There was a brief quarter of an hour on Sunday when I was leaving University College Hospital after visiting a friend, sidestepping doctors checking beepers, nurses checking pulses, when Jeremy Hunt was in No 10 as part of Theresa May’s reshuffle, and I was busily checking Twitter and daring to hope.

Surely, the man who is running the Department of Health while the NHS performs at its worst ever levels; whose plans involve closing one in six A&E departments; who has demoralised an entire generation of doctors, would go?

But continuing a staggering run of a truly awful decisions, May has decided to leave Hunt in post. There’s speculation that Ben Gummer – a key architect of the awful Tory manifesto – was lined up as his replacement, but that plan was scuppered when Gummer lost his seat.

Interestingly, Hunt has stayed almost silent since. Not immediately tweeting his reappointment, as he did last year (“rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated” – quoting Mark Twain might seem cute, but if your demise is rumoured it doesn’t suggest you are doing a great job, pal).

Presumably, Hunt will now get on with the £22bn of cuts levelled at the NHS and enforcing the sustainability and transformation plans. STPs seem like a good idea, and could be – relieving the strain on hospitals and inpatient units by moving care into the community and fostering interaction between services. The trouble is, as with the seven-day NHS debacle, it’s difficult to do more with the same level of funding, and the public and frontline staff have barely been consulted. The concern is facilities closed down, with people then left to fend for themselves without the required help. Doesn’t sound so great now, does it?

Hunt will dispute that things are going belly-up, of course, as he always does. But I must have spoken to tens, if not a hundred NHS workers or those in the public health sector, and I’ve met only one person who backed him – who I later realised worked for him. It’s surely no coincidence that 12% of the Tory MPs who lost their seats in the early hours of Friday morning were current or former health ministers.



NHS workers and experts are warning it's in danger; patients are reporting it's in danger. And May is happy to carry on

As for my own experiences (with a nod to the current media climate of journalists –sometimes justifiably – seen as out of touch or with little proximity to issues), here are my encounters with the NHS in just the past year:

Therapy with a very dedicated but overworked junior doctor who was often exhausted because her shifts had changed at the last minute to fill rota gaps elsewhere, and who was so despondent about Hunt’s new contract imposition that she published a brilliant article about it. Being sectioned and made to wait in a room for 22 hours in A&E before an inpatient psychiatric bed could be found (eventually out of borough, on the other side of London from where I lived). Staying in a more relaxed hospital after, which was a positive experience, but where three staff members told me they were fed up with NHS pay and conditions and were leaving. Then a period of zero help whatsoever for months. Then a good worker at a different service but placed on a two-year waiting list for specialist therapy, and now, finally, on to a different waiting list for a different therapy – of 18 months. When I found out about that last waiting list time, I took to my bed with rage – which might seem strange, but it really is exhausting, this fighting for help.

I cannot emphasis enough how these are not atypical experiences. Witness the two members of a Question Time audience last month who had both had the same experiences with mental health services. And it doesn’t stop there. Almost 200,000 patients are waiting a month longer than targets for surgery; people are being treated on trolleys in corridors. And in that same Question Time audience, there was an NHS nurse who had had her pay frozen for five years as living costs are rising.

Let’s be very clear, as politicians are wont to say all the time: NHS workers and experts are warning that the NHS is in danger; NHS patients are reporting that the NHS is in danger. And May is happy to carry on this way with Hunt remaining in place?

Hunt has lost the confidence of the entire profession and the public, who come out in force to show support for the health service. Protests are well attended and the NHS is repeatedly named as a priority for voters. Hunt is toxic, and has presided over the most tumultuous NHS period for some time – keeping him in place is not the “strong and stable” option. There will be more protests when he comes after consultant contracts, which he surely will, as he has come after junior doctors, nurses’ bursaries and A&E units.

In fairness, Hunt isn’t alone in being a poor health secretary. The disastrous Health and Social Care Act (2012) was brought in by Andrew Lansley, and it was a Labour government that oversaw the Mid Staffs crisis. And in fairness too, not all the NHS pressures can be laid at Hunt’s door: an ageing population and rising instances of mental health problems, for instance. But Hunt is in charge of getting the best from the NHS, and he is the only one who has written a document on privatising it while doing nothing to disabuse us of the notion that he wants to push the system to the brink until that comes to pass. And what will happen when EU staff leave? Who will take their place? Enter the private sector.

It is beyond galling to hear May trot out her pet new rhetoric on mental health care while reappointing Hunt, who is decimating it. If she actually cared about the “just about managing”, she wouldn’t be OK with leaving people on waiting lists for literally years. If she actually cared about jobs and a stable economy, she’d realise that mental and physical ill-health cost the economy billions per annum and invest more in our health system, as other countries do. Her soundbites will not nourish those turning up to hospital underweight and emaciated, missing meals in order to feed their kids.

It’s galling too, to see Hunt going bouncing out of No 10 with his NHS pin on his lapel. It rather reminds me of John Terry dressed in a Chelsea kit to collect the Champions League trophy, despite having played no part in the final: you’ve done absolutely nothing to help here. Sure, he can come across as charming in the odd interview, but even the most poisonous of snakes have pretty patterns. The reappointment of Hunt by May shows utter contempt for the NHS, and all of those – everyone, in fact – who has been calling for his replacement.