Sentenced to a slow, agonising death . . . by No 10’s panic squad

ONE OF the filthiest tactics of the Panic Merchants is to claim that anyone who opposes their strangling of the country is callous and cares only about money, not life. Dissenters have been pelted with slime of this kind by Johnson, the man who ruined Britain, and by his dense sidekick, Hancock – perhaps the first Health Secretary in history who does not know that malaria is spread by mosquitoes. They tell us we wish to ‘let the virus rip’.

Well, Johnson and Hancock, if you care so much about lives, get in touch with Lisa King, as I did. Ask her to tell you about how her husband Peter, a retired t axi driver aged 62, died. It is a horrible, upsetting story, involving a grown man screaming in agony. And in my view it is an absolutely direct consequence of Hancock’s conversion of the NHS into a National Covid Service which treats everything else as a nuisance.

Pet e r King was grudgingly granted (as so many now are) a remote session with a GP who, unable to meet him, and apparently ignorant of his records, diagnosed his severe chest discomfort as reflux. I am not especially interested in blaming this doctor. Under the conditions created by Hancock, he was presumably doing his best.

But it was not good enough. Actually the trouble was far more serious – a stone trapped in his gall bladder – and the resulting delay meant he was overcome with indescribable pain a few days later.

Peter was given emergency surgery to reduce the agony, but needed a more radical operation. He was put on the urgent list for it. But this was still too late. He fell terribly ill again and despite the heroic efforts of paramedics, he died. The many years of happy life which Peter and Lisa King might otherwise have had were wiped out for ever.

This is not just some isolated case. Something like 25 million appointments with GPs have been lost as a result of the Johnson Government’s panic (not as a result of Covid, as the hopelessly pro- Government BBC always says. The Government had a choice over how to respond, and took the wrong path).

Millions have not had referrals for diagnoses including cancer and heart disease. Some of them will have been scythed down as Peter King was. Others will have been needlessly damaged in smaller, slower ways.

But this is what Johnson and Hancock have let rip – needless pain, needless death. Let them never again dare to pretend that their original bungle, and the later months in which they have tried to save themselves from deserved disgrace, were the only way to save lives.

I suspect their panic may well in the end kill more than Covid ever did or could have done. We are in the hands of fools who will not admit they have made a terrible mistake.