Now that Boris Johnson has finally realised the value of the NHS, he can focus on repaying his debt to it

Lionising frontline troops when they are needed and dismissing them after the emergency passes is as old as warfare itself. The prime minister would be wise not to let that continue, writes Matthew Norman

The Tories took the unflinching devotion of nurses for granted (AFP/Getty)

Boris Johnson says he owes the NHS his life, but does he have any plans to repay the debt? With the prime minister recovering well, the respectful niceties want replacing with fact.

A series of Conservative administrations, beginning in 2010 with the cynical savagery euphemised as austerity, have desecrated the institution Nigel Lawson called the country’s one and only true religion.

The Tories picked a ridiculous fight with the junior doctors. They effectively cut pay by capping public sector rises to a sub-inflationary one per cent. They took the unflinching devotion of nurses for granted. Now they betray their fundamental duty of care on a scale to stagger even those who identify smug incompetence as the calling card of the British state for decades.

Three nurses have joined the ranks of the dead in the last 24 hours and more will die for want of protective equipment. Asked about the shortage by Andrew Marr, the business secretary Alok Sharma devolved his answer to the mind-crushingly familiar line of defence that the crisis is “unprecedented”.

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If Sharma thinks “unprecedented” is a synonym for “unforeseeable”, he really, really needs a better thesaurus. Even before Johnson bragged about shaking hands with everyone in that hospital – because golly gosh and strike me pink if hand-shaking isn’t the most terrific fun – the warning sirens from China and Italy rendered our future blindingly obvious.

By the middle of February, at the very latest, a semi-competent government would have anticipated the requirements. If it had to use quasi-wartime emergency powers to divert factories to produce such easily manufactured items as masks, gloves and gowns, it would have.

The loss of hospital workers to an entirely avoidable cause of death is more than a series of personal tragedies. It may well be grounds for a class action against the crown brought by the families of the dead, if not a charge of manslaughter by gross negligence against the state and its representatives. Yet nothing of the kind will happen under a system expertly designed to protect unaccountability rather than hospital workers. The notion that it is somehow unpatriotic to ask why our finest compatriots are needlessly dying will prevail.

The semi-omerta restricting adequate reporting to a few media outlets will, whenever this ends, morph into imbecilic hero-worship of the unwitting agents of death. Having almost “taken one for the team” in father Stanley’s phrase, Johnson will be deified as the godly spirit of Britannia. Those who lost their lives because they were reassured by that homicidal act of hand-shaking bravado will be forgotten.

Judging by the imbalance of headlines, with the PM’s improvement relegating the carnage to an afterthought, they already have been. But what of the nurses who come through it? Whether you regard this as a proxy war, or whether you find the martial metaphors tastelessly misjudged, one handy predictive guide is the Rudyard Kipling poem, “Tommy”.

Tommy Atkins, a soldier chucked out of a boozer for being in uniform after returning from fighting in the Crimea, reflects with wry disdain on the contrast between the perception of his trade during and after the war:

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’
But it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country’ when the guns begin to shoot
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!

When they finally lift their eyes from the ventilator tubes and vital signs charts, the nurses will see. The obscenity of pantomime donkeys lionising frontline troops when they are needed, and dismissing them as serfs after the emergency passes, is as old as warfare itself.

The timespan of gratitude being conveniently short, the time for nursing unions to utilise their muscle is now. In the midst of this disaster, no prime minister, let alone one with the incumbent’s medical history, could resist sustained pressure for a new settlement.

What it reveals about Britain’s descent into the Americanised hellscape that student nurses are charged tuition fees hardly bears contemplating. But the government led by Theresa May, in which Johnson and Matt Hancock served, saw this as a spiffing way to address the 40,000 staffing deficit in 2017 (when the parliamentary party cheered the defeat of a motion to relax the public sector pay cap). Does it seriously need debating that this abomination must end?

Even disregarding the crushing moral dimension, the cancellation of existing student loans and scrapping of future tuition fees wouldn’t make a ripple in Rishi Sunak’s ocean of coronadebt. The unions, with Labour support, shouldn’t content themselves with that. All nurses (along with cleaners, porters and other ancillary staff) deserve an immediate pay rise, so that they earn 10 per cent more in real terms than in 2010.

Automatic annual rises of 5 per cent above inflation should be guaranteed for 10 years. Showering them with honeyed words and empty applause is what employers do, along with doling out meaningless titles, when they want to retain staff without rewarding them properly. Genuine appreciation is only expressed with money (including such lavish benefits as being excused hospital parking fees). So the moment he’s back in Downing Street, Johnson needs to be harried by the opposition and nursing leaders to state in undeniable terms when and how he means to settle his own debt.

If not, if the opportunity to shame him is wasted, whatever version of normality returns will feature the Tommyfication of nurses. “An’ it’s Florence this, an’ it’s Florence that, and Flo’s a saintly pet/ But when the crisis is over, it’s pay off your student debt.”