‘The stroke could have killed me’

8 July 2006

‘All of us have journeys, some series of incidents in our lives which impact on us,’ he says. His journey dates back to the summer after the 1992 general election, when he was not the sensitive Tory moderniser he is seen as today. Then, he ran the Conservative research department and had a reputation as a right-winger in the mould of Norman Tebbit, whom he had served as a civil servant.

His all-star staff at the CRD included David Cameron as political secretary and Steve Hilton, now Tory communications director, as the graduate trainee. Ed Llewellyn, now Mr Cameron’s chief of staff, led the CRD’s foreign and defence section. Mr Lansley was running the group which is now running the Conservative party — and they had just helped John Major win a general election, against all expectations.

Three months later, Mr Lansley was playing cricket in Rochester on a Saturday. ‘I went to pick up a ball, stood up again and suddenly I couldn’t stand straight,’ he remembers. ‘I tried to stabilise myself on the pitch, but I had lost my balance. I walked down to the pavilion and sat down, but it got progressively worse.’ He collapsed and was taken to hospital where he was diagnosed with a simple ear infection and sent home the next day.

But his then wife, a junior doctor, was instantly suspicious. ‘She said I had no symptoms of ear infection, no raised temperature, nothing. Now it was true, and continues to be true, that if you have somebody who knows their way about, you can argue your way through the system without being dismissed by the authorities. We badgered the GP so much that he eventually sent me off to have an MRI scan.’

Lansley was referred to a private hospital, where the staff invited his wife to look at the scanning machinery, then quite new. ‘She is a doctor, so they talked her through it. They were all chatting away merrily as the results came in, then they suddenly all went a bit quiet. The pictures came up with bits of dead brain.’ It was thought at first that the cause was a tumour, but then the picture became clearer. At the age of 36, and in full health, Mr Lansley had suffered a stroke.