Labour politicians dismiss the Conservatives’ claims to be the “party of the NHS”
THE SUMMER after he ran the Brexit campaign, and two years before he was appointed the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings gave a talk to Nudgestock, a “festival of behavioural science”. At the event, put on by Ogilvy, an advertising agency, his analysis of the “core problems of the Tory party brand” was typically blunt. Almost all British people love the NHS. But most Tory MPs don’t care about it, he said—“and the public kind of has cottoned on to that.
One place where the battle will be fought is Watford, a Tory-Labour marginal on the northern outskirts of London, and one of the beneficiaries of Mr Johnson’s largesse. The town’s general hospital, a dilapidated 521-bed establishment next door to Vicarage Road football stadium, is expected to get the lion’s share of a £400m loan to the trust that runs it. When Mr Johnson visited in October he promised a transformation. “The old Victorian building will go, the Portacabins will go,” he said.
The party is on firmer ground when criticising the government. Mr Johnson’s promises of new cash have come too late for Chris Ostrowski, Labour’s candidate in Watford. He points out that plans for the redevelopment of the hospital have been around for at least a decade, but lacked funding. “From consultants to porters, the thing you often hear is, ‘It’s never been as bad as this’,” he says. National performance measures back up such reports.
More optimistic Tories point out that the now-standard winter crisis usually kicks in at the start of the year. But even if the Conservatives manage to escape blame for the state of the health service, they are likely to take flak on another front. As Mr Cummings discovered during the Brexit campaign, with his promise to give the NHS £350m a week recouped from Brussels, linking Brexit to the health service is a potent political combination.
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