NHS boss blames staff after years of failure at the helm. Mystery solved: Jeremy Hunt IS Sepp Blatter!

One is a top official in a powerful organisation that over the last three decades has become ever more tainted by an unhealthy obsession with extreme wealth, extending rich backers’ influence and, where possible, finding scapegoats. The other is Sepp Blatter.

Of course, I am being somewhat tongue-in-cheek in my headline by suggesting that the corruption scandal-hit FIFA boss and the Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt are the same person.

But, as helpfully pointed out to me on Twitter by @AndyJay1, they do have their similarities: both men have long been at the helm of failing administrations and both prefer to blame their staff than take any responsibility themselves.

In the case of Blatter, whose organisation is accused of allowing Russian and Qatari bribes buy the next two World Cups, he first blamed the British media and U.S. justice system - and then settled on a minority of “individuals” within FIFA.

Meanwhile, Hunt, writing in the Daily Telegraph today, says that that NHS, which he has presided over for three years, has had enough money and must stop making excuses as it goes through the what one highly respected think tank described as the “biggest funding squeeze in its history”.

The Health Secretary, whose soothing bedside manner hides a fierce desire to roll back the state after having previously co-authored a book calling for the NHS to be dismantled and replaced with a system of personal health accounts, revealed that the organisation will receive £8billion of extra funding – so long as it makes £22billion worth of “efficiency savings”.

However, aside from the hypocrisy of pretending not to but actually cutting spending in a supposedly “ringfenced” service, the problems with his rationale are twofold.

Firstly, the NHS is already remarkably good value compared to other countries’ systems and, secondly, the Tories have actively weakened its efficiency over the last five years.

In the first case, only two out of 12 major nations spend a smaller proportion of their national income on health than Britain does, according to OECD statistics.

The UK’s total health expenditure is £2,008 per head, or 8.7% of GDP, while the NHS on its own is this year projected to cost 6.2% of GDP (down from 6.5% in 2013).

This compares to 11.2% in France, 10.7% in Switzerland, 10.5% in Germany, 10.4% in Canada.

All these countries have taxpayer-funded universal healthcare systems, although they all operate with less direct state involvement than the NHS, which is the world’s fifth biggest employer.

The U.S., the only industrialised country that does not have publicly funded universal healthcare and where millions continue to be denied treatment, spends almost twice as much of its national income as Britain does at 16%.

Indeed, British health spending is so relatively efficient, that last year the respected Commonwealth Fund judged the NHS the best system in the world.

A panel of experts judging 11 different countries rated British healthcare top for quality, access and efficiency.

And yet, in spite of this, Tory-led reforms – after breaking a promise of “no top-down restructuring” – has helped fragment the service and weakened the high degree of unity that was the previous basis for efficiency.

The NHS now pools fewer and fewer resources, which is exacerbating problems caused by falling funding (and it is – just look at the chart below), rising patient demand and staff shortages.

Hunt today rightly noted that the “exorbitant” fees of up to £3,500 a shift that agencies charge for temporary doctors and nurses is “ripping off” the health service.

Yet, aside from the fact that his party axed at least 6,000 permanent nursing jobs between 2010 and 2013, reduced training and prolonged a pay freeze, part of the reason that hospitals struggle to employ enough staff is that the hiring process is much less efficient.

The biggest source of new staff is now overseas, but instead of a single NHS recruiter hospitals must now compete with each other and pay higher finder fees to land talent, which, of course, drives up overall costs.

If Hunt really wanted to increase efficiency he could start by scrapping the Health and Social Care Act of 2012, which has broken down the NHS into smaller components and made it easier to contract out to private providers.

And, instead of telling what is already the world’s most efficient healthcare provider to make bigger savings and blaming it for the shortages the Tories have helped to create, he would increase the NHS funding, perhaps by taxing those wealthy financiers in the City who are the source of half the Conservative Party’s funding.

But of course he won’t because neither of these solutions serve his and his party’s core mission of cutting spending, reducing taxes and privatising at all cost.

Yet, like Sepp Blatter and FIFA, I suspect Jeremy Hunt and the Tories’ tower of lies they have built around our public services will eventually come crashing down of them.

Hopefully that moment won’t be too late for the NHS.