Junior doctors work seven days per week, they are the backbone of medical care in hospitals every day, at weekends and at night. I have had a number of emails from them complaining that, under the provisions of the proposed new contract, they will have to work harder and for less pay. I assure them that they won’t – that is an absolute guarantee that no-one will lose out compared to their current contract.

This Government was elected on a mandate to deliver a 7-day NHS and ensure care is the same quality across the week. At present, if you are admitted to hospital at the weekend your chances of dying are 15% higher. Illness does not take weekends off, it is essential that we so organise the NHS so that it doesn’t either.

Changing this means reforming the current contracts – put in place by Labour (for junior doctors in 2000, and for consultants in 2003). Last week in the Commons the Government guaranteed that not a single junior doctor will see their pay cut compared to their current contract. On the contrary, they will get same pay as they receive under their current contracts; but with a reduction in the maximum number of hours that can be worked in any one week (in order to end the unsafe practice of tired doctors treating patients).

This is not a cost cutting exercise. We are not seeking to save a penny from the junior doctors’ pay bill. We want the new contract to improve patient safety by better supporting a seven day NHS. For junior doctors, this means some increase in hours which aren’t payable as overtime, but backed up with a significant increase in basic pay.

Our ambition for the NHS to be the safest health care system in the world, is underpinned by reducing, not increasing, the number of hours junior doctors work each week.

This is a fairer deal for doctors. The new contract will mean no junior doctor is required to work more than an average of 48 hours per week, with tougher limits on unsafe hours including a new maximum working week of 72 hours, and a new maximum shift pattern of four consecutive night shifts and five long day shifts, compared with the current contract which permits more than 90 hours a week, 7 consecutive night shifts and 6 long day shifts. It will also better reward pay progression based on achievement and experience.

To threaten strike action is bizarre in the circumstances. Beyond the present dispute however, doctors should think about the profound implications of such a step, and the consequences for patient safety. By adopting the mores of the unionised factory shop floor, thet would abandon the standards of their profession.

It is time that the British Medical Council got back to the negotiating table, and inform its members of what really is on offer.

I have been deluged with emails protesting about the reform of tax credits. I disagree. Gordon Brown designed a system where one office the in Treasury taxed working families, whilst another used a highly complex system to pay the money back again to 9 out of 10 of those families. It’s like Charles Dickens’ ‘Circumlocution Office’.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more effective not to have taxed them in the first place?
We inherited this system in 2010. We’ve cut the 9 out of 10 families eligible to 6 out of 10. The current modest reform is now designed to cut it to 5 in 10. From the furore you would have thought that we were proposing a massacre of the innocents. A woman even broke down on BBC Question Time, but it turns out, on examination, that she will be unaffected.

We have to ensure that it always pays to work. This system however, simply doesn’t do that: in its first year of operation it cost £4 billion, this year it will cost £30 billion yet the number of ‘working poor’ has risen by 20%. Instead, what it has done, is to subsidise low wages. Employers have been able to get away with paying less, in the knowledge that taxpayers will make up the difference.

It is a horribly complicated system that has clogged my mailbag for years with cases of thousands of pounds being demanded in repayments. The tax credit payable in the current year is calculated on the basis income received in the preceding tax year, with a requirement for recipients to notify the Tax Credit Office immediately of changes in their circumstances that will alter their current entitlement. Of course, they neglect or forget to do this, or don’t even realise that they were supposed to.

Alternatively, the tax credit office fails to make the necessary alteration to payments when properly notified – not untypical of the Circumlocution Office. Either way, the bill for repayment comes as a disaster for the families concerned.

If we are to prosper we have to end our addiction to welfare. The UK has 1% of the world’s population, 4% of its income, but pays out 7% of its welfare. The reforms will help us move from high tax, high welfare, and low wages to an economy based on lower taxes, lower welfare, and higher wages. It’s a clear choice.

This week’s emails included about 50 from constituents urging me to attend a nutrition event at the House of Commons with Jamie Oliver. I was able to reply by saying that I had beaten them to it because last Thursday evening I had spoken at just such an event, and indeed had followed Jamie Oliver (albeit his contribution had been on video).

The event, at the Brazilian Embassy, was part of the ‘Road to Rio’ – passing leadership from the London Olympics in 2012 to the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016. A critical initiative launched in London, which needs to be refreshed and re-energised at Rio, is about healthy nutrition.

Last month the world signed-up to the Global Goals at the UN General Assembly, including the commitment to eradicate hunger and under-nutrition by 2030. Notwithstanding the fact that this has halved since 1990, eradicating it remains a very challenging ambition.

We have delivered ourselves into an extra-ordinary situation. Whilst the entire planet is being slowly cooked, a significant minority of its population appears to be determined on eating themselves into oblivion – almost as if they were characters in that seventies cult film La Grande Bouffe.

At the same time the developing world seeks to emulate our ‘sophistication’ by abandoning breastfeeding and increasingly accessing cheap sugar sources. The obscenity is the most under-nourished babies turn out later to be most prone to obesity, with all the morbidity and mortality that follows.

The bright spot is that the focus and finance to deal with this problem has been transformed since 2010. UK has played a major role in this: our aid spending on improving nutrition is $840 million annually. We will need to do more to meet the goal that we have set: In particular, we will need to do more for women and adolescent girls; we will need to do more to collect and analyse data in order to drive improved policy; we will do more to achieve better nutrition from agriculture.

I was able to announce 2 new research projects in partnership with the Gates Foundation. We will provide $41.5 million to fund research into improved agriculture and food choice in the most under-nourished places.

We need more donors, more innovation, and more global thinking. It is vital that we use the Rio Olympics to increase momentum. It would be an abomination if we continue to get ever fatter whilst others go under-nourished.

I know the young man from The New Forest, Colm Lock, whose egg spattered face was all over the national newspapers last week. Whilst some might say it was his own contributory negligence for loitering in the vicinity of the Tory Party conference in Manchester, I told him that he should wear it as a badge of honour.

I am afraid that I missed all the demonstrators: these are folk who do not rise early, and as I was always up with the lark and into the secure zone before 9 AM, there were never any demonstrators about.

By all accounts however, when they did get there they thoroughly enjoyed themselves hurling abuse at almost any passer-by. There were a couple of left wing media commentators who were really quite hurt to be called ‘Tory scum’. When they hurled more than just abuse their aim was often no more accurate: Boris Johnson had the best line, demanding the reintroduction of ball games in schools to revive these essential skills, given that the mob had missed him with every projectile that they had thrown.

On that basis perhaps Colm Lock’s egg was just a luck strike. Nevertheless, he can be justifiably proud of it. I recall the pride that I felt when I was struck by an egg in Wednesbury Market when I was fighting the West Bromwich West constituency in the 1992 general election – it was on the same day that John Major also took a direct hit with an egg. I took the view that, whilst I was in no danger of actually winning the seat, if I was important enough for someone to take the trouble to buy an egg and throw it at me, then I really had made my mark politically.

The spectacle of the demonstrations does however, beg the question of what has happened to the ‘gentler’ politics which Jeremy Corbyn announced that he would be ushering in?

It has been fascinating to watch a body of Labour supporters retreat into their comfort zone, readopting the ideology and modus operandi that served them so ill in the early nineteen eighties, but at least they appear to be enjoying themselves – whatever the electoral consequences might turn out to be.

I’ve just been back to Iraq for the first time since 2003 when I served there in the Army. I announced a further £20 million for our humanitarian relief effort, taking our commitment to £70 million since the summer of last year – that is aside from our military contribution to the international coalition against Daesh (ISIL). Despite the primacy of the Syrian war, Daish’s genesis is principally Iraqi.

A persistent band of internet trolls bombard me with emails purporting to prove that Daesh’s bestiality stems directly from the teachings of the Koran, and that the only true Muslims are – quite properly – violent jihadists. I have used this column previously to refute this nonsense. The reality is that Daesh, however efficiently organised and disciplined, is no more an homogenous phenomenon than any other terrorist group. It does, of course, consist of a significant proportion of religious nutters. It also contains gangsters, psychopaths, opportunists and – particularly in the higher echelons – plenty of Iraqi former regime loyalists. It is from this element that I believe the propensity for such extreme violence stems. These were men who served Saddam Hussein, and they learned their gruesome trade at the feet of the true Master.

Iraq has only a quarter of a million Syrian refugees (by comparison with over 2 million in nearby Turkey, and over a million in tiny Lebanon) but over three million of its own people have fled their homes and need help, which the government and the UN are asking for.

The difficulty is this: Notwithstanding the fall in the price of oil, were it not for Iraq’s rampant corruption; dysfunctional sectarian politics; bloated public sector; economic mismanagement – and free electricity, then Iraq ought to be able to weather the crisis from its own resources. It is difficult to touch the UK taxpayer for more, given the blood and treasure we have already shed there.

On the other hand, news of German and European generosity has reached the millions who have fled their homes to other parts of Iraq. Social media is alive with discussion of the prospects for more ambitious travel. We have to consider what more we need to do that might send the signal that remaining in Iraq still offers fair prospects.

Ben Carson the Republican presidential hopeful may have blown it by saying that it would be unconstitutional for a Muslim to be president of the USA, attracting the opprobrium of liberal commentators. He was, of course, wrong and ignorant of his own US Constitution which specifically excludes any religious bar to the office of President. It was pretty mild fare by comparison with the anti-Muslim propaganda that a number of my constituents continue to bombard me with. This is usually stuff they have picked up from dodgy websites and chain emails. In effect, they insist that the only authentic interpretation of Islam is as a totalitarian and violent ideology, ignoring the experience of over a thousand years of, for the most part, tolerant and peaceful co-existence.

The interaction of politics and religion has been an important factor in our own constitutional development. Lord Halifax in his Letter to a Dissenter sought to point out to Protestants opposed to the Anglican establishment, the dangers of making common cause with the papist tyrant James II, against the Church of England. Warning them that “infallibility and liberty are the two most contrary things in the world”. In this respect, returning to US politics for a moment, it is interesting to note that John F Kennedy, when he ran for president, made statements disavowing his Roman Catholicism, and insisting it would not unduly influence him as President.

Our own nation, notwithstanding its established Protestant religion, has evolved to be perhaps the most tolerant in the world of religious diversity. Equally, the USA, despite its Constitution defining itself as a ‘Nation under God’, is also a haven of toleration and diversity. I think that this earns us the right to comment critically on regimes that are failing to protect the rights of religious minorities, whether they be Islamic states accommodating increasing conservatism, or those in Israel wanting to define it as a Jewish state, with an aggressive settler movement determined to turn Palestine into a biblical theme park.

Most religions are benign, and all of them are a bit wacky, even my own. As Origen, one of the early church fathers pointed out ‘the more absurd it is, the more I believe it’. When it comes to the wacky stakes however, there is plenty of competition: Scientology; the Moonies; but is there anything to beat Mormonism?

Well, perhaps Atheism?

Last week I received a delegation of charities and voluntary organisations, many respected and well known household names, who came to complain about conditions in Gaza, and the restrictions which hamper their attempts to bring relief. In addition, they gave vent to their frustration about what they percieve as Israel’s increasingly brutal occupation of the Palestinian territories, with illegal settlements, demolitions, and collective punishments.

I responded by pointing out just how much we, as a government, are spending to demonstrate our support for the Palestinian people, it runs into hundreds of millions of pounds, and we are second only to the USA as a bilateral donor.

Notwithstanding the ever present terrorist threat, there is no getting away from the fact that, for staunch allies and supporters of Israel like ourselves, it is becoming increasingly difficult to defend some Israeli actions. As I said to ministers when I visited Israel recently, they aren’t giving us much to work with.

There are however, individuals and organisations in Israeli civil society who have the same concerns that were shared with me last week. This, at least, is an encouraging sign in what has been a bleak period for any prospect for peace.

I warned colleagues, excited at the prospect of the first Prime Minister’s questions with Jeremy Corbyn, that these things usually disappoint. It gave me no satisfaction to be proved right.

I do not recall a single PM or leader of the opposition in the last 18 years that hasn’t begun by announcing that they will do prime minister’s question time differently. Mercifully however, they all revert to type within a couple of weeks. Let’s hope Mr Corbyn follows the same pattern.

Every year a couple of people will write to me to complain about the lack of decorum at PMQs, but they are dwarfed by by the enormous number asking me to secure them tickets.

I think we are fortunate to have something with a bit of theatre to it, something of a gladiatorial contest. It is in stark contrast to the dullness of our continental neighbours. Now, if you want a really exciting parliamentary floor show, I can recommend Japan, which really can be authentically gladiatorial.

Da’ish is the grizzliest phenomenon of the modern world. Having specialised in finding the most shocking ways of carrying out public executions. It is now manufacturing and using chemical weapons with ghastly mass effect. Those of our disordered citizens who join this cult of death, declaring themselves to be the Queen’s enemies, should be given no quarter. They deserve to be targeted with whatever appropriate weapon systems we possess. Properly targeted and deployed, drones are an entirely satisfactory means with which to pursue them, after all…they had it coming.

To those of us brought up on Cricket and Christianity – giving us a C of E ‘middle and leg’ approach to most of life’s great questions – religious fanaticism is an incomprehensible phenomenon: we can entirely understand that men and women can be crazed and wicked.

It is impossible however, to understand their claim to be doing the will of God. The certainty with which Dai’sh terrorists believe that – should they die whilst massacring innocents – they will be welcomed to paradise with the gift of 72 virgins, is perhaps the most bizarre belief of all.

I understand, that now, scholars believe that it all comes down to a mistranslation: the offer is raisins, not virgins. Boy, are these guys going to have to handle disappointment.