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For everyone, it seems, not least the Prime Minister. After Washington, for high-stakes but as yet unresolved soul-searching about letting Ukraine penetrate Russia with western long-range missiles, and then Italy for talks on migrants, he’s got a nation on its knees to sort out. As our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, the state of the NHS says it all.
A report last week by independent peer and top surgeon Lord Darzi could hardly have been more damning.
The health service is in a ‘critical condition’, it states, with ‘ballooning’ waits and ‘awful’ emergency services.
Thanks to the Tory-led government’s austerity policy after the global financial crash it’s chronically weakened, Lord Darzi adds. With a legacy of crumbling hospitals and outdated technology.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting went further, riffing on the then Prime Minister David Cameron’s catchphrase about fixing the roof while the sun was shining.
Far from that, he claimed, the Tories were guilty of: ‘Not just failing to fix the roof while the sun was shining, but effectively pouring petrol on the house, turning the gas on.’
Whoever’s to blame, fixing it is a huge ask. And Keir Starmer reckons the only solution is: ‘The biggest re-imagining of the NHS since its birth.’
He insists that just throwing money at the service, which of course he hasn’t got anyway, won’t solve the problem. What it’s got to do, he put it brutally, is: ‘Reform or die.’
His idea is to shift away from reliance on hospitals towards more tests, scans and healthcare offered on high streets and in town centres, with a beefed-up role for family doctors.
Also a greater emphasis on preventative care. The plan to ban junk food adverts fits neatly into this picture. But it’s only a beginning.
The same might be said of the deeply controversial decision to end the winter fuel allowance for most pensioners.
Next month’s budget is billed as a beast, with spending cuts and tax rises aplenty to not look forward to.
So it may be that squaring up to those who say hands off the oldies was Starmer’s way of testing the water. Or, rather, more specifically, the resolve of would-be Labour rebels.
It seemed risky, because, as Tony Blair colourfully put it his memoir: ‘Your average Rottweiler on speed can be a lot more amiable than a pensioner wronged.’
And, arguably, Starmer could have sold the idea better, bigging up the fact that pending increases in old-age pensions will more than compensate for the loss.
There was a bit of a belated damage limitation exercise, though one potential rebel couldn’t resist quoting a line from Ronald Reagan: ‘If you’re explaining, you’re losing.’
Staying across The Pond for a moment, Donald Trump’s outlandish and unfounded allegation that immigrants in one town actually eat their pets struck many as a bit of a loser thing to say.
And most observers think Kamala Harris won the debate, though whether or not that shifted the dial remains open to question.
Her immediate thumbs up from pop princess Taylor Swift might yet tip the balance.
But meantime, moving swiftly back to the home front, a lot more was written about the fuel allowance row before than after the parliamentary crunch.
That’s because, when it came to it, only one Labour MP voted against it, and a mere dozen ducked the vote without permission.
Round one to the boss then, though that may turn out to have been the easy bit, if a really scary warning from the government’s official tax and spending watchdog is anything to go by.
The Office for Budget Responsibility says the pressures of an ageing population, surging debt interest and dealing with climate change mean a lot more nasty medicine is the only way to keep nation afloat.
Annoyingly, from ministers’ perspective, they’re not even blaming the Tories, insisting instead that most of this is about trends over the last half century.
Nonetheless, our tax take is significantly below that of most better-off European nations, meaning we can’t really expect their levels of public investment and service.
And trying to pretend otherwise can only spell trouble.
Take last week’s emergency measure of releasing a whole tranche of prisoners after they’d only done well under half their time.
Leaving aside the very real fears of some domestic abuse victims, which is bad enough, there’s also the immediate knock-on pressure on the already overstretched probation service.
Of course it all comes back to Britain’s hideously overcrowded jails practically bursting apart, and it’s hard for the Tories to deny that they could have done better on that front.
Starmer may, however, wish to think about switching from just banging crims up to more community service, tagging and other forms of reparation.
After all, we in Britain do, proportionally, lock up well over double the number of people than they do in Germany and the Netherlands.
There’s also the obvious way to reduce re-offending via rehabilitation. On this front the new Prisons Minister Lord Timpson, who’s employed masses of ex-cons, is very much on the case.
That said, the Crime and Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson may well be minded to fling one particular naughty person into a dank cell and throw away the keys.
Not, that is, because of the gravity of the offence so much as the silliness of the situation it put her in.
There she was, telling a top cops’ annual conference that UK had been: ‘Gripped by an epidemic of anti-social behaviour, theft and shoplifting’, only to discover her own purse had been nicked.
Infinitesimally small beer, mind, next to the grand larceny perpetrated on those many hundreds of sub-postmasters ordered by the Post Office to repay money they hadn’t stolen in the first place.
Though compensation’s taking its time they did at last get justice, thanks to the dogged campaign led by Sir Alan Bates. It must have taken it out of him, but he seems to have got his sense of humour back.
In an interview in January he quipped that if Richard Branson was reading it he’d love a holiday. And the Virgin tycoon took him at his word, inviting him to his private Caribbean island.
Sweet of him of course. And Sir Alan thought it’d be nice, while he was there, to round it off by getting hitched with his long-term partner.
Her name had been Suzanne Sercombe until His Majesty gave him the gong for his efforts, at which point people couldn’t work out whether or not to call her Lady Bates.
He confessed that even he wasn’t sure, meaning matrimony was the only answer.
‘Personally, I blame the King,’ he joked. ‘It’s been thirty-four years and we’ve managed to never do it but he really dropped me in it.’
We can only guess at what Lady Bates made of that.
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