If you thought ‘small boats week’ was a disaster, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Welcome to ‘NHS week’

NHS week must have been planned for a long time. Far too long, certainly, to drop it once it became clear that it would be a bit of an embarrassment, writes Tom Peck

It seems unlikely NHS week will achieve everything that small boats week managed but it has, within hours if not seconds, got off to a truly flying start (Times Media Ltd)

From the people that brought you “small boats week”, now comes “NHS week”. For reasons best known only to themselves, the government would like to let it be known that this week they will be trying to trumpet all of their triumphs around the runaway success story that is the National Health Service.

It’s not immediately clear what they are hoping to achieve, mainly because it’s not immediately clear what on earth they could possibly do to convince a single, solitary person that things in the NHS are going well.

It may be that their ambitions for NHS week are merely that it goes better than “small boats week”, which last week ended with the crashing of a government drone worth half a million quid, the evacuation of their prison barge over the discovery of potentially deadly Legionella bacteria on board, another roughly one thousand people arriving by small boat, and six not arriving but drowning and dying in the channel instead.