Healthy Signs

The elevation of Ben Nunn comes as no surprise. Until the 1997 Election, the concept of NHS privatisation existed only on the outermost fringes of pseudo-academic crankery. But with the arrival of Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan, then it became Government policy.

Whereas the creation of the National Health Service had been in all three parties' manifestos in 1945, so that it would have happened no matter who had won, the privatisation of the National Health Service was in no party's manifesto in 1997, yet at least in England it was opposed by no party that was then in the House of Commons, and by only a handful of Labour backbenchers such as Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott.

All three parties have continued to implement it ever since, and to have been employed in that process has become a badge of honour and a rite of passage on the Labour Right, with Owen Smith having earned his spurs as a lobbyist for it before becoming that faction's standard-bearer.

But NHS privatisation has never been popular. It was just that we were denied any way of voting against it. And it could not be less popular now. The political wind is in the direction, not of extending it, but of reversing it. Such people as still wanted it could, I suppose, always vote for Nunn's patron, Keir Starmer.

The rest of us can get on with making the Fifth of July the United Kingdom's National Day, to be kept as fulsomely as the Fourth of July was kept in the United States. And the clapping might conceivably now be a weekly event forever.

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