Oliver King is our new politics editor. He writes:
While it's easy to dismiss the current Conservative leadership contest as little more than a political beauty contest, the race is about far more than a job title. The future of party policy is up for grabs and senior Tories are seizing on the opportunity to dump on policies they never liked in the first place.
According to this morning's Daily Telegraph, Andrew Lansley, the party's cerebral shadow health secretary, wants to drop their "patients' passport" policy, their idea of cutting waiting lists by letting patients use NHS money to subsidise private operations. While he never said so explicitly in a speech on Wednesday to the NHS confederation, there is little doubt about what he meant. He told his audience: "It is most important to engage the public positively with choice and competition extended to everyone, than to be directed into a benefit for a minority." The point being that giving patients half the cost of a £5,000 hip operation only helps if you can afford to fund the other half.
Could parents' passports be next? In a speech tonight (read the text here) leadership hopeful David Cameron uses very similar language to Andrew Lansley. He claims that the electorate don't trust the Tories on the public services because they haven't made it sufficiently clear that the Conservatives are a party for everyone and not just the middle classes. On education he'll say: "School autonomy and parental choice are not enough. We can't just step aside and say to schools and parents: 'It's over to you – we're closing down the Department of Education, good luck.' What about those parts of the country where parents have no realistic choice of school?" David Cameron's team insist he's sticking to the choice agenda and any similarity with Andrew Lansley is mere coincidence. Really?
As the Telegraph points out, the centre-left inside the shadow cabinet have long argued against any policy which Labour could portray as helping the wealthy, but were overruled by Michael Howard. The patients' passport was a favourite of the right and the brainchild of Mr Howard's key ally Liam Fox.
Dr Fox, the shadow foreign secretary, launched his own leadership bid yesterday and was given the great boost this morning of a supportive editorial in Rupert Murdoch's Sun. The paper thinks that, as a former GP, Dr Fox has the experience to reform the public services. Given his record on patients' passports Dr Fox's colleagues might well beg to differ.
