Home > The Magazine > Features

Wednesday 3 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

‘The stroke could have killed me’

Fraser Nelson

Wednesday, 5th 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.

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page

More articles from: Fraser Nelson | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

I will always defend a big spender like J.M. Keynes

Nancy Dell�Olio

Nancy Dell’Olio makes an impassioned case for Keynesian economics as the necessary remedy for the global crisis. It is to the Cambridge economist that we should turn once more

How I became Bulgaria’s etiquette guru

Dylan Jones

Dylan Jones is astonished to find in Sofia that the former communist country has embraced his guide to the mores of modern life — and that not everybody looks like Borat

Rudd has lurched from indecision to phoney war

Matthew Castray

Matthew Castray looks back on the Australian Prime Minister’s first year in office and audits an administration which has reviewed much and done very little

Incompetence is fine: but being offensive is sure to get you sacked

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says that something has gone wrong when 15 South Lanarkshire social workers are sacked over a dodgy Gary Glitter joke while none of their counterparts in Haringey has even been reprimanded over the ‘Baby P’ case

Brown has played into the hands of the Tory Bullingdon Boys he loathes

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson says that the Pre-Budget Report killed off New Labour without landing a punch on the Tories. It has paved the way for a new Conservatism, in which Cameron woos aspirational voters, focuses on government debt and looks for responsible spending cuts

Want to cut taxes? First cut spending. Here’s how

Fraser Nelson

After a week of clamorous competition between the parties over tax cuts, Fraser Nelson offers a guide to paying for them: a programme of spending cuts that would preserve core services but shave off the fat of the Brown years. All that is needed is political will

Obama has changed the world just by being elected

James Forsyth

James Forsyth looks back on an extraordinary contest and the victory of a man who, even before his inauguration, has had a transformative effect upon American politics

Osborne stumbles: but is there a bigger story about Mandelson?

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite says that the shadow chancellor should have known better than to cross the most brutal spin-doctor in Westminster, or flout the conventions of the super-rich. But we should not be distracted from the Business Secretary’s true role in this saga

Amid the financial turmoil, Peter versus George is the key battle

Fraser Nelson

Stand by for a mighty clash between two politicians, says Fraser Nelson. The now infamous dinner between Mandelson and Osborne was a cordial parting for power-brokers of different generations who will fight each other savagely for electoral advantage