right and proper to make such an offer.
Bernard then went so far as to suggest that it could save a lot of wear and tear on the doctors – with sufficiently long tubes for their stethoscopes, he suggested, they could stand in one place and listen to all the chests on the ward.
I hope and pray that he was being facetious.
Then I showed Humphrey the memos from St Stephen’s about toilet rolls and the mortuary.
Sir Humphrey brushed these memos aside. He argued that the Health Service is as efficient and economical as the government allows it to be.
So I showed him a quite remarkable document from the Director of Uniforms in a Regional Health Authority:
Humphrey had the grace to admit he was amazed by this piece of nonsense. ‘Nice work if you can get it,’ he said with a smile.
I saved my trump card till last. And even Humphrey was concerned about the Christmas dinner memo:
Humphrey did at least admit that something might be slightly wrong if we are paying people throughout the NHS to toil away at producing all this meaningless drivel. And I learned this morning that in ten years the number of Health Service administrators has gone up by 40,000 and the number of hospital beds has gone down by 60,000. These figures speak for themselves.
Furthermore the annual cost of the Health Service has gone up by one and a half billion pounds. In real terms!
But Sir Humphrey seemed pleased when I gave him these figures. ‘Ah,’ he said smugly, ‘if only British industry could match this growth record.’
I was staggered! ‘Growth?’ I said. ‘Growth?’ I repeated. Were my ears deceiving me? ‘Growth?’ I cried. He nodded. ‘Are you suggesting that treating fewer and fewer patients so that we can employ more and more administrators is a proper use of the funds voted by Parliament and supplied by the taxpayer?’
‘Certainly.’ He nodded again.
I tried to explain to him that the money is only voted to make sick people better. To my intense surprise, he flatly disagreed with this proposition.
‘On the contrary, Minister, it makes
This, of course, was pure sophism. ‘The money should be spent on patient care, surely?’
Sir Humphrey clearly regarded my comment as irrelevant. He pursued his idiotic analogy. ‘When a sacrifice has been made, nobody asks the Priest what happened to the ritual offering after the ceremony.’
Humphrey is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! In my view the country
‘With respect,3 Minister,’ began Humphrey, one of his favourite insults in his varied repertoire, ‘people merely care that the money is not
I rejected that argument. I reminded him of the uproar over the mental hospital scandals.
Cynical as ever, he claimed that such an uproar proved his point. ‘Those abuses had been going on quite happily for decades,’ he said. ‘No one was remotely concerned to find out what was being done with their money – it was their sacrifice, in fact. What outraged them was being told about it.’
I realised that this whole ingenious theory, whether true or false, was being used by Humphrey as a smokescreen. I decided to ask a straight question.
‘Are we or aren’t we agreed that there is no point in keeping a hospital running for the benefit of the staff?’
Humphrey did not give a straight answer.
‘Minister,’ he admonished, ‘that is not how I would have expressed the question.’
Then he fell silent.
I pointed out that that was how I had expressed it.
‘Indeed,’ he said.
And waited.
Clearly, he had no intention of answering any straight question unless it was expressed in terms which he found wholly acceptable.
I gave in. ‘All right,’ I snapped, ‘how would you express it?’
‘At the end of the day,’ he began, ‘
‘One?’ I said. ‘One? What else?’
He refused to admit that I had interrupted him, and continued speaking with utter calm as if I had not said a word. ‘But, until we have the money for the nursing and medical staff, that is a function that we are not able to pursue. Perhaps in eighteen months or so . . .’
