You really couldn’t make it up. You go away for a late autumn break to a Spanish island when you suddenly become ill and have emergency surgery. Your insurance company tries to make arrangements to fly you back to the UK – only to be told there is no available hospital bed.

Canon David Wall, 67, has been waiting almost two weeks to return, but is stranded in Palma, Mallorca after having a five hour operation following an infected cyst which began to impact on his spinal chord. He is on a respirator and has not spoken or moved since surgery.

His family are at their wits end – and very angry with the NHS’s postcode radius system which restricts finding a bed to near his home in Suffolk. They are happy for him to be transferred to London or other hospitals in the region, but the NHS bureaucracy does not work that way.

The retired vicar desperately needs an intensive care neurological bed, but his family have been told all the suitable beds in East Anglia are full and he will have to wait until space becomes available.

But have they been told the truth? Bizarrely, Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, about 40 mins drive away, says it has beds available, but it’s a clinical decision about where it would be best for him to be treated and discussions were ongoing. That sounds like flannel to me.

Someone’s not telling the truth here, if there are beds at Addenbrooke’s excellent neurological centre, then why has his family been told there are no beds in the area? How many other Brits are stranded in hospitals overseas and being treated in the same shocking way?

As local MP Richard Spring points out, the Government boasts about having increased flexibility by introducing “choice”, but is obviously not delivering it.

I’m pretty sure that publicity about this will soon put the wheels in motion and a bed will suddenly be offered.