Editorial Wednesday 20 June 2012: Review of Andrew Lansley's NHS Confederation speech

Andrew Lansley's speech to the NHS Confederation today was, unexpectedly, very funny.

Albeit not intentionally.


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I will be enjoying the hand jive to "an opportunity to look forwards and outwards, not inwards or backwards" for some time. Perhaps someone could use the relevant section of the video and set it to some fetching music?

The section about public sector pensions not being fully funded was extremely witty. It reminded me of the Not The Nine O' Clock News sketch about a bank which keeps all the clients' money in individual shoeboxes. It's as if pensions were deferred wages, or something.

Beating the line that "politicians should support the NHS. They shouldn't try to say what local services should be or impose things from the top-down" was by no means easy, but Our Saviour And Liberator managed it with "let's not put innovation in a box". Well, quite. The box has probably got a fully-funded-from-contributions pension in it.

I have rarely laughed as much at a speech by Andrew Lansley.

And to round it off, we got splendidly querulous responses to the not-terribly-difficult questions (and the audience got no chance to ask him directly, in a gutless display).