Brexit squeezes the air out of everything. Well, there’s always room for another great British sex scandal or another crash-out from Theresa May’s dysfunctional cabinet. But otherwise Brexit has smothered all the burning issues that would normally fill front pages and lead news bulletins ahead of an eighth extreme austerity budget – police, prisons, social care, schools and everything else dangerously starved of funds.

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How clever of Simon Stevens, head of NHS England, to seize on Brexit to make the case for saving the NHS from what he called its funding “nosedive”. Here’s his rude affront to the Brexiteers: “The NHS wasn’t on the ballot paper but it was on the battle bus.” He warned that “trust in democratic politics” will be weakened if people are told there is no money for the NHS “precisely because of Brexit”. Clever, but impudent and possibly imprudent – and bound to infuriate the Brexiteers, who are all small-state austerians, whatever false generosity their bus promised. Jeremy Hunt replied that the government was in no way beholden to Brexit campaign promises.

From next April, the NHS faces a real cut in per capita spending after years of its lowest increases since 1948. Hunt boasts of extra staff, but they are heavily outnumbered and overwhelmed by soaring numbers of patients, with more of the old admitted through A&E, fewer beds to take them in – and Brexit drying up the supply of nurses. Without more money, waiting lists will hit 5 million in a couple of years, Stevens says. Targets will be abandoned (they often are already), returning to the bad old days when the NHS was rationed by queuing.

Admit it, your eyes may be glazing over. You’ve heard it all before. At the NHS Providers conference this week, where Hunt and Stevens spoke, specialist health correspondents said they found it ever harder to interest their news editors in NHS crisis stories. Every winter NHS leaders warn of imminent collapse but it never quite happens. Was it wolf, wolf?

The government has been remarkably lucky that there have been no flu or norovirus epidemics and no hard-freeze winters. The wolf is at the door, but sheer determination and the public spirit of NHS staff, despite understaffing, overwork and more acutely ill elderly patients, keeps them on their feet. Both No 10 and 11 block their ears, wilfully complacent: the NHS always whinges, yet the wheels stay on.

Hunt rules by threats and thuggery: bring me the heads of two failing CEOs to frighten the rest on waiting times and debts, he demanded recently – and two heads duly fell. Terror and targets still work: at the conference, NHS CEOs said to me privately that only a few untouchables dare speak out. Talk to the press and the call from HQ comes through instantly. Stevens has put his own head on the block this week: will they dare sack him? Or will he walk, if the chancellor ignores the NHS begging bowl, as seems likely? His departure risks causing chaos.

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May’s complacency may be blown away by a gust of Siberian weather or by the current Australian flu reaching these shores. It can take just one memorable shocker of a death story to catch the public imagination for May to feel what it is to be engulfed in an NHS firestorm: Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair could all warn her. Underfund the NHS for too long and it will blow up, sooner or later. And she is not a lucky prime minister.