12 The Times Magazineeremy Hunt has just invented a
whole new genre of political memoir.
Instead of the usual tales of
triumph against insuperable odds,
of crucial reform achieved in the
face of bureaucratic obstinacy, of
the vanquishing of unworthy rivals- instead, indeed, of the general tone
of, “I was right all along” – Hunt is
about to publish a book detailing
how the organisation he ran for nearly six
years managed to kill thousands of people.
And it was not even the Ministry of Defence.
Hunt was Britain’s longest-serving – and very
possibly most unpopular – health secretary.
As if in observance of the “duty of candour”
he imposed on care providers in 2014, he
writes in Zero: Eliminating Unnecessary Deaths
in a Post-Pandemic NHS that our beloved
health service harms 10 per cent of its patients
and that there are 150 avoidable deaths a week.
More than one million “clinically significant”
medication errors are made weekly. Twice a
week, the NHS operates on the wrong part
of somebody’s body. With around 500 such
Never Events every year, Hunt put up a
whiteboard in his office to record the previous
week’s toll. While progress was made in his
time – reducing baby deaths, for instance – it
was rarely fast and never easy. Zero cock-ups,
which is what the book’s title alludes to,
remains a fantasy – literally a sick one.
“Bill Clinton says that politics is like
working in a graveyard: there are lots of
people underneath you, but they’re not
necessarily listening. It is a bit like that,” he
tells me. “You’ve got 1.4 million [employees]
below you and the truth is you think, and
the system makes you think, that they will do
anything you ask them to do. The reality is,
they won’t because they’re so busy. Think
about a doctor or a nurse in a busy ward: they
are run ragged trying to look after the patients
in front of them. What the health secretary
wants to happen is a very, very distant thing.”
We shall return to why NHS doctors are
run ragged (perhaps they are raggedly run),
but it does strike me that the book may count
as an unforced error in its own right. Hunt’s
original plan was to publish this “manifesto
for change” while still in office. But the right
moment never came, perhaps because he
knew he would be accused of running down
the NHS because he wanted it privatised
(which he really didn’t and really doesn’t).
Then he was promoted to foreign secretary,
losing the job when Boris Johnson beat him
to the Tory leadership in 2019. He could
have published it then from the back benches
but for the pandemic, which quickly brought
enough pressure on the NHS for it to be
getting on with.
Yet now may not be such a great moment
for him either, what with Boris Johnson
in trouble and Hunt reportedly quietly on
manoeuvres for another leadership run. Zero
is an excellent piece of work, but its catalogue
of errors and failed initiatives could surely
turn into a huge stick with which to beat him.
“Absolutely,” he concedes, “but I think in
the end, if we don’t allow space for politicians
to reflect on their time... I mean, I think that
one of the great strengths of British politics is
that we do allow space for debate.”
So is the hour about to dawn for a reflective
Jeremy Hunt premiership? He talks of
Ukraine, the succour it would provide Putin
if our great war leader were to be replaced. Of
course, however, he agrees that if a charge of
misleading parliament were proved it would
be “a very big deal”.
So he’s discreetly preparing a leadership bid?
“As I said, I don’t think it’s the right time,
but I would be very open with you that I don’t
rule out a return in the future.”
Because, I say, we surely all wish that three
years ago the Tories had opted for a bit less
charisma and a bit more competence.
“Well, thank you for the compliment about
my charisma,” he says. “Hugely appreciated.”
We are in the kitchen of his townhouse, a
healthy jog from Parliament. His wife, Lucia,
and three children are at his other home
in Hambledon, Surrey, where he is the MP.
He makes me an espresso from a neat little
machine and then, as the interview intensifies,
a couple more for himself. Very Ipcress File,
I say, but he has not seen the recent ITV series,
nor, less surprisingly, This Is Going to Hurt,
the BBC adaptation of Adam Kay’s mordant
2017 account of life as a junior doctor, a book
whose list of acknowledgments ends, “With no
thanks at all to Jeremy Hunt.” Kay had left the
NHS way before Hunt arrived, but the 2016
junior doctors’ strikes that so tarnished Hunt’s
name will have inflamed Kay as he was
writing. Well, they did a lot of us.
“If you worry about that sort of thing, you
shouldn’t go into frontline politics,” says Hunt.
A sketch writer once observed that Hunt
always looked as if he was about to burst into
tears. In fact, he is, or at 55 has become, a
robust character. For a successful man, he also
harbours a decently self-deprecating sense
of humour. More importantly, Zero unveils
a commitment to the NHS far stronger than
Kay and most junior doctors will ever allow.
Every morning as health secretary he read
a letter complaining of terrible, sometimes
fatal, NHS treatment, and each chapter
of Zero begins with an encounter with
someone unnecessarily bereaved, often
now a campaigner for change. He not only
attended the memorial service for William
Mead, a one-year-old who died of sepsis after
NHS staff missed four chances to save his
life, but used the occasion to apologise publicly
for all the tragic failings.The trouble with medicine, he explains, is
that deaths occur all the time and it is not a
health institution’s natural instinct to inquire
too deeply into whether a particular one was
preventable. “These things happen,” is one
response. Another is, “It was a one-off.” Yet
the report into the Mid Staffordshire scandal
in the century’s first decade revealed that
hundreds of patients had died unnecessarily
in a hospital where cruelty had become
normalised. Norman Williams, then president
of the Royal College of Surgeons, actually
took him aside and said, “Jeremy, you’ve got to
understand, this is not just Mid Staffs. There
are pockets of this problem all over the NHS.”
In Zero, Hunt argues that the three big
causes of avoidable medical harm are: a
blame culture that encourages cover-ups and
discourages learning from mistakes; short
staffing; lack of resources. These problems
are aggravated by the ingrained box-ticking
of targets, hierarchies that mean too few
decisions are challenged, the fear of litigation
(more cover-ups, more money going to
lawyers rather than patients), and groupthink
(as in the assumption made by Hunt and
his civil servants that the next big pandemic
would likely be flu rather than coronavirus).
Hunt’s cures are more, more, more: more
transparency; more continuity of people
providing care; more care at home; more
emphasis on prevention; more new tech.J
Hunt when health secretary, visiting the Royal Free Hospital in
London in June 2018 with Theresa May, the prime ministerAt a leadership campaign rally in Kent, July 2019DAN KENNEDY, GETTY IMAGES, SHUTTERSTOCK