Rishi Sunak is under fire today after being filmed laughing as a woman tackled him over the state of NHS waiting lists – before walking off.
The Prime Minister was told ‘you could stop it all’, by a former health worker on a walkabout in Winchester as she quizzed him about lengthy wait times for treatment.
In an exchange caught on camera by Sky News, Mr Sunak blamed the backlog on strikes by medical staff before laughing as she said: ‘You could make it all go back to how it used to be … where, if you had a problem, you could go to the hospital.’
As she continued, saying ‘my daughter spent seven hours waiting’, he was pulled away by Winchester candidate Flick Drummond to continue his walkabout in the Tory Hampshire seat that is on the Lib Dem target list at the next election.
She then followed him down the street and he said he was ‘sorry to hear that’ before they discussed the strikes again before shaking hands.
As the exchange went viral online it was dubbed his ‘Gordon Brown moment’ – a reference to the former PM being caught calling Gillian Duffy a ‘bigoted woman’ while attached to a microphone before the 2010 election.
The Prime Minister was told ‘you could stop it all’, by a former health worker on a walkabout in Winchester as she quizzed him about lengthy wait times for treatment.
In an exchange caught on camera by Sky News, Mr Sunak blamed the backlog on strikes by medical staff before laughing as she said: ‘You could make it all go back to how it used to be … where, if you had a problem, you could go to the hospital.’
As the exchange went viral online it was dubbed his ‘Gordon Brown moment’ – a reference to the former PM being caught calling Gillian Duffy a ‘bigoted woman’ while attached to a microphone before the 2010 election.
Liberal Democrat MP Christine Jardine said: ‘Laughing in the face of a former health worker whilst they are trying to explain to him the dire straits the NHS is in is frankly shocking.
‘The Prime Minister either does not care or he does not get it.’
And Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary, added; ‘Rishi Sunak has no idea of the misery NHS patients are going through.
‘When patients try to tell him, he laughs in their faces and walks away. When Sunak asks for their vote later this year, he will get a taste of his own medicine.’
Some 6.39 million patients across England were waiting for routine hospital treatment in November, figures suggest, which is down slightly from 6.44 million in October.
But the NHS is still failing to hit most of its key performance targets despite the overall drop, the data indicates.
Some 11,168 people in England were waiting more than 18 months to start routine hospital treatment at the end of November, up from 10,506 at the end of October.
A&E times also worsened, with 69.4% of patients in England seen within four hours in December, down from 69.7% in November and against a target set for March this year of 76%.
Mr Sunak blamed striking doctors for the backlog, telling the woman that the recent dip in the number of people waiting ‘just shows that when there aren’t strikes, we really can make progress.’
The PM last year made cutting waiting lists one of the five key priorities of his leadership.
However, data analysed by the PA news agency suggests that despite recent decreases in the waiting list, it is still higher than when the pledge was made.
The waiting list stood at 7.21 million treatments waiting to be carried out in January 2023.
As of November – a month with no industrial action – some 7.61 million treatments were waiting to be carried out.
The NHS is likely to be a key political battleground in the blue wall – traditionally Tory seats in southern England which are vulnerable to gains from either the Liberal Democrats or Labour – during an election year.