Fraser Nelson
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The NHS budget may have trebled, but has performance? The waiting list which stood at 1.16 million when Labour came to power is now 560,000. No one is waiting over 18 months – but, I ask, hasn’t the average hospital wait stayed about the same? He bridles at the suggestion. “No, no, why do you think that? When we came to power in 1997 the waiting times were horrendous. They were still the legacy of the Tories who after fifteen years could only offer people a wait of 18 months. So they never successfully tackled this at all.”
After the interview, his office sends over the figures – and I am right, on one measure at least. The average wait of a patient seen in a hospital has actually lengthened from six weeks in 1997/98 to seven weeks in 2006/07, the latest data available. But if you look at the number of inpatients still waiting in a particular month (the NHS conduct regular surveys) this has fallen from 13 weeks to 4 weeks. It is, as ever with the NHS, a maze of complex targets where a clear picture is almost impossible to discern. This is why the Blairites thought it ungovernable, and wanted to push through the market reform.
Perhaps this is what he has in mind when he says “ideological” – because it is hard to think he was referring to the Tories. Instead of accusing Mr Johnson of caving in to the unions (a charge made by a few of the Blairites), Andrew Lansley, his Tory counterpart, is attacking from the other direction. The central Tory proposal is to grant operational independence to the NHS. Mr Lansley says that the NHS has had too many re-organisations, and it would have an independent board under the Tories to ensure it is not so disrupted in the future. This, Mr Johnson says, runs the risk of leaving the health service dangerously unaccountable.
‘The NHS, love it and bless it, concentrates on issues that it sees as priorities,’ he says ‘For example, a clinical discussion can go on in hospitals saying mixed sex accommodation is not so important. But the public feel it is important.’ Last month, he gave the NHS 14 months to have men and women in different wards — an order which he says a Tory health secretary would be unable to make. ‘It is hot breath down their necks that makes things change,’ he says.
While the Conservatives have supported the government on welfare reform, there has been no support on the remaining health reform. ‘We asked GPs to open in the evenings and on Saturdays. The Tories opposed it, using the same argument as the GPs — that accountants don’t open on a Saturday morning so why should GPs? They actually helped write the doctors’ petition. They went marching with them. As the Health Service Journal said, it’s easy to oppose closures; it takes a real perverse genius to oppose openings.’
The Conservatives, incidentally, reject this interpretation saying they opposed the new GP contract in general but not the Saturday openings per se. But is true to say that their skirmishes do not come from Mr Johnson being accused of going slow on reform. It is when a hospital ward is threatened with closure that the Tories join the unions in a ‘stop the cuts’ campaign. It is an 180 degree change from relationship under Thatcher when the BMA launched a devastating poster of a bulldozer warning that the Tories would destroy the NHS. Memories of this bate still linger – and Mr Johnson suspects this explains Mr Lansley’s strategy.
“Maybe the tactic is to try and assuage 1.3 million people in the NHS who didn’t particularly have a good experience under the previous Tory government” he says. The Tories have failed, he says, to cosy up to the Royal College of Nursing and Unison. “But they’ve done it with the doctors but I think that was a fundamental mistake”. Mr Lansley, he says, should have joined last autumn’s battle over copayments. “There had been a cruel system all these years where you took away NHS care from a patient if they purchased a drug that wasn’t available from the NHS. You’d think this would be meat and gravy for an
opposition to get stuck into – where were they? They were away talking about an independent NHS board while we resolved the problem.”
Yet for all his criticisms, he will accept that Mr Cameron is worthy opponent. In part, at least. This Mr Johnson will grant — in part. ‘Initially, Cameron had people looking at him and thinking: he’s likeable, fresh and different from the other Tory leaders. He took his copy book from Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. In the early stages that worked.’ But that was then — now, Mr Johnson argues, this charming man is beginning to irritate the public.
‘Now, he’s not so fresh and he’s not so new. And, actually, not so likeable. He’s got to watch this Flashman tendency coming back in.’ You read this correctly: Harry Flashman, the womanising, cowardly bully from the George Macdonald Fraser novels. ‘There is something of the Flashman about the way he acts at the dispatch box, particularly with the Prime Minister,’ Mr Johnson proceeds to explain. ‘You might call it the Bullingdon Club. There is a bit of arrogance there, and that is not very likeable.’
If he is right, the opinion polls show little sign that the public agree with this assessment. I ask if Mr Johnson sees in the British jobs for British workers imbroglio the signs of Labour’s core vote deserting the party. ‘Among core voters, we have kind of reconnected — in the sense of being concerned about child benefit, making sure pensioners are looked after,’ he says. ‘I think our issue is: how do we reconnect with the seats that we won that are not our core vote, how do we keep together the great coalition that Blair won in ’97 and won again in 2001 and 2005?’
That will be even harder in the recession now underway. But this time, he says, it will be different, as the back-to-work infrastructure is far greater. ‘What happened in the Eighties and what happened to a certain extent in the Nineties is that whole areas, Hull for instance, were just left with no help at all. If we can get through this, a year, 18 months, even two years, with all the agencies focusing on how you give people skills to fill the vacancies, then you will have a completely different picture at the end of this than you did at the
end of the Eighties.’
Two years? This sounds rather more pessimistic that the official Treasury forecast for a recovery starting in July. I ask if I heard him correctly, and he reddens. ‘This will last for as long as the Treasury is saying it’s going to last,’ he says. ‘Look, it is very difficult to win a fourth term. Particularly in such circumstances. But the other iron rule of politics is that, in difficult times, people cling to nurse for fear of something worse.’
This time last summer the Labour Party did just that – and kept Gordon Brown as its leader. Mr Johnson’s name had been mentioned as possible contender: who better to take the sting out of the anti-Labour vote than the man it is impossible to hate? Looking at his bookshelf – he has a John Peel biography and the copy of the Beatles Anthology – he isn’t pretending. He does seem to the closest the Cabinet has to a real person. But he perhaps laboured this point a little too hard on Desert Island Discs saying he wasn’t up to the job of bring Prime Minister. So why, I ask – and if it’s not too rude a question – is he up to being the Health Secretary?
“That is very cheeky!” he says. “Look, when I was branch chairman of the union I thought I could be an executive council member. When I was executive council member I thought I could be an officer. When I was an officer I thought I could be general secretary. When I was an MP I though it could be a Minister. When I was a Minister I thought I could be a Secretary of State. I’ve not got to the self delusion that now I am a Secretary of State I could be the Prime Minister. It’s a different league.”
Admirable humility, I say, but in politics isn’t it better to hide one’s modesty under a bushel? “Well Mario thinks that,” he says – nodding to his special adviser. “Everyone else thinks I should have done that. But you know, I’m too old to worry about things like that.”
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