Healthy Spin

The Vicar of Downing Street, whose assurances on the subject of Iraq during 2002-2003 are still a rich source of mirth, has been applying his talents to the subject of NHS privatisation, asking "NHS managers and doctors", presumably in that order, to "make the case for further reforms and help convince people of the clinical arguments for A&E closures". The appeal comes in the wake of a leaked record of a meeting at which his reverence's health salesperson, Patsy Hackitt the Nurses' Friend, diagnosed the underlying problem with unerring New Labour instinct: the Government needs to be "smarter" in its advertising campaign. "Too often the debate on public service reforms seem to pitch the government against frontline staff," said the document, which was marked "restricted" in order to protect the public from this dangerous knowledge. Since there are, by the Guardian's count, fifty separate campaigns against "proposed or rumoured" reforms of NHS services across the country, the only possible explanation must be that the Government's public relations could do with improvement; hence, no doubt, today's attempt to recruit health service staff as advertising frontpersons. "The best is yet to come, with more lives saved, stopping more pain and distress," his reverence said, having heard somewhere that frontline staff are interested in that sort of thing. "If we fall down this time the consent for taxpayers funding the NHS will diminish," he continued. That would be calamitous, of course. If taxpayers no longer consented to fund the NHS, how could the Government ever, in good conscience, possibly continue to accept their money?