls from women claiming that ‘Gorgeous’ has been do rather more than simply showing them his manifesto. Still, you have admire Galloway’s chutzpah - faced with an irate and non-too trusting spouse, Galloway has apparently responded by claiming that reports that his weapon may have been ready for use in less than 45 minutes are ‘a plot by an unnamed intelligence service to discredit him’.

Wonderful stuff, indeed.

There are few politicians, very few in fact, who could genuinely claim to hold the respect and admiration of everyone in their own political party, let alone across the whole mainstream political spectrum.

Politics is a business in which you inevitably end up making a few enemies along the way - unless, of course, you happen to be Michael Foot.

Foot is a remarkable figure within the Labour movement. Party leaders rarely do well in defeat, as Michael Howard will shortly discover. Almost everything else can be forgiven, just not losing elections and losing them badly. Yet despite having led the Labour Party to its worst electoral defeat in living memory and possibly the worst in its entire history - I can’t recall for the moment just how badly we came off under Ramsay-McDonald - Foot remains a much-loved and respected elder statesman of the party. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone with a bad thing to say about him.

To people outside the party, especially those who recall him only as the guy in the ‘donkey jacket’ at the cenotaph - and it wasn’t a donkey jacket, by the way, just an overcoat - perhaps the news that this week, at the age of 92 and with 72 years as a party member behind him, Foot has been out and about on the campaign trail in Hornchurch, Essex - zimmer frame and all - fighting the fascist BNP and its efforts to target the seat as one where they could have an impact, may explain a little of why he’s so widely respected.

I’ve heard Foot described, many times, as being part of the ‘conscience’ of the Labour movement and it must surely be a man of conscience and great fortitude that he’s still out there, fighting for what he believes in after so many years - to be out campaigning at his age is an act where words genuinely fail me and all I can do is sit here and quietly applaud the great man.

It happens often enough at the best of times but during election campaigns, if there’s one thing that you can bank on its that some people will find ways to blame the government for just about everything, even if its not really their fault at all.

Having failed, miserably, to make any kind of real impact out of forcing the disclosure of the Attorney General’s preliminary advice, which amounted to little more than ‘your guess is as good as mine’ when it came to the question of whether invading Iraq was legal or not, much was then made of the one real piece of discomfort that the studio audience was able to vest on Tony Blair during the Question Time Leaders Special - the claim that some GP’s had responded to NHS targets on waiting times for appointments by refusing to book appointments more than 48 hours in advance.

This, we are assured by all and sundry, is the government’s fault. Just another example of how targets warp clinical priorities and force the poor beleaguered medical professional into yet more unnecessary time-consuming pen-pushing when they should be treating patients. So mortified was he by getting nailed with a question for which he hadn’t sorted out a preprepared answer, that our Imperious Leader is now promising to scale back on the number of targets facing NHS professionals and make them more ‘flexible’.

But hang on a second here. Let’s wind back a little bit and think things through.

What exactly are we talking about here? Most of the criticism of NHS targets before this week has focussed on things like hospital appointments and operations where targets might, conceivably, affect schedules and impact of clinical decisions - the ‘well we’ve got to get another couple of heartbypasses in this week to make the targets so we’ll have to drop a couple of hip replacements and and half dozen ingrown toe-nails to fit them in. But that’s not what we’re talking about here, we’re talking about appointments with GP’s, you know the ‘I’m not feeling too pukka, think I’ll give the Doc a call’ kind of thing.

Now, ok, there’s clearly some room for flexibility in this area when it comes to setting targets. GP’s do get a fair amount of ‘regular business’, repeat prescriptions, sick notes and routine appointments arising from patients with medium-long term illnesses, so it would be unfair if that were allowed to count against them but otherwise I don’t see what’s so wrong about the idea that if I’m taken unwell, unexpectedly, I should get to see my doctor within a couple of days. In fact, as targets go, that ones seems pretty reasonably to me as, personally, I’d much prefer to be guaranteed a same-day service. But if a couple of days is the best they can do, well then a couple of days is OK I suppose.

It says a lot about the way many people see politicians - lying scumbags - very differently from doctors - god in a white coat - that when GP practices start playing the system to cover their own arses on these targets, people automatically start blaming the government for it rather than wondering exacly what kind of lazy, dishonest, bureacratic scumbag it takes to figure out how to work the system with actually addressing the problem of trying see patients within a reasonable time and why whoever it is has already been handed their P45 for trying it on in this way.

Perhaps the government’s targets in this area are too rigid and inflexible but that does nor excuse some practices taking the easy way out and rigging the system in their favour instead of trying to make sure they get to see patients in a reasonable time and its that we should be more concerned about.

If your GP is one of those who’s operating a ‘no advance bookings’ system at the moment then perhaps you should be complaining to them about the lack of decent service, not tot he government as its really not their fault.