Hewitt's legacy: a £300,000 bill for taxis on the NHS

* Junior doctors without jobs, NHS maternity units and accident and emergency departments forced to close, staff shortages and paltry pay-rises for the lowest paid among them such as nurses.

Still - it's good to see that civil servants at the Department of Health have been travelling in style.

Under Tony Blair's final Secretary of State for Health, Patricia Hewitt, pictured above, the DoH last year spent £310,754 on taxis, £463,723 on business-class plane tickets and £3.1m on first-class train fares.

That averages £1,195 a working day on taxis and almost £12,000 a day on first-class train travel.

"A lot of people will be surprised that civil servants at the head office in Whitehall are spending so much on luxury train and plane travel at a time when the NHS is under such financial pressure," says the Conservative MP Mark Hoban, who tabled the original parliamentary questions which prompted the department to open its expenses file.

A DoH press officer says that staff need to travel between offices in London and Leeds, as well as visiting NHS facilities around the country.

He adds: "It is essential that Department of Health officials travel overseas in order to do their jobs properly and to keep informed about global health issues.

"All requests for overseas travel are signed off at senior level and are subject to regular scrutiny."

Very reassuring. Taxi for Hewitt!

* Jolly hockey sticks presenter Sophie Raworth is about to leave BBC lunchtime news bosses in a post-natal funk.

Raworth, 39, yesterday informed colleagues at Broadcasting House that she is pregnant with her third child and will soon take maternity leave. She celebrated the announcement with a glass of champagne in the studio.

When she took leave in 2005 to give birth to Georgia, now 20 months old, the "ratings Viagra" Natasha Kaplinsky was brought in to cover for her on the Six O'Clock. Kaplinsky was given Raworth's slot on a permanent basis and brainy Raworth - once outrageously maligned as resembling a "talking boiled egg" - moved to present the Beeb's One O'Clock News, where she replaced Anna Ford.

Raworth's eldest daughter, Ella, is now three. I do hope that no ambitious young "autocutie" has designs on her lunchtime patch.

* It's something of an understatement to say that the members of indie band Blur "dabbled" in drugs, Tattinger and sex with groupies.

The drummer, Dave Rowntree, wrote a newspaper column yesterday about his cocaine addiction - he spent years hoovering Colombian marching powder up his conk, apparently - and the resultant paranoia and depression. "When I first discovered alcohol, and later cocaine," he wrote, "the effect was almost religious in its intensity, and all my problems seemed to melt away."

Rowntree wants to become a barrister, and, he tells me, is one year into a law degree at the Open University. Whichever inn he seeks to join will request "clarification" on his former substance use. Pandora's barrister says: "If he still took coke he would be most welcome."

* Neil and Christine Hamilton have resurrected their vulgar husband-and-wife chat show at the Edinburgh Festival. (Long-suffering readers of this column may remember that the former MP was spanked by two men in red leather bondage attire last year, while Christine groped a male comedians crotch and lifted her skirt to shock front-row audience members.)

One person who won't be rushing north to buy a ticket is Cherie Blair. Christine told her studio crowd yesterday: "Thank you, we're very grateful to the Scots for sending us Mr Gordon Brown. And Sarah Brown, who's got rid of the Wicked Witch for us - although I shouldn't be mean about another middle-aged woman with thigh problems."

* General Colin Powell has spoken warmly about the brief military career of his military contemporary Elvis Presley, who he encountered twice. "I see him as Elvis the soldier who, by the way, happened to be a celebrity," Powell tells Paul Gambaccini in this morning's Radio 4 show The GI Blues of Elvis Presley.

Colin and Elvis met on a training exercise in Frankfurt in 1960. "I saw him in the field," says Powell, then a a lieutenant. "I ran across him in the woods while he was doing what every other GI does." Vague for a reason, one suspects. (Remember that EP died on the toilet.)

Powell, now 70, was two years younger than Elvis. Just think what Elvis could have done if he'd laid off the drugs and burgers. Secretary of State?

pandora@independent.co.uk