Stella English pitted herself against the wrong man when she took Lord Sugar to court.
Anyone who's watched the self-made salesman demolish the personality, brains, practical abilities and long-held dreams of a mildly underperforming contestant could have told her that with eyes as hard as flint, and a hide that would make a rhino proud, Lord Sugar was not going to roll over simply to avoid a bit of bad publicity. Nor should he. If ever a case screamed greed and pique, this was it. Ms English, a former winner of The Apprentice who had given up her £82,500-a-year job to take part in the show, claimed that in her £100k post for Lord Sugar she was treated as "an overpaid lackey". She resigned and took him to court, thereby underestimating not just him but also the mood of the tribunal. Their verdict was resoundingly in Lord Sugar's favour. Worse, they added that the case "should never have been brought".
The apprentice's downfall came after an equally dubious claim some weeks ago by WPC Kelly Jones, who tripped over a kerb on a call-out from a man who thought there were burglars on his property. Ms Jones claimed the victim had failed to ensure her safety. When her chief constable called her lawsuit "surprising and disappointing", the officer dropped the case, but it's since been disclosed that she is already pursuing a claim against Norfolk Constabulary for a knee injury she suffered during a police car chase some months earlier.
One could cite many eye-watering suits in recent times where the prime motive appears opportunistic. And who among us hasn't had a cold call or a text message urging us to make a claim for a recent traffic accident? Such legal fishing trips have spawned a grim cash-for-crash industry, whose no-win-no-fee promise has actively encouraged the disgruntled, the amoral and the avaricious to establish a new and unedifying national hobby of nest-feathering. That they have done so without a care for the impact of their bill on everyone's premiums in part explains David Cameron's insistence, last year, that cold calling and bogus car-insurance claims must be robustly dealt with.
I look forward to the day Mr Cameron's rhetoric bears fruit, when honest claims are honoured and cheats routinely sent home empty-handed. And while nothing has as yet come of that resolve, in years ahead we might be able to look back on the Prime Minister's salvo as the first public stand in what is sure to be a long and painful war against an embedded culture of getting something for nothing, of looking after number one, of using – and roundly abusing – the system.
In the cases of the failed apprentice and the policewoman, it's interesting that they were so quickly denounced, either by tribunal or, in Ms Jones's case, by public and professional outcry. Could it be that what seemed to be a steadily advancing tide of petty or fabricated personal claims is beginning to turn? Is the hot-house climate of grasping self-interest cooling?
With false insurance claims, I suspect it will take the most sophisticated technology and the best-trained brokers to weed out the genuine from the ersatz. Nothing will curb some people's habit of milking a cash cow. In the public arena, however, when cases come to court, there does seem to be a change of mood. Gripped as we are in an ice-age of austerity, those demanding unwarranted hand-outs are certainly viewed with greater revulsion. Yet I wonder if it may go deeper. Is the distaste for excessive or ludicrous claims the sign of a growing need to distance ourselves from the era of unbridled avarice that led to today's economic woes?
Sentimental though it sounds, as the old-fashioned ethos of make do and mend takes a tighter hold, when helping your neighbour and doing something for the community is coming back in fashion, restraint and dignity are being recognised once again as positive and indeed desirable virtues. It seems to me that Ms English's and Ms Jones's claims offended because they were so blatantly cynical and exploitative. Like countless others before – but hopefully fewer in future – they were misusing a system designed for the needy, not for them.
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