Lost: test results diagnosing Jeremy Hunt with terminal incompetence

Somewhere in the UK there is a warehouse stuffed full of GPs’ referral letters and blood test results diagnosing the health secretary with terminal incompetence. But as it has yet to be found, Jeremy Hunt had to limit his scope to the 700,000 NHS documents that have just turned up after going missing in action for five years in answer to Labour’s urgent question in the Commons.

“Absolutely nothing went missing,” he reassured MPs. All that had happened was that hundreds of thousands of confidential pieces of medical information had accidentally been sent to the wrong place without anyone noticing. But it was no biggy. As far as he knew, no one had died – or if they had, their death certificates had also gone AWOL, so it was much the same thing. And what it really proved was how many unnecessary tests the NHS were conducting each year. Just think of the potential savings. A couple of avoidable deaths had to be a price worth paying for not bothering with 700,000 bits of paperwork.

Hunt was rather less cavalier with his own reputation. “I was made aware of the situation in March last year,” he sobbed. And he had begged and begged his departmental officials to let him tell the country. But they had said to him: “You mustn’t do that, Jeremy, because otherwise every hypochondriac in the country will be ringing up their GP to find out if they’ve got cancer after all and we’ll never get round to finding out just how big a cock-up you’ve made. Not that you have made a cock-up, of course.”

Yet Hunt is an honourable man. Not telling everyone about the missing documents was preying on his mind. So to ease his conscience, he sent out a 138-word written departmental statement on the last day before the summer recess in July reassuring people that they needn’t worry about the thing they didn’t know about. Just to make sure no one could possibly miss this statement, he added a brief footnote to his department’s annual report that he couldn’t believe no one had read. To round off his utter commitment to transparency, he had come to the house today to clear up any remaining misunderstandings.

Jon Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, was underwhelmed by Hunt’s performance, calling the affair a “catastrophic breach of confidentiality” and questioning if being forced to come to the house to answer an urgent question was really symptomatic of a man with an obsessive-compulsive desire to tell the truth. He also wanted to know why the government had chosen to sell off the transfer of patient records to Capita after the Shared Business Service had proved to be such a disaster.

“You’re wrong,” Hunt replied defensively. “We haven’t transferred the SBS contract to Capita. We’ve taken it back in-house.” Really? “Yes.” Really, really? “Well … we have sold off some other patient records transfer to Capita and it is true there are a lot of teething problems with that contract.” But, touch wood, no one had died so there was nothing to see here. Move along.

Many MPs on both sides of the house found the health secretary less than convincing. If it had taken five years to discover that 700,000 items had got lost, how could he be certain there weren’t hundreds of thousands of other documents that were missing, presumed killed? Hunt shrugged. What the eye couldn’t see, the heart couldn’t grieve over. Wasn’t it just luck rather than planning that no one had croaked. Hunt smiled. He had asked himself one question and he did feel lucky.

Only a couple of Tory Ultras, who are more interested in their own preferment than inconsequential matters of personal integrity, rallied to Hunt’s cause. Victoria “Gizza Ministerial Job” Atkins observed that Labour had lost far more data in 2007 than the Tories had done so they should, like, shut up, yeah. “Yeah,” said James Cleverly, “and if Labour had created a decent NHS IT system when it was in office, then none of this would have happened.” So it was all just fake news. Hunt chose to follow the data’s example and make himself scarce. Time to quit when he was no further behind.