The NHS should be a higher priority in this leadership election

The health service is the second most important issue for the voters, writes John Rentoul

The leadership campaign has failed in its democratic function (Getty)

I keep David Canzini’s list in my head, as a useful reminder of what politics is actually about. Canzini is the deputy chief of staff in No 10 for a few more weeks, and in March he briefed political advisers on the government’s priorities between now and the general election. They were, in order: the cost of living, the NHS, crime, and small boats.

I think that accurately reflects the people’s priorities. The bit that didn’t was that he had a number zero on the list before all the others, which was Brexit, but that was making a political point about differentiating Conservatives from Labour, so it doesn’t count for my purposes, which is to remind myself what the median voter cares about.

What is surprising about that list is how little attention has been paid to the NHS in the Tory leadership election, which will decide our next prime minister and the employer of Canzini’s successor. The subject has hardly come up in the debates and hustings.

Andrew Neil asked Rishi Sunak about the NHS in his interview on Friday, but Sunak got no further than “diagnostic hubs” before Neil cut him off, saying, in effect, that he didn’t want a list, he just wanted a sound bite. Sunak protested that tackling the backlog was a complex problem that deserved a detailed answer, but Neil was in a hurry to get on to a subject where Sunak didn’t have all the answers (he didn’t find it, by the way).

The Public First compendium of the two candidates’ policies contains just one line on the NHS from Liz Truss: she is “completely committed to that NHS spending, to the hospitals, to the doctors”, apparently. Sunak’s entry is a list of policies mostly from his campaign website, but he hardly gets the chance to explain how he would deal with the problem beyond saying that he would “grip” it.

In this respect, the leadership campaign has failed in its democratic function, which ought to be to test the candidates on the subjects that matter to people. As The Independent has reported, the NHS is in a bad way, with coronavirus absences cutting staff numbers. Despite huge sums of extra money allocated, waiting lists will go on getting worse for at least another 18 months.

A plea to the interviewers of the candidates in the media and at the hustings over the next few weeks: could you ask them searching questions about their plans for dealing with the NHS backlog?

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator