Back In The Box, Healthcare Issue

This is classic, top quality shenanigans. Sarah Wollaston is a Tory MP who was a doctor and is distinctly unimpressed by her party's insane plan to sell the NHS to their mates.

Obviously, you don't want independent thinkers around when the Select Committee on Health starts looking at the small print.

So you dispatch the most junior government minister in existence to her constituency on debate day so that she has to be there to welcome him and pose for photos rather than ask pointed questions and appear on TV interviews making awkward points.

The only trouble is that Dr Wollaston has to welcome a junior minister to her Devon constituency today and tomorrow.

Yes, it's Richard Benyon. On a two-day ministerial visit to the green pastures of south Devon. And no doubt her party colleagues impressed on Dr Wollaston how discourteous it would be for her to not be in Totnes when Mr Benyon was there.

Even if, as parliamentary under-secretary at Defra, he is one of the most junior members in the entire government.

His visit will make it a lot harder for Dr Wollaston to do TV interviews.

It was arranged at the last minute, I understand, and had been postponed from an early date.

Voilà: silence.

Another fine story unearthed by the odd Michael Crick. Brilliant shenanigans: it entirely privileges partisan politics over the good of the sick. This from the party that called for an end to spin and for 'new politics'.

Meanwhile, the cat's out of the bag, thanks to Tory Minister Greg Barker, in case there was any doubt that their attack on public services was more than nasty-minded ideological obsession:

We are making cuts that Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s could only have dreamt of.