Zahawi wasn’t what PM had prescribed on his NHS question time
Yesterday was scheduled to be Turn the NHS Around Day, but all Westminster wanted to talk about was Nadhim Zahawi. “I think I acted pretty decisively,” Rishi Sunak told an audience in County Durham, an odd turn of phrase given that one can no more be pretty decisive than “almost unique” or “slightly pregnant”. Where do our leaders learn to speak like this? In a breakout session at Davos, where Rishi, Joe, Justin and Darth Vader are taught empathy in leadership.
“I find your lack of faith disturbing.” “I like the energy, Darth, but it’s too negative. Try ‘Come on guys! Let’s put some faith into it’,”
A hundred days into his premiership and Sunak is still applying the Motivate Your Minions method to a country that sees work as downtime between tea breaks (and rightly so). The gap between his HR jargon and reality is becoming Brechtian.
The backdrop at this question time with some undeniably over-stretched health workers – called “PM Connect” – was a screen with his five pledges on it. But only one of them was visible within the camera frame, so he spoke upliftingly beneath a slogan as grim as it was irrelevant: “Stop the Boats”.
The NHS will have “more beds,” breezed the PM. “More ambulances … more staff … more social care”. All helped by a massive expansion in virtual wards. Many patients “don’t need to be in hospital”, said Rishi. Many of them “don’t want to be in hospital”.
Prime Minister, many of them can’t get into a hospital. They spend the night in the ambulance in the car park, balancing their decapitated head between their knees.
I’d be “delighted to take any or all of your questions”, he said, generously (excluding the media, because they’d only ask about you-know-who). And the requests rolled in for more money – for pay, for training, for pharmacists.
Well, said Rishi, I’m sorry to say that there’s only so much cash to go around. It was a tough message, in an everyday language you and I could understand.
“Every time you open a bill, it’s like ‘oh my, what’s going on’.” Spooky: that’s exactly what I say, Prime Minister, albeit with more swearing.
And the Government has to fight inflation because “when this goes badly wrong … it’s going to be awful for all of you, right?”
Right. The audience did not clap but there was a serious silence that implied they kinda, sorta got it.
This left just a few minutes for media questions. Zahawi, Zahawi, Zahawi. The PM was visibly annoyed that journalists were spoiling his big day but then, if he’d sacked Zahawi a week earlier, this clash of topics would have been avoided.
And it’s not the only thing wrong on his watch. We cut away to a BBC report from a school where staff are planning to strike. What do you make of it, a reporter asked a little girl. “It’ll be really good,” she said, “because you’ll get to lie in bed.” The future of our country is in safe hands.