I was going to change lines at some point. Finally, in today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Rishi Sunak dropped his refusal to discuss his family’s health care arrangements and admitted that he has gone private.
He used the first question of the session, from Labor’s Cat Smith, to ‘answer the lady directly’ and say: ‘I am registered with an NHS GP. I have used independent medical care in the past and am also grateful to Friarage Hospital for the fantastic care they have given my family over the years.’
Starmer had an open target today: the NHS hasn’t left the front pages in weeks
The admission shows that Sunak and his team had seen the way his line that health care was a private matter had landed, and had accepted that it would be better to simply release the details and move on. Keir Starmer brought it up towards the end of his six questions and said the prime minister would now “enjoy the experience of waiting for 8am” to try and get a GP appointment on the NHS.
Unsurprisingly, Starmer focused all her questions on the health service, starting with criticizing Sunak for not negotiating properly with health workers and therefore prolonging the strikes. The Prime Minister tried to shift the focus towards what he called ‘minimum security legislation’ (the bill itself does not mention security levels, but talks about ‘service’) and asked why Labor has not backed up. He used that legislation again in his second reply when Starmer attacked the Conservative legacy in the NHS.
Sunak then went on to ridicule shadow health secretary Wes Streeting’s proposals to turn GPs into salaried NHS employees rather than private partners as “will cost a fortune and is outdated, just like the Labor Party”. Streeting appears to have been independent on this: shadow cabinet colleagues have not supported what appears to have been a no-cost policy idea. It’s a useful weakness for Sunak to exploit.
Starmer insisted on the status of the NHS rather than strikes, accusing Sunak of going “from applauding nurses to firing nurses”. He also said the Tory party had presided over “ten years of controlled decline” and used the pandemic as an excuse for the current crisis.
Starmer had an open target today: the NHS hasn’t left the front pages for weeks and the strikes have only been a sidebar to the major collapse in the service. But even though Sunak has kept his own personal arrangements from being one continuous story, he has far less control over the main issue at stake.
The strikes have focused on the state of the NHS and the fact that, even with the additional funding and policies announced this week to take the pressure off the emergency, there are long-term problems with the health and care services sector. Social. Conservatives have ignored these issues and they are now key factors in the current crisis. Even Labor’s bogus proposals on GPs won’t cover that because the opposition hasn’t had a chance to introduce any reform for over a decade, while the Conservatives have.
