You might have expected Rishi Sunak’s “health week”, which has just ended, to at least be free of the perennial “wedge issue” – those culture war topics, from small boats to net zero, which have dominated government messaging of late.
But you’d be wrong. Amid the unflattering focus on waiting lists – on which a record 7.6 million people in England were languishing in June – a new culprit for the NHS crisis emerged from government quarters. A source close to the health secretary, Steve Barclay, told journalists that, instead of being “relentlessly focused on caring for all patients and cutting waiting lists”, NHS trusts and other health bodies had been “wasting time and money on woke virtue signalling”.
