Crisis in the NHS in 2022 will damage the Conservatives

CLICHÉS ARE common in British politics. It is a land where a week is a long time, dear boys are told to worry about events and, more recently, everything is just like “The Thick Of It”. Some clichés count more than others. Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary, returns to one when attacking the Conservatives on the NHS. “It’s not just that the Tories didn’t fix the roof while the sun was shining,” Mr Streeting likes to say. “They dismantled the roof and removed the floorboards.” This echoes George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor, who hammered Labour for “fail[ing] to fix the roof when the sun was shining” during the global financial crisis.