Few NHS England board members are better versed in the pithy soundbite than the exuberant Tim Kelsey.
Getting your message across to Fleet Street means talking in simple, grandiose terms and repeating your main points in case the dozy journos are a bit hungover and slow on the uptake, as Mr Kelsey, who was previously a Sunday Times journalist, is well aware.
In his address to the annual EHI Live conference, Mr Kelsey hammered home the usual stuff about a coming “social revolution”, but chose to leave his audience with a maritime metaphor to ponder.
“If you want people to cross oceans, you don’t just teach them to build boats, you teach them to long for the immensity of the sea,” he said, although he credited the metaphor to a “an amazing guy who looks after open data in France”.
End Game could not help but recall Eric Cantona’s classic hack-baffler: “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea”.
We applaud Teekay’s adoption of Gallic abstraction, but hopes for everyone’s sake that, should he encounter any heckling from the sidelines, he keeps his studs to himself.
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