Via The Guardian: Every Tory MP sent This Is Going to Hurt as reminder of Jeremy Hunt's record. Excerpt and then a comment:
Adam Kay is sending a copy of his bestselling memoir about life as a junior doctor, This Is Going to Hurt, to all 330 Conservative MPs ahead of their vote on the new Tory leader, to remind them of how leading contender Jeremy Hunt “left the NHS in tatters” after his stint as health secretary.
Hunt, who is now foreign secretary, has pitched himself as the “serious leader” the UK needs in the Conservative party leadership race, arguing that he is the best negotiator to deliver Brexit. Kay said he was sending his memoirs to MPs because he “wanted to remind those ‘honourable friends’ with any honour quite what those in the health service actually thought of those ‘negotiation skills’ Mr Hunt has been boasting about’.
Speaking on Wednesday, Kay said: “If a week is a long time in politics then the 11 months since Jeremy Hunt left the NHS in tatters must be a generation ago. Much as I don’t want to be complicit in a world where we have prime minister Johnson, I can’t sit back and watch Hunt’s record on health go somehow unmentioned.”
Hunt, who was health secretary between 2012 and 2018, clashed with junior doctors in 2015 and 2016 over a new contract that sought, among other things, to extend doctors’ normal working week hours to include Saturdays and weekday evenings from 7pm until 10pm. The bitter dispute led to strike action across the NHS.
“It was his actions – forcing an unfair and unsafe contract on the junior doctors and then leading a misinformation campaign when they fought against it – that led me to dig out my junior doctor diaries and have them published,” said Kay, lambasting Hunt as “the biggest villain of them all” for “hacking back at NHS funding, driving overworked staff to breaking point, leaving us with over 100,000 vacancies, then watching unflinchingly as his actions saw every imaginable waiting time soar, from ambulance call-outs to oncology appointments.”
Kay's book has been at the top of UK best-seller lists for many months. I reviewed it for The Tyee last October. Highly recommended.
