The Times Magazine 15“I don’t think I do. There’s a whole bloody
chapter on it.”
There is, but it ends with him admitting
that at the time of writing there were
99,000 health vacancies. I am sure he fought
hard for extra cash and sometimes he won
the battles, as when Theresa May forced
Philip Hammond to fund an increase in
doctor training places by 25 per cent, but
the NHS is currently 2,500 GPs short.
I adjust my bedside manner. I say I know
he did not deliberately create staff shortages...
“If I made the job of health secretary
sound impossible then I’m probably doing it a
disservice, because I think it’s an amazing job.
It was a privilege to do it. Look – and I say this
not to blow my own trumpet – six months ago
I found out that the number of baby deaths
over the past decade, during most of which
I was health secretary, has fallen by 400 a year.
“The chance to put in changes that make
a difference is greater as health secretary
than in any other job, and it’s an incredible
privilege. When you’re foreign secretary you
have the red carpets and the private jets and
the helicopters and the banquets, and it’s
fascinating and incredibly important work
when you’re thinking about the future of
democracy. But being health secretary is what
gets you in the heart. You can leave the NHS
but it never leaves you.”
The Jeremy Hunt who tells me this, his
eyes glinting, will for many be very hard
to reconcile with the health secretary who
brought idealistic young doctors out on
four strikes in early 2016, the politician who
became an icon of Tory callousness, the
hated Jeremy Hunt.
I ask where his personal resilience comes
from. From his secure childhood? Being head
boy at his private school, Charterhouse? Or
from building up and selling his education
web company, Hotcourses, for a reported
£30 million five years ago? (He says he received
nothing like that, not even £15 million.)
“Look, no one is completely immune to it,
but I grew up in the Eighties and Margaret
Thatcher was my great hero. She made an
absolute virtue of taking tough and difficult
decisions in the long-term interests of the
country whatever the unpopularity was. I’m
not saying that I want unpopularity to be
a permanent state of affairs, but I think you
can go into a big job in government and say,
‘I want to come out of this more popular than
I started,’ and you might be able to achieve
that, but you won’t change very much.”
The junior doctors’ dispute began with
a speech to the King’s Fund in July 2015
in which he said he would if necessary
impose a new seven-day contract to end the
weekend staffing gaps in hospitals that cost
6,000 lives a year. Doctors were outraged.
One of his fiercest and most persuasive criticswas Dr Rachel Clarke, a young palliative care
doctor, whose tweets were so hostile, he writes,
that he ended up un-following her for the sake
of his own morale. After I meet Hunt, I ring
her. She recalls the speech.
“It was very, very unpleasant and
aggressive. When it appeared on the front
pages and all the papers, I was in the doctors’
mess that morning with my fellow junior
doctors and consultants about to start another
12-hour day for which I was only paid for
8 hours, and we were all genuinely distraught
and horrified that the government from
nowhere could attack us in this way.”
When I read the speech, I discover
that he in fact praised doctors “driven by
professionalism and goodwill, but in many
cases with no thanks or recognition” who
did attend patients over weekends. It is true,
however, that he told the British Medical
Association to “get real” and gave it six weeks
to agree to the contract. Hunt in the end
asked to meet Clarke. At their meeting she
called his “weekend effect” arguments “simply
moronic”, because the real problem was ashortage of doctors. He writes that the dispute
damaged his relations with doctors but his
changes to contracts were now “accepted”.
Clarke says that is like saying that,
after the 1984 coal strike, the miners accepted
they would no longer be miners. Just as
they had, doctors had been “bludgeoned”
into acceptance.
“The point was never that there were
no problems. We knew better than anyone
that there was a massive problem with
understaffing at weekends, because we were
the poor saps running around crazily all
weekend trying to do everything. But the issue
is not fixed. The contract has not made things
any better at all, because it has not resulted
in more doctors and that’s the fundamental
problem. You can put more doctors on at
the weekend, but only by taking them away
from the week.”
Does she at least give Hunt marks
for sincerity?
“I do give him marks for sincerity. I think
that he clearly believes deeply about patient
safety,” she replies. “But we all know that the
greatest problem for patients now, as it was
throughout his tenure as health secretary, is
the lack of resources and the lack of staff to
keep those patients safe.
“I don’t hate Jeremy Hunt in the same way
that some people do. I think he’s a very, very
interesting character. I’m just not sure how he
manages to sit with his different impulses.”
She wonders if his stridently unstrident
emphasis on NHS funding, even now he
is out of office, might be connected with a
leadership bid. “The moment he says anything
credible about NHS resources he’s going to be
hammered as the tax-and-spend, put-up-your-
taxes candidate. And, of course, he has to
avoid that at all cost.”
She may be right, for Hunt’s passion for a
first-class, state-funded health service cannot
be doubted. His three children were born on
the NHS. When he broke his shoulder last
year slipping on ice while running early
one morning in Surrey, it was to the Royal
Surrey’s A&E that his wife drove him, his
arm dangling. He does not have private
health insurance. But he is also a politician, a
Conservative politician. There is, you see, no
absolute duty of candour in politics, not really.
We should just be grateful, I suppose, that in
his book Jeremy Hunt has risked as much of
the stuff as he has. nZero: Eliminating Unnecessary Deaths in
a Post-Pandemic NHS by Jeremy Hunt is
published by Swift Press on May 24 (£20)‘FOREIGN SECRETARIES
HAVE THE PERKS.
BUT BEING HEALTH
SECRETARY GETS
YOU IN THE HEART’
With his wife, Lucia, London, 2019Jeremy Hunt: how I would fix the NHS.
Don’t miss The Sunday Times tomorrow
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