Crisis in the NHS in 2022 in will damage the Conservatives

CLICHÉS ARE common in British politics. It is a land where a week is a long time, dear boys are told to worry about events and, more recently, everything is just like “The Thick Of It”. Some clichés count more than others. Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary, returns to one when attacking the Conservatives on the NHS. “It’s not just that the Tories didn’t fix the roof while the sun was shining,” Mr Streeting likes to say. “They dismantled the roof and removed the floorboards.” This echoes George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor, who hammered Labour for “fail[ing] to fix the roof when the sun was shining” during the global financial crisis.

If the soundbites are alike, that is because the predicament of the Conservatives in 2022 is similar to the one Labour found itself in after 2008. In both cases, a government faces a crisis in an area where voters never fully trusted it. For Labour under Gordon Brown, it was the economy in the wake of the financial crisis. For the Conservatives, it is the health service in the aftermath of the pandemic, with the prospect of 14m-long waiting lists. In neither case is the government directly culpable. In both cases, it banks on voter forgiveness. It was not forthcoming for Labour; it would be heroic to assume it will be for the Tories.

Enormous waiting lists undo...