Sir Philip Green

He may not be the most likeable of people, although it is hard to judge never having met him. But his public persona is rather naff. However he is innocent until proven guilty.

Sadly wealthy and powerful people have manipulated the judicial process ever since there was one. As I understand it several people, mainly/all women have received sums of money from him in return for which they signed NDAs. The Telegraph was going to report this and Sir Philip took out a temporary court injunction to prevent this. A full hearing is due to take place "soon". Lord Hain revealed this fact and Sir Philip's name as the man behind this using Parliamentary Privilege in order to get round the injunction. So as I understand it there are two points in question - the use of NDAs and the use of parliamentary privilege. 

Many of us have signed NDAs, the ultimate one which I have signed is the Official Secrets one. But I have signed many customer ones when commercially sensitive information was disclosed to me. I also signed one when I left my last employer and this covered the terms of my termination agreement. It would appear that NDAs are also being used when people make allegations and they are "bought off" with sums of money and they promise to say anything more. Who is the "guilty" person in these cases probably varies. I can understand an innocent person succumbing to paying out rather than be tried by the media! I can also understand someone raising a legitimate complaint being bought off as it is so much easier than fighting expensive lawyers and a court case. Should this type of NDA be made illegal? Probably easier said than done as no matter how careful the wording of the law there will always be a clever lawyer who will find a way to get round it. 

To move to the issue of Lord Hain and his revelation in the Lords. Should he have done this? Is the fact that it was Sir Philip behind it all relevant? Personally, on balance, I think Lord Hain was wrong. But the cat is out of the bag and who knows where it will run.

Update on drug testing

Update on drug testing - as you know from earlier posts I was not suitable for the drug trial due to not having the propensity for developing excess Beta-Amyloid in the brain. The research company Re:cognition contacted me several weeks ago to ask if I would be willing to go for genetic testing. There is a link between the APOE4 gene and Alzheimers and they want to monitor people who have this gene to see if they develop Alzheimers. So a few weeks ago I had a DNA and I got the results yesterday.
Basically we all have the APOE gene and there are three versions of this APOE2, APOE3 and APOE4 (I do not know what happened to APOE1!!). If you have a single copy of APOE4 the genetic risk of getting Alzheimers increases by 25%, if you have two copies it increases by 55%). Understand that with genetic risk factors it does not mean that you will get the disease and if you genetic risk is 0% you can still get it - it is just one of the factors that can cause it.
Anyway the result of my test shows that I have the APOE3 gene (not the APOE4) so that genetic risk is 0% in my case. It also means that my children cannot get the APOE4 gene from me - so they cannot have two copies of the gene as you can only get one copy (max) from each of your parents.
So that is good news, it doesn't mean that I cannot get Alzheimers but the chances are considerably reduced. I can of course get another form of dementia - but so far so good!

Who knows what tomorrow will bring..............