A flu pandemic could decide next year’s election

If anything is to break the four-party politics deadlock, it could well be the NHS.

Norovirus the food poisoning bug that causes violent stomach flu (Alamy)

So relentlessly and with such compelling cause are modern governments accused of favouring short-term news management over long-term strategic planning that any sign of forward thinking must be greeted with a rousing hats off.

And so we launch the titfer towards the stratosphere today in honour of the Prime Minister’s Tory conference promise (a variant, admittedly, on one he made a year ago) dramatically to extend the hours during which we may see a GP by the year 2020. Recalling that Theresa May was recently instructed to make an important policy statement on the Today programme, rather than later that day to the House of Commons, so that 10 Downing Street could own the next three hours of the news cycle, this represents startling progress on the long-termism front.

Churlish as it will seem to cast a shadow over this tremendous improvement, I must declare a couple of tiny quibbles. For one thing, it’s devilishly hard to gauge precisely where a “promise” ranks in the gradation of unbreakable statements of political intent. It certainly feels stronger than a “pledge” (or at least a Nick Clegg “pledge”), which is good. But somehow it feels less binding than a “vow”, as in the “vow” to devolve more power to the Scots. Me, I’d have been happier if David Cameron had made it a solemn oath written in his own blood.

Even if he had, however, another weeny problem is that six years is a very long way in the future when drastic underfunding, a grave shortage of GPs and a population growing in age and number have conspired to desecrate the front line of NHS care today. The last time I rang for an appointment, at an excellent west London practice, the first one available was almost three weeks away.

Passing over such trivial questions as whether wickedly overworked GPs will be mad keen to work even harder (the early signs, curiously, are that they will not), you wonder whether leaving it until 2020 before surgeries open for longer on weekdays and on weekends is quite enough. With so many of them forced to close their lists, and in some cases remove people from them, the crisis is happening now.

Last year, 104 practices asked permission to stop taking on new patients, and another 45 to dispense with existing ones. The case of Lily Dove gives a flavour. This 95-year-old widow, who suffers from failing eyesight and diabetes, heart problems, arthritis and poor mobility, was one of 1,500 patients sacked by her Norfolk surgery in June, and told to sign up with another 10 miles away. God willing Mrs Dove lives a year beyond receipt of her telegram. But it seems an unusually dreamy kind of blue-sky thinking for Cameron to reassure ailing 95-year-olds that the crisis will have passed in six years.

Whether Cameron will be in his post on 8 May 2015 to oversee his languid masterplan remains exceedingly hard to call. Seven months out, the rapid entrenchment of four-party politics makes the coming election more difficult to read than any before. Gut instinct insists that the economic recovery gives the Tories a clear edge, the psephological head says that the growing schism on the right and the collapse of the Lib Dem popular vote favours Labour, and the odds-on favourite with the bookies is that no party will win a majority. But if anything is to break this deadlock, it could well be the NHS.

Winter is coming, to borrow the motto of the House Stark in Game of Thrones, and with it the season of the virus. If it brings a particularly nasty strain of flu or the winter vomiting bug, the flaws in primary health care – which until now have to some extent remained hidden in plain sight and confined to anecdotal suspicions – will be lethally exposed.

If it took almost three weeks to see a doctor at a well-staffed surgery in early September (and an unusually warm one at that) can you imagine the wait if you called in late December during a flu epidemic? “The first appointment I have is 10.50pm, 15 March 2020,” the receptionist would wearily intone. “Of course, that’s assuming Cameron honours his promise about extending our hours. Otherwise, could you call back in the spring of 2027?”

Although Nigel Lawson was fundamentally right to observe that the NHS is the national religion, it is unlike most other religions in this regard. Congregants at the shrine of the National Health Service, unlike Christian believers, are not satisfied with nebulous guff about one day maybe reaching heaven. Rather than embrace the cheery idea of the afterlife, they expect their GPs to be available to help postpone it for as long as possible. Unlike the Children of Israel, they will not be sustained by the remote prospect of entering the promised land. They are in the wilderness now, and will not tolerate the sacrilegious disregard for the only national institution which, for all its failings, they still worship.

This government’s neglect of the GP system has been blasphemy. Cameron and his health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, would be wise to spend the next couple of months on their knees praying that winter, when it comes, is not accompanied by the brutal flu pandemic that would bring down the temple.

Gay kissing and imperial measures? It’s not exactly Paxo

The remarkable thing about the interview with which Evan Davis marked his Newsnight debut as Jeremy Paxman’s successor was the man’s ungodly restraint. How on earth did David Cameron, that laureate of dahn-the-boozer blokeishness – with his talk about “the effing Tories” and Mark Reckless’s failure to get off his “fat arse” – refrain from asking Evan about that possibly mythical Prince Albert?

Davis was pretty restrained himself as he set out to establish what kind of Tory Cameron might be, with inquiries about his preference for metric or imperial measurements (imperial), and whether or not he objects to gay people kissing in public (not). Why one chap with an Oxford first in PPE and a taste for privatising public services – Davis published a 1998 book on the matter – thought this the best use of precious time with another, I’m not sure.

Given the choice I’d rather have Paxo back, and the hugely likable Evan – his politics are almost as hard to fathom as Cameron’s, though one assumes from the book that he too is a kind of post-Thatcherite/One Nation Tory hybrid – in No 10.

Whether he is the saviour of Newsnight seems unlikely. The show has a very bright main anchor to go with a brilliant print journalist, Ian Katz, as its editor, but the fatal problem is that British politics has become too small to generate much interest. To that extent, asking the PM if he values a mile more than 1.6 kilometres seemed a useful staging post on the road to apathetic obsolescence.