Rishi Sunak has been caught on camera apparently walking away from a woman who has just started telling him about his daughter’s ordeal waiting for NHS treatment. As she starts to complain, he is looking anxiously over his shoulder at his aide, and then says he needs to get to the next appointment. She then walks with him while he repeats what the government is doing on the NHS. He does not, as the initial clip circulated suggested, walk straight off, but the encounter remains awkward for the Prime Minister as he doesn’t seem to take any interest in the individual case at all. This clip was circulated first:
Exclusive footage of Rishi Sunak challenged this morning by a former health worker on the state of the NHS, – captured by an off duty @skynews camera operator pic.twitter.com/aN8QKTjnH4
— Tamara Cohen (@tamcohen) January 19, 2024
While here is the full clip:
I can't stand Rishi Sunak, but you could have at least shown the whole clip.
— Lee Harris (@addicted2newz) January 19, 2024
He finished the conversation while he was walking and shook hands.
It's very easy to criticise him because he is useless, there is no need for dodgy Sly News clips on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/ULcvbYnVLr
Sunak, who was on a campaign visit in Winchester, was holding forth about how NHS waiting lists had been falling in the months when healthcare workers weren’t on strike. One of the women in the crowd, a former health worker, started to argue that things should go back to how they were before, at which point he rather oddly laughed, and then she said ‘well, not literally!’, before adding that her daughter had been waiting for seven hours. As they walked together, the Prime Minister told her what the government was doing, but did not engage with her on a human level.
These unscripted encounters are what political campaigning is all about. How a politician handles them derail their election campaign. In 2010, Labour was struggling to talk about immigration, and Gordon Brown was caught on a hot mic calling Gillian Duffy a ‘bigoted woman’. He spent the ensuing days trying to make it up to her. At least in Brown’s case, there was a debate about whether what Duffy was being bigoted when she spoke about ‘all these eastern Europeans what are coming in, where are they flocking from?’ NHS waiting lists are less debatable, and the human misery caused by waiting too long is something everyone in this country understands viscerally. Even if this woman is a paid-up Labour supporter who has a red flag flying in her front garden and a Jeremy Corbyn tattoo, she is entitled to be upset by a family member’s ordeal. And voters won’t care about anything other than that.
This is the wider problem for Sunak with NHS waiting lists. Even if the numbers are falling by the election, everyone in this country will have had someone on a waiting list in the past year, many of whom will still be on that list, and many who will also have got sicker while waiting for too long. Numbers don’t matter when you have seen a friend wait longer than they needed to for a scan. Even once someone has reached the top of that shrinking list, it takes a while to forget what they’ve been through.
Sunak was in broadcast mode in Winchester today. He needs to switch into human pretty fast.
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