Andrew Lansley: unlucky or incompetent?

A long apprenticeship does not always lead to a happy inheritance. In politics the best example is Anthony Eden, glamour boy of the 1930s, whose decades of waiting for the top office ill prepared him for it. The same might be said—on an altogether more modest scale— of Andrew Lansley, who lost his job as England’s health secretary in David Cameron’s reshuffle. Seldom has any health secretary known more about the NHS than Lansley: he could make it his specialist subject on Mastermind. But he leaves office almost wholly unmourned. To make so many enemies in such a short time calls for a special kind of genius or bad luck on a prodigious scale.

Yet it all started well. By the time of the 2010 election, David Cameron and Andrew Lansley had successfully detoxified the Conservative brand as far as the NHS was concerned. Cameron’s experience of the care received by his young son Ivan, who had cerebral palsy and epilepsy and died aged 6 in 2009, made his declarations of support for the NHS ring true. Lansley had managed, as shadow health secretary, to rid himself of the patient passport, an idea championed by his predecessor Liam Fox that would have enabled patients to take NHS money and spend it on private treatment. His website then listed as his two proudest achievements helping to win the 1992 election and “transforming the public’s view of the Conservative Party’s support for the NHS.”