The Condemned Man stared helplessly towards the TV camera. It was the first time the Supreme Leader had risked letting Jeremy Hunt out in public during the election campaign, and one wrong word could easily be his last. Ever. The health secretary is widely tipped for elimination after the coronation of 8 June.
Andrew Marr was in no mood to make life easy for the Condemned Man. Why hadn’t the NHS met its A&E waiting time targets for over two years? Why have more than 350,000 people had to wait more than 18 weeks for major surgery? “These are important standards,” Hunt stammered. “And I’m annoyed they are not being met.” And he’d give the health secretary a piece of his mind about it if he ever got the chance to meet him. “But they are not the only standards.” There were other equally exacting substandards that the government was exceeding. Why couldn’t he focus on these?
“The Royal College of Physicians says the NHS is in crisis,” Marr continued. “Many will wonder what Jeremy Hunt has been doing?”
“What has Jeremy Hunt been doing?” said Jeremy Hunt, stalling for time as he tried to remember who exactly Jeremy Hunt was. Having come up with no definitive answer, he could only guess that Jeremy Hunt had been having a difficult time because the NHS was being so well funded. The Supreme Leader had been absolutely right to argue that nurses were turning to food banks for complex reasons. The most complex of which was that nurses were already earning far too much money to go to Tesco.
By now the Condemned Man was on the brink of tears. It wasn’t fair to blame everything that was going wrong with the NHS on him. It was all down to Brexit. If strong and stable Kim Jong-May was given a strong mandate to deliver Brexit, then at least all those people lying around in hospital corridors on trolleys could die happy knowing that Britain was a strong and stable country free from the hegemony of Brussels bureaucrats.
So did that mean that no deal rather than a bad deal with the EU would be a good deal for the NHS? A look of sheer panic was etched on the Condemned Man’s face as he realised whatever he said was bound to be wrong. Couldn’t he talk about his new promise to create an extra 10,000 mental health workers by 2020 to replace the 6,000 ones he had just sacked? “Sure,” said Marr. “How are you going to fund that?” The Condemned Man shrugged. By cutting £1.4bn from another bit of the NHS budget. Simples.
Marr ended by asking the Condemned Man who in the EU was rigging the election in favour of Labour and the Lib Dems.
“You’ll have to ask them,” the Condemned Man said confidently, pleased to have got one answer not totally wrong. It was obvious the EU was doing this because it was obvious. Just as the Supreme Leader May She Live Forever and Rule For Longer had said. Over at Tory High Command, Kim Jong-May quietly scratched a line through the name Jeremy Hunt. She would be needing a new health secretary after all.
Over on Peston on Sunday, Emily Thornberry was arguing that voters would love Jeremy Corbyn to bits if only they got to see more of him and that the only reason Labour had done so badly in the local elections was because they hadn’t had enough Jeremy. Robert Peston was understandably sceptical. Who was going to stand up for the liberal metropolitan elite for whom £80,000 a year made them eligible for working tax credits, he wondered. How much money did Labour think it was going to raise from this iniquitous tax hike?
“I really don’t know,” said Thornberry, adding a new dimension of incompetence to the Diane Abbott numeracy playbook. “You’ll have to ask John McDonnell.”
“Fantastic,” replied Peston.
The shadow chancellor might have loved to say how much he was going to raise from his modest tax hike, but he was too busy failing to deny he was a Marxist.
There were a lot of good things to learn about Marx, McDonnell said. Yes, he may have got a few things wrong, but his heart was in the right place. Voters would love Marx to bits if only they got to see more of him, and the only reason Labour had done so badly in the local elections was because they hadn’t had enough Marx.
“Was that a no or a yes, I couldn’t work it out?” Marr pressed.
“Well, I’ll tell you – I believe there’s a lot to learn from reading Das Kapital.”
The EU masterplan to rig the election was right on track.
