He was going to change his line at some point. Finally, at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Rishi Sunak dropped his refusal to discuss his family’s healthcare arrangements and admitted he has gone private.
He used the first question of the session, from Labour’s Cat Smith, to ‘answer the lady directly’ and say: ‘I am registered with an NHS GP. I have used independent healthcare in the past and I am also grateful to the Friarage Hospital for the fantastic care they’ve given my family over the years.’
Starmer had an open goal today: the NHS hasn’t left the front pages for weeks
The admission shows that Sunak and his team had seen the way his line that healthcare was a private matter had landed, and had accepted that it would be better to just get the details out there and move on. Keir Starmer did bring it up towards the end of his six questions, saying the Prime Minister would now ‘enjoy the experience of waiting on hold at 8 a.m.’ to try to get a GP appointment on the NHS.
Unsurprisingly, Starmer focused all his questions on the health service, starting by criticising Sunak for not negotiating properly with healthcare workers and therefore prolonging the strikes. The Prime Minister tried to switch the focus onto what he called the ‘minimum safety legislation’ (the bill itself doesn’t mention safety levels, talking instead about ‘service’), and asking why Labour hasn’t backed it. He used that legislation again in his second answer when Starmer attacked the Conservative legacy on the NHS.
Sunak then switched to ridiculing Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s proposals to make GPs salaried employees of the NHS rather than private partners as something that will ‘cost a fortune and it’s out of date, just like the Labour party’. Streeting appears to have been freelancing on this – shadow cabinet colleagues have not been supportive of what seems to have been an uncosted policy idea. It’s a useful weakness for Sunak to exploit.
Starmer persisted with the state of the NHS rather than the strikes, accusing Sunak of going ‘from clapping the nurses to sacking the nurses’. He also said the Tory party had presided over ‘ten years of managed decline’ and used the pandemic as the excuse for the current crisis.
Starmer had an open goal today: the NHS hasn’t left the front pages for weeks and the strikes have only been a sidebar to the main meltdown in the service. But even though Sunak has stopped his own personal arrangements from being an ongoing story, he has far less control over the main issue at play.
The strikes have become about the state of the NHS, and the fact that even with the additional funding and policies announced this week to alleviate the emergency pressure, there are long-term problems with the health service and social care sector. The Conservatives have ignored these problems and they are now key factors in the current crisis. Even dud Labour proposals about GPs won’t cover up for that because the opposition hasn’t had the chance to introduce any reforms for over a decade, whereas the Conservatives have.
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