'If Rishi Sunak admits he sees a private GP, he knows nothing about the NHS'
"Prime Minister, have you ever been in a shoe shop that sells £490 loafers?"
"My dad wears shoes, I grew up in a house that wore shoes...."
"Not my question, it's really straightforward. Do you own, and have you ever owned, a pair of £95 sliders?"
"As a general policy, I wouldn't ever talk about me or my family's feet. But it's not really relevant to this, what's relevant is the difference I can make to the shoes the rest of the country don't have."
A ridiculous exchange, and even more so when you realise the Prime Minister who refused to answer Laura Kuenssberg's question about his use of a private GP earns £162,080 a year, owns at least three mansions, and has a family fortune that makes him richer than the King.
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"You might have more luck asking the Sunaks to pay for your bodyguards" (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)Of COURSE a man sitting on three-quarters of a billion pounds goes to an expensive shoe shop. Rishi Sunak is as likely to pop into Deichmann, or buy his children's school shoes from George at Asda, as Elon Musk is to discover self-awareness.
We've seen the Prada loafers worn to a building site, been shown photographs of him chilling out in slippers that cost 10 times what most of us think of as a good bottle of wine. We've even learned, via snaps taken by his own vanity photographer and issued as 'good publicity', that he sips his coffee from a self-heating mug that costs more than two weeks of Universal Credit.
We all know Rishi's rich. We all know that privilege makes no difference to usefulness, because if it did Prince Andrew would be a more widely-appreciated spanner.
So why is Rishi so embarrassed to admit the bleeding obvious - that he's rich enough to not only jump the queue, but to see a doctor who'll give him the full hour that he pays £250 for.
To be fair, we can all get a doctor to fly to our side by helicopter at a moment's notice. But most of us would need to be mangled in a multi-car pile-up before the air ambulance is scrambled, whereas Rishi just needs to get his wallet out.
Side note: Laura Kuenssberg is normal-sized (PA)The fact he and his family were registered with a private GP was revealed in November, and ever since he's refused to confirm it in much the same way he insisted that his wife's non-domiciled tax status was no-one's business but hers.
He finally had to address the tax issue, not because he changed his mind, but because the row rumbled on and he kept talking b******s about it. The zinger was when he implied it was just something that happened, automatically, to people of other nationalities, when in fact you have to apply to be a non-dom, pay £30,000 a year to the taxman to maintain it, and most migrants don't.
And the same is going to be true of the private healthcare row, for one simple reason: in the next few months Rishi is going to be making massive decisions about something which takes 40% of government spending, is used by people 564 million times a year, and is teetering on the edge of collapse after 12 years of grotesque underfunding.
It's like asking a pacifist to design a new tank, or Dennis the Menace to set the National Curriculum. Heck, you could let Britain's first space launch be handled by Timmy Mallett and have more hope of it working out, than you would getting someone who hasn't used the NHS in decades to understand what his decisions will do to it.
It's WACASPACE! (ITV)Rishi is an intelligent and well-meaning man who reads his briefs, takes advice, and listens to what the experts say. But his decisions about the NHS will boil down to the information others feed him, in the same way that a computer is only as good as the ape bashing away at the keys wants it to be.
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The NHS is not a spreadsheet. It is not a profit-and-loss account. And it cannot be understood, or fixed, in simple monetary terms, for the fundamental reason that any computer looking at how much the average human costs to care for, and what the average human produces, will decide it's wiser to strangle 99% of us at birth.
It would reduce waiting lists, free up GP appointments, improve the working environment, and release billions for new hospitals. It is the patients that are the problem - the overweight, smoking, pizza-chomping, sugar-addicted, lazy, love-handled problem - but it's the patients who vote.
It is this logical conflict which is causing Rishi's brain to stumble and whir whenever he's asked where he gets his cough drops. On the one hand, the NHS must be saved at all costs or he and his party will be out of power for a century. And on the other, it's the bloody voters getting sick that keeps giving the NHS too much work to do. How can any politician tell the voters, sorry guys, you just don't get to live today?
What neither he nor most voters grasp is that's already happening. People are dying in corridors drenched in their own urine. They're dying waiting for ambulances that are stood in a queue. Shortly, they'll be dying in a hotel bed still waiting for social care, or on a "virtual ward" where a doctor is supposed to monitor their vital signs at home but the signal fails. Excess deaths are 21% higher than the average for this time of year, and it's nothing to do with the pandemic - deaths in other nations aren't showing the same spike.
If your local hospital put the body bags outside the front door, you might notice how bad things are. Because patients get processed by the morgue far quicker than in A&E, you - and by extension, the media, and the politicians who care what the media report - don't see it.
A rich man who remembers what it's like not to be rich might realise that the NHS is a no-win scenario. It is never going to be financially viable to save the lives of people who will eventually die anyway, usually without covering the cost of keeping them alive. We do it because we must. We do it because we can't NOT do it. We do it because otherwise we'll die sooner, of things we could fix if only we'd had the credit cards of those who work in international finance.
But Rishi's only ever been comfortable as a child, and as an adult has luxuriated. His last experience of the NHS is probably when the roof wasn't collapsing. All he sees when he looks at the budget is numbers, whereas all that you or I would see is our children in A&E with a funny rash, our dads crocked in a chair waiting for an x-ray, us and our friends held close through miscarriage, bereavement, and burns.
A nice shiny computer can't resolve those issues, because it doesn't know the value we put on it. Rishi has simply not got the software to help him grasp that the point of the NHS is that, in a crisis, it costs nothing and as a result is worth the world.
You can tell a lot about someone from their shoes. A man who wears £490 loafers to a building site has never asked himself why everyone else is in boots. And you can't entrust the NHS to a man who won't tie his own shoelaces.
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