David Cameron has a Burnham problem

Like Tory leaders before him, David Cameron has a problem with the NHS. It wasn’t meant to be like this. His fraudulent but fleetingly successful advocacy for the NHS before the 2010 general election was meant to detoxify the Tory brand, to cast himself as the centrist, one-nation leader he can never be and lay to rest the public’s deep-seated fears over traditional Tory attitudes to our most valued public service.

As parliament, the public and NHS staff now know, Cameron hid his plans for the NHS from the public. Upon becoming Prime Minister, Cameron launched a “hand grenade” into the health service in the shape of the biggest, top-down reorganisation the service has ever seen. The carnage of this decision is still being played out. Services have been destabilised. £3.5 billion have been taken from front-line spending to pay for this political vanity project. There is a crisis in A&E made in Downing St. The NHS 111 service was rolled out in the full knowledge that it wasn’t fit for purpose. The list goes on. More importantly than anything else this is bad for patients, but in terms that Cameron cares about more than any other, this is disastrous for him politically.

The Tories have been politically tortured for three years now because of their NHS policies. Poll after poll shows Labour with a consistent and commanding lead over the Tories in this area; currently over twenty points.

Cameron sees the polls and he hates them. It wasn’t meant to be like this. He knows his deceit stands to cost him and his party dear, but he’s sore too. Sore because, in the shape of Andy Burnham, Labour has relentlessly exposed the Tory lies on the NHS. Sore because the independent UK Statistics Authority said he cut NHS spending. Sore because he has had to admit that thousands of nurses have been sacked since the election. Sore because he had to wipe out his entire team of Health Ministers, including the architect of his health policy disaster, Andrew Lansley.

Caught out. Exposed. Angry. Little wonder Cameron is now lashing out. Last week, the Tories briefed the Daily Mail and the Telegraph over their plan to ‘target Burnham’. Fine, politics is, after all, a contact sport. But in areas of profound national concern – like the events of Mid-Staffs and the Francis inquiries into these – the public interest is best served by rising above the partisan instincts of party politics. Anyone caught trying to make political capital from tragedy deserves all they get. Sadly, the infamous Osborne-Crosby instinct of ‘weaponising’ high profile issues of public concern has begun to infect Cameron’s judgements. Welcome to Aussie Rules.

Responding to the publication of the Francis Report in February this year, Cameron told the House of Commons “…let us be clear about what this report does not say. Francis does not blame any specific policy, he does not blame the last Secretary of State for Health and he says that we should not seek scapegoats.”

Wise words.

What’s changed? Desperation can be a disfiguring motivation in politics. The appointment of Jeremy Hunt as Secretary of State for Health has proven to be a terrible error of judgement. Mired in suspicion following the BSkyB affair and tainted by the suspicion of being susceptible to the interests of powerful lobbying groups (nobody can forget the secret texts to the Murdochs and the climb down on cigarette packaging) the often invisible Health Secretary has yet to make a mark as the NHS suffered its worst winter crisis in over a decade, ambulances queued at A&E and patients were treated in tents.

Failing and distrusted on the NHS, saddled with a weak and ineffective Secretary of State, rightly fearful of the effect these failings will have upon the outcome of the next general election, the No.10 machine has hatched a ‘Burnham Plan’ based upon personal smears and attacks.

As the Ashes unfolds, we remember that ‘bodyline’ was a dirty English innovation, eventually copied by the Australians. Some Australians are capable of being just as dirty.

Andy Burnham’s constant exposition of Tory failings on the NHS is only one part of David Cameron’s NHS problem. His real problem is this: the public sees what he is doing to the NHS, they know his real intentions, they know they’ve been deceived and they don’t like it one bit.

Jamie Reed is a Shadow Health Minister