Hunt’s a Stalinist with a good bedside manner
...the PM’s verdict on his Health Secretary in the memoirs that have electrified Westminster
LAST WEEK a furore erupted after we reported how David Laws’s book on his time in the Coalition Government revealed No10 ‘leaned on’ NHS chief Simon Stevens to cut his estimate of the extra cash needed by the Health Service from £16billion a year to £8billion. This week Laws reveals the background to the dispute, David Cameron’s nickname for Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt – and Hunt’s fury when George Osborne demanded control of NHS spending…
JEREMY HUNT took over the Health Department from Andrew Lansley in 2012. Lansley’s demotion was punishment for ‘retoxifying’ the NHS after his reforms stirred up a hornets’ nest of opposition. The Prime Minister gave Hunt – ‘the Stalinist with the good bedside manner’, as Cameron once jokingly referred to him – a simple direction: ‘Keep the NHS out of the news.’
Actually, if Cameron had had his way, Vince Cable could have had Hunt’s job. In 2011, the PM suggested to Nick Clegg moving Vince from Business to Health, but Nick rejected it as a poisoned chalice.
Although Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne wanted to improve the NHS, they weren’t enthusiastic about providing the means – the money. Indeed, in 2012 and 2013, they had even considered cutting NHS spending – once to fund a tax cut and on the other occasion to offset borrowing.
In July 2014, Hunt received a particularly blunt letter from Osborne, telling him to do more to keep within his spending limits.
Osborne set out a series of demands, and told Hunt he was taking the highly unusual decision of removing budget autonomy from the department and from its Secretary of State.
The very next day, the Chancellor received an equally blunt and robust response from Hunt, rebutting the criticisms and pointing out that the NHS was now carrying out 850,000 more operations, 1.2 million more A&E visits, 3.6million more diagnostic tests and 6.3million more outpatient appointments than in 2010.
Hunt threatened to call in the PM to adjudicate. The response from the Treasury was swift and unhelpful: they said there would be no more money for the NHS that year or the next. The message was repeated in a meeting with Cameron when Hunt’s request for extra cash was rejected by both the Chancellor and the PM.
The NHS was heading over the edge of a cliff, and would need more money, whatever the Treasury said.