Ministers could help the patients dying in NHS hospital corridors right now – they just choose not to

‘The government’s actual response to the crisis gripping the NHS is a perverse inversion of everything it purports to hold dear.’ The health secretary, Steve Barclay, and chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, at No 10, December 2022. Photograph: Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street

With NHS staff being forced to witness our patients dying in corridors, in cupboards, on floors and in stranded ambulances, we can only thank our lucky stars that the country’s second most powerful politician is the man who last year published Zero: Eliminating Unnecessary Deaths in a Post-Pandemic NHS.

Because the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, cannot possibly stand back and permit these crisis conditions to continue, can he? He knows better than anyone – having written 320 pages on precisely this fact – that avoidable deaths are the very worst kinds of death, the ones that sicken families and clinicians to their core.