Nhs

Ed Miliband gave a good, forceful, well-received speech at Labour’s manifesto launch this morning. It couldn’t have been anything else, given how close we are to polling day. There were some very well-delivered moments, particularly when it came to zero hours contracts and non-doms. The peroration was particularly energetic, with the Labour leader saying: ‘Over the last four and a half years, I have been tested. It is right that I have been. Tested for the privilege of leading this country. I am ready. Ready to put an end to the tired old idea that as long as we look after the rich and powerful we will all be OK.

Towards the end of last week, the Tories were looking a bit miserable. Their slow response to Labour’s non-coms announcement, coupled with a ‘dead cat’ response from Michael Fallon which made the party look rattled and unpleasant had left the Conservative campaign looking unusually disorganised and slow-witted. But ministers have tried to pick things up, and some of their announcements in particular have left Labour in a similar mess. The story that David Cameron’s party will meet the £8bn demand for health funding from NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens has left Labour hopping around looking a bit cross and awkward. This was not how the party had planned things:

David Cameron doesn’t regret the Lansley reforms that have done so much to damage any chance that the Tories could be trusted again by voters on the NHS. That’s what he told the Today programme this morning, saying: ‘The reforms were important and they were right… Of course [I stand by the changes]. If you’re saying to me: “Would you rather have 20,000 more bureaucrats and 9,000 fewer doctors?” Of course not.’ listen to ‘Today: David Cameron defends hostile campaign focus on Labour and Ed Miliband’ on audioBoom It’s difficult to find many Tories who privately share his view. Many who still think the spirit of the reforms were right

Faragephobia reached dizzy new heights on Sunday afternoon, when a bunch of thespians and circus freaks invaded Nigel Farage’s local pub and hounded him and his family out. Behaving with grating and probably knowing irony like small-minded Little Englanders, though dolled up as punkish outsiders, the protesters were basically saying to Nige: ‘Your sort aren’t welcome here — you’re barred!’ And so was a public figure humiliated while doing that utterly non-public thing of lunching with his wife and young daughters — turfed out of his own local hangout by people who don’t like his policies on immigration, the NHS, and other stuff. But this was more that Faragephobia, more than

The PMQs before the Budget is always pretty pointless, and David Cameron turned up clearly determined to trivialise his exchanges with Ed Miliband as much as possible. He came armed with a plethora of jokes about second kitchens, chuckling about throwing two kitchen sinks at problems, that if the Leader of the Opposition couldn’t stand the heat, he should get out of the kitchen, and that the Shadow Chancellor wouldn’t be able to tell which kitchen he could find his leader in. It was partly a device to blunt the attacks that Ed Miliband made, which predictably were on the NHS, on his promise not to reorganise the health service,

Has Andy Burnham really reinvented himself to prepare for a future leadership bid? In this week’s Spectator, I interviewed the Shadow Health Secretary about his rather forthright views on the NHS: views that some suspect have conveniently changed in order to appeal to Labour’s base. You can read the interview here, but for Coffee House readers, here are some extended quotes from our discussion. Burnham was insistent that his views on the health service today are the ones he put into practice when he was Health Secretary under the last Labour government. When I asked whether he’d changed politically, he said: ‘Well, there are a couple of ways to answer