Things we don’t learn in this article: that the author wrot…

Things we don’t learn in this article: that the author wrote David Cameron’s speeches during the period when they were intentionally underfunding the NHS and other services, directly creating the problem the author is concerned about now.

Today we learn health services are brutally underfunded with scant support for hard pressed staff, although it\u2019s left unclear who is responsible for that and it appears to be an exceptional, totally unpredicted phenomenon, like a freak weather event. pic.twitter.com/StwFR7RejE
— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) January 25, 2021

We also don’t learn that the paper it’s written in stridently supported those measures and attacked junior doctors threatening strike action over NHS cuts and long working hours, accusing them of holding the country to ransom.

We aren’t reminded that NHS funding and the future of health provision was a central part of previous election campaigns, and that attempts to highlight these problems were swiftly stomped on or diverted and then ignored by most of the press, including the Times.

I’d underline here that “corruption” doesn’t just mean money in brown envelopes: it describes a situation where much of an organisation is personally motivated to ignore, downplay or divert from malfeasance for personal reasons - because highlighting them would be bad for careers

Foges was Cameron’s speechwriter at the height of austerity; Forsyth is married to the PM’s spokesman; Danny F is a Tory peer; Parris is a former MP; Gove used to write for them regularly, and that’s before we get to professional mates-with-ministers like Shipman or Montgomerie.

I’m sure we could go a lot deeper here but even at the top level, it’s clear loads of these people are deeply and personally implicated in helping to create the problems they’re commenting on, and this is nowhere made clear whether they’re in the paper or on radio and TV.

Again: this is what corruption is, where people have a professional interest in not focusing on bad behaviour and are actually motivated to resist attempts to tackle it. If we’re still asking why ministers don’t resign any more, it may be because they know nobody will make them.

No sinister meetings in smoky rooms: just a common professional understanding that never needs articulating that certain types of stories are important and helpful, and others very much are not.

The best argument you could really make here is that some of these people are hostile to Johnson and his allies, but out of partisanship within the Conservative Party. And that’s not great, is it, particularly at a time when the government’s total unfitness for office is so plain