Charles Moore’s notes: While Justin Welby was finding God, I was eating baked beans

Attending the funeral of Margaret Thatcher in April, the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was much impressed by the bit in the sermon by the Bishop of London about how Mrs Thatcher had replied personally to so many letters. He went back to his department, and asked it to give him each day one letter from a member of the public which recounted particularly shocking problems in the Health Service. He now uses these letters to dive into the problems that patients experience. It is a good idea, but how alarming that it is a novel one. The Department of Health receives more letters than any other part of government except 10 Downing Street. Is it really the case that up till now, officials have never troubled the Secretary of State with the woes of the public? For more than 60 years, we have been bullied into thinking that the NHS works for us. At last, because so many — especially the old — have cruelly experienced the opposite, we want to make our feelings known. Mr Hunt’s one letter a day is a tiny drop in the ocean of misery which must eventually sweep the current system away.

If the Liverpool Care Pathway had been called, say, the Oxford Care Pathway, would it have inspired more confidence?

In October 1975, I went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. My first set of rooms was G3 New Court. These are the ones described by Tennyson in In Memoriam, because they were occupied by Arthur Hallam, whose death the poet laments. ‘Up that long walk of limes I past/ To see the rooms in which he dwelt/ I lingered: all within was noise/ Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys/ That crashed the glass and beat the floor;/ Where once we held debate, a band/ Of youthful friends, on mind and art,/ Of labour, and the changing mart,/ And all the framework of the land.’