Labour's new chief to tackle NHS rebels

Tony Blair is sending in the Labour Party's new chairman, Ian McCartney, to avert the looming rebellion over his proposals to reform the NHS.

Mr McCartney will head a campaign to try to convince party activists that the proposal to turn the best NHS hospitals into self-governing foundation hospitals is a vital way of protecting the principle of free health care for all.

Left-wing critics of the plan see it as a right-wing measure, in the spirit of the Tory health reforms of the 1980s, that will encourage the spread of private health care.

Not so, according to its defenders. They say that by putting the hospitals under the control of locally elected boards, the reform will revive the spirit of the co-operative movement. According to one senior aide: "The only case for foundation hospitals is a left-wing, socialist case."

Mr McCartney, who has lifelong family ties with the Labour Party and trade unions, was promoted to his new post at the end of a week of intensive behind-the-scenes efforts to win over sceptical Labour MPs.

Mr Blair set aside several hours to meet small delegations of Labour MPs, drawn mostly from the 120 declared opponents of foundation hospitals. They included the former health secretary, Frank Dobson, and the chairman of the all-party Commons health committee, David Hinchliffe.

Other MPs have been called in to talk to the health minister, John Hutton, or have received telephone calls from the whips' office urging them not to rebel when the legislation to create foundation hospitals goes to the Commons after the Easter break.

A total of 129 MPs, nearly all Labour, have signed a Commons motion warning that foundation hospitals will lead to a "two-tier" NHS. Mr Blair countered that argument by telling MPs that there are already sharp differences in standards between NHS hospitals. He also warned that unless Labour tackled NHS reform, the Conservatives would use an unreformed NHS as a pretext to introduce a shift towards private health care.

One of the MPs summoned to the Prime Minister's office said: "It was quite surreal to be asked in by the Prime Minister, not the Health Secretary, in the middle of a war, to discuss foundation hospitals. He was in shirtsleeves, sitting on the sofa, and he greeted us with 'Hi guys! Hey, foundation hospitals – you're concerned – tell me'. From the reactions in my group, he was getting very short shrift."

Another said: "We all went in strongly opposed, and we came out strongly opposed. We were told we had been listened to."

Opposition to foundation hospitals has been stoked up by an article signed by Mr Blair, published in Progressive Governance magazine, urging government supporters to be "willing to experiment with new forms of co-payment in the public sector".

The words have been interpreted as meaning that the Prime Minister wants more NHS patients to pay for part or all of their treatment. But when he was challenged about the article in the House of Commons last week, Mr Blair surprised MPs by appearing to renounce what he himself had written. He said: "The NHS will remain as it is: free at the point of use."

The confusion deepened later in the day during one of Mr Blair's private meetings with MPs when the former minister Angela Eagle praised him for apparently backtracking over "co-payment". Mr Blair appeared not to know where the expression came from, and had to be reminded that it was in an article published under his name.

One MP said: "I felt some sympathy for him. Although the article appeared under his name, I got the distinct impression that he did not know what was in it."

According to Whitehall sources, the disputed article was ghost-written by a 27-year-old Cambridge graduate, Patrick Diamond, who works in the Downing Street Policy Unit. Mr Diamond is a former political adviser to Peter Mandelson.