LONDON. In a development that has left emergency services across the Home Counties reaching for the smelling salts, a British field hospital has been dispatched to Venezuela. The mission: to treat an epidemic of panic attacks and stress fractures. Yes, you read that correctly. A nation in the grip of a political and economic collapse so profound that its citizens are literally falling to pieces, and our response is a 50-bed mobile medical unit with a heavy emphasis on calming mists and bone setting.
Let us pause to savour the magnificently British absurdity of this situation. While Nicolás Maduro swans about in his presidential sash, the populace is apparently so overwrought by the price of a loaf of bread that they are spontaneously combusting into fits of anxiety. And who do we send? Not a diplomat. Not an economic envoy. No, we send doctors. Very well-meaning doctors, I am sure. But they will be like trying to mend a dam with sticking plasters.
I imagine the scene at Heathrow: 'Right, chaps. We've got a 37-year-old male, presenting with acute hysteria brought on by a 40,000% inflation rate. Nurse, prepare the diazepam and a briefing on the merits of the Waitrose meal deal.' The audacity, the sheer pluck of it all, is almost admirable. It is the foreign policy equivalent of offering a drowning man a nicely brewed cup of tea.
Meanwhile, the real fractures are not in the bones of Venezuelans but in the very fabric of their society. The economy has collapsed. The currency is a joke. People are eating from bins. And yet, the international community's response is a field hospital staffed by the very people whose government has been complicit in propping up Maduro's regime through sanctions and neglect. Oh, the irony is so thick you could spread it on a stale arepa.
But let us not forget the panic attacks. In a country where you cannot buy aspirin for less than a month's wages, where the electricity goes out more often than a premiership manager's patience, it is a wonder anyone is calm enough to stand upright. The stress fractures are a literal metaphor: the people are so ground down by the weight of their existence that even their bones are crying out. And we, the benevolent British, arrive with our polypropylene tents and our pastel-coloured forms, ready to treat the symptoms while the disease rages on.
The field hospital is a fine thing in itself. It will undoubtedly save lives and mend limbs. But it is a sticking plaster on a haemorrhage. What Venezuela needs is not more medics but a cure for the madness that has gripped its leadership. It needs a governance transplant. But that would require spine and conviction from our own leaders, who are currently too busy admiring their own reflections in the globes of their whiskey decanters to notice the abyss yawning below.
So, here is to the medics. Brave souls, heading into the heart of darkness with their stethoscopes and their empathy. I raise my glass of Bombay Sapphire (naturally, a juniper-based medical tincture) to their valour. But let us not mistake their mission for a solution. The crisis in Venezuela will not be cured by Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and a prescription for ibuprofen. It requires a political remedy, a forceful intervention of the sort that our leaders seem too timid to contemplate. Until then, we can expect more fractures, more attacks, and more field hospitals. And more tragically British responses to a tragedy that demands something far more radical.
God save the medics. God save Venezuela. And God save us from our own pathetic delusions of humanitarian grandeur.
