‘The NHS has saved my life, no question,” Boris Johnson said yesterday after being discharged from St. Thomas’s hospital in London, where he was treated for a serious case of coronavirus. The Prime Minister went further still, saying that the NHS is “the beating heart of this country” and “the best of this country.” While the Queen had, in her Easter address to the country, invoked the transcendent, the “risen Christ,” Johnson made his own devotion to the British health-care system, which he said was “unconquerable” and “powered by love.”
It is quite natural that a person recovering from a life-threatening illness should feel indebted to those responsible for saving his life. But is it natural for a political leader to worship an institution of the state, to place it on a pedestal, above and beyond all criticism or talk of reform?
Though the National Health Service, launched by Clement Atlee’s post-war government in 1948, has socialist origins, conservatives have been running it for 44 of its 71 years. Prime minister Margaret Thatcher denationalized major industries, but would never touch the NHS. In 1982, the Iron Lady promised that the NHS was “safe in our hands.” Her biographer, Charles Moore, noted how she “never ceased to worry that the NHS had the potential to destroy her politically and electorally.” Failures have often been attributed to Tory mismanagement, whether through reforms privatizing certain sectors, or — the overwhelming criticism in recent years — by austerity.
By the time of Theresa May, conservatives were under heavy fire. In 2018, 50,000 patients’ treatments were cancelled because hospitals were overwhelmed with seasonal flu. Meanwhile, Britain’s reputation on accident and emergency (A&E) care and cancer treatment waiting times lagged horribly behind their European counterparts. In his pursuit of the top job, Johnson attempted to distance himself from these failures.
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