Tom Hodgkinson welcomes the Health Secretary’s sensible advice

Many years ago when I was stuck in a boring job that involved spending an hour every day on a crowded Underground train with a hangover, the cough remedy brand Lemsip launched a horrifyingly anti-idler advertising campaign to support its new Lemsip Max range of products. Gone was the old Lemsip, a comforting lemony drink to be taken while lying in bed reading Sherlock Holmes books. In came Lemsip as tool of the slave drivers and friend to go-getters.

The gist of the campaign was that, thanks to Lemsip’s power in hiding symptoms, you could have a cold or even flu and carry on going in to work. Lemsip Max, claimed the ads, was “for hard-working heroes” and one memorably brutal poster admonished bleary-eyed commuters with the guilt-inducing injunction: “Stop snivelling and get back to work.”

Lemsip Max’s advertising team had clearly cottoned on to the American approach to sickness, which was: if ill, take a pill and carry on. This is the attitude that led to the opiates tragedy: blue-collar workers were in great pain as a result of their jobs. But they worried about losing their jobs. So their doctors gave them opiates to dull the pain. The problem with painkillers is of course, as my friend Penny Rimbaud of Crass would say: the pain is still there, you just can’t feel it.

And in the case of colds and flu, it’s the same: the cold and flu are still there. You just can’t feel them. You’re still infectious. In fact when ill, the best thing is to rest, to go to bed for a few days, get yourself out of circulation.

But this approach doesn’t make anybody any money so is not advertised on the tube. And I thought it had been relegated to the margins. So I was surprised but pleased to read none other than Health Secretary Matt Hancock speaking out against the Lemsip Max attitude yesterday.

“Why in Britain do we think it’s acceptable to soldier on and go into work if you have flu symptoms or a runny nose, thus making your colleagues ill?” said Hancock. “I think that’s something that is going to have to change.”

Hancock added that we should all take tests for cold and flu, which seems completely daft – as well as absurdly costly – since most of us know when we’ve got cold or flu because our bodies produce pretty unmistakable symptoms. Still, the basic principle of staying at home when ill, and keeping healthy, is surely a good one. Overwork, tiredness and stress all attack our immune systems, so Mr Hancock is correct when he says that the “soldiering on” attitude must end. He might have added, the “idling” must start. The anti-Covid precautions, while possibly excessive, have arguably led to a healthier populace. Said Hancock: “This year there’s been far fewer respiratory and other communicable diseases turning up in the NHS.”