‘The stroke could have killed me’

8 July 2006

While most strokes are suffered by pensioners with heart disease, they also affect the young. For reasons Mr Lansley’s doctors have never managed to establish, a vein in his neck had been damaged and the blood had started to clot internally. When he picked up the cricket ball, a clot had temporarily blocked the blood supply to a part of his brain. He was shocked by the randomness of it all: had blood been denied to a different area of the brain he could be paralysed or worse. ‘It could have killed me. It was just a chance event that the net result for me was just losing my balance.’

His decision to talk about his condition fits a pattern of behaviour in the Cameron Conservatives. At a time when the party does not have a health policy, Mr Lansley has the unusual job of championing ideas which do not yet exist. But he can pick themes and plot personal narratives, which are increasingly considered more powerful than political policy.

Mr Lansley’s story highlights a notorious flaw in the NHS: that he only had proper treatment because he was married to a doctor and able to bully his local GP. The Tories could always produce a research paper showing that poorer people are treated worse by the NHS as they are less likely to have such expertise — but it is personal anecdotes and individual cases which are being used to get the broader message across.

Mr Lansley is taking his campaign a stage further. Next Tuesday, the House of Commons public accounts committee will publish a report on how stroke patients are treated by the NHS and asking how many people could be spared paralysis if they were treated with the same urgency as heart-attack victims. If suspected stroke victims are detected and scanned within three hours, there is a chance of removing the blood blockage and minimising brain damage. Mr Lansley has the figures: 75 per cent of stroke victims in New York are given a brain scan within three hours, but in Britain just 0.2 per cent are treated as emergency cases.