Who cares if Rishi Sunak uses a private GP?

Rishi Sunak is absolutely right to say, in softer terms, that his family’s healthcare arrangements are no one’s business. 

There is a reason that one of the core tenets of the Hippocratic Oath is confidentiality: accessing healthcare is a deeply personal and private matter. That’s as true for the prime minister as it is for anyone else. That right to privacy doesn’t diminish because it’s suspected that an insurance bill or out-of-pocket fee might be involved in the process. 

This is one of the many ugly ironies of socialised medicine: a purported universal public service gets used as a political tool to single out and criticise people (often politicians) who might go about accessing care in a different way. But, as he searches for any and all solutions to improve current service levels in the coming months, pressure will only build for Sunak to answer questions about his family’s GP and healthcare set-up.

Speaking to Katy Balls for The Spectator’s Christmas issue last month, Sunak – ever the pragmatist – said that there were plenty of examples of ‘doing things differently’ to get better results for patients, refusing to rule out the independent sector to help achieve such outcomes. Having now set himself the task of getting the NHS back on track in his new year speech, he will almost certainly need to look outside of existing NHS structures to find the capacity and skill sets to do so. This means his personal arrangements are going to be a key talking point for anyone who takes issue with prioritising patient outcomes over political ideology. This will make Sunak’s task of improving healthcare delivery even more politically difficult to achieve.

The Conservative party needs to shoulder its share of the blame in all this. It has spent over a decade both in power and in denial about healthcare outcomes. Sunak was right yesterday when he suggested that drawing focus to his own arrangements is simply a ‘distraction’ from the bigger issues. But it’s his own party that has so often used that tactic of distraction: celebrating the NHS’s birthday, throwing money at the system to avoid the topic of reform, reverting to false platitudes about the wonders of the NHS when questions about its performance were too tricky to answer.

Meanwhile, as British politics gets whipped up into a frenzy over whether the PM sees a private GP, the rest of the world looks on gobsmacked. How can this G7 country, which does have plenty to envy, be in such a sorry state of debate about its crumbling healthcare services?

The ideological obsession with the NHS – summed up by dancing nurses in the Olympics opening ceremony back in 2012 – has always seemed a bit strange abroad, especially when almost every other developed country offers universal access to healthcare. A decade on, this oddity has morphed into tragedy, as the outright denial about patient outcomes, and refusal to critique the NHS in any meaningful way, has brought the system to its knees.