We are where we are. The government may have no very obvious idea of how to deal with the immediate crisis of Brexit – Theresa May is so vague that her MPs are unable to agree on what she has said moments after she has stopped talking – but that hasn’t stopped Matt Hancock, the cabinet’s most enthusiastic Man-Boy, from publishing his own 10-year plan for the NHS. On Tigger’s watch, no one is going to get cancer, no one is going to become obese and everyone is going to live for ever.
Understandably, perhaps, the health select committee had not been totally convinced by these promises and had called on Hancock, along with Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, and Ian Dalton, chief executive of NHS Improvement, to justify this optimism. Given there were so many unknowns, that there were no fixed budgets and no guarantees of meeting workforce targets, observed the committee chair, Sarah Wollaston, how could they be so confident of meeting their targets?
Ah, there was those things, Stevens conceded. But apart from that, everything was going to be fine. The challenge was merely to get the right people to participate in the bits of the NHS that Tigger wanted them to. Dalton put more faith in the government’s new Getting It Right First Time programme. The earlier Getting It Right the Second or Third Time programme hadn’t been a huge success for all those who had been misdiagnosed and died.
Throughout these early exchanges, Tigger merely nodded keenly, happy to let the others do the talking while aiming to look as if he had all the facts at his fingertips. Then he opened his mouth and proved he didn’t.
The trouble started when Labour’s Ben Bradshaw enquired how the department’s plans for a no-deal Brexit were coming along. Everything was just great, Hancock snapped. There was no cause for any alarm. The fridges had been bought and the medicines sourced and stockpiled.
Yes, he had read that some supermarkets had said there would be food shortages and that prices would go up, but the same did not apply to medicines as their supply chains were very different. Food came in through Dover, while medicines came in on ferries that did not yet exist through Ramsgate.
That was odd, said Bradshaw, because the pharmaceutical companies had told the committee that they would have the same problems as the food industry because they relied on the same transport networks. Tigger reddened. What part of his being on top of the situation had the committee failed to understand?
“Medicines will be prioritised over food,” he said firmly. He was committed to requisitioning lorries to make sure the country died of starvation rather than through illness. All foodstuffs would be left to rot in France so that pharmacies would be able to dispense valium prescriptions to everyone stressed about not being able to get enough to eat. Apart from anything else, it would do everyone good to lose a bit of weight. It was time for the country to step up to the plate. Just not a plate with any food on it. Hard choices had to be made. Dulce et decorum est pro Brexita mori.
Realising he might have gone a little further than he intended, Tigger began to backtrack a little. Although some former ministers had said there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of the government getting all its legislation passed in time to ensure an even vaguely orderly Brexit, he was happy to go on record as saying there was no cause for alarm. Unless you were hungry. At which even Stevens and Dalton began to look panic-stricken. Their lack of faith in Hancock was touching.
Right, said Bradshaw slowly, trying to make some kind of sense of all the contradictions in what the health secretary had just said. If everything was going so swimmingly, how come he had told the Andrew Marr show that the government was considering imposing a curfew and martial law?
“I didn’t say it,” Tigger insisted. Bradshaw gave him another chance. Several million viewers had distinctly heard him saying every contingency was being considered. “Oh, that,” Hancock ad-libbed. He had just been having a bit of a laugh. And he could give his personal guarantee that the government had no plans to open fire on its citizens, providing the looting remained largely recreational. But come to think of it, calling in the army might be delivering on the result of the referendum. After all, wasn’t imposing martial law the ultimate expression of taking back control?
