With Truss gone, what next for her friend the Secretary of State for Health?
Thursday, October 20, 2022 at 16:55 It was inevitable, I’m sorry to say. Recent events made her position untenable so Liz Truss had to go.
I just hope that her good friend, health secretary Thérèse Coffey, is still in her job after the PM’s successor is announced next week.
A report that Coffey was going to abandon the long-awaited tobacco control plan was one of the few positive stories to emerge in recent weeks, although I wasn’t entirely sure it was true.
Listening to Coffey on LBC a couple of weeks ago it was clear she hadn’t given tobacco control much thought, but that’s not the same as dropping plans for England to be ‘smoke free’ by 2030.
It just meant it wasn’t a priority, given everything else on her plate.
The signs were enough however to worry an impatient tobacco control industry not to mention their supporters at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), hence the Guardian story that was clearly designed to put pressure on Coffey to act.
Likewise last week’s leading article in The Times, an opinion piece in the Guardian by former health minister Dr Dan Poulter (I’m a Tory MP, but I think Thérèse Coffey is putting ideology above the nation’s health), and some indignant tweets on social media that appeared to be driven not by ordinary members of the public but by anti-smoking groups desperate for the Khan recommendations to be implemented as part of the Government’s plan.
Sadly, and through no fault of her own, Coffey’s time at the DHSC could be cut almost as short as Truss’s term at Number Ten because my guess is that the new leader of the Conservative party may want a complete break from Truss’s closest friends and allies and that makes the health secretary extremely vulnerable.
If Coffey goes I suspect the job of health secretary will revert to the usual upwardly mobile politician for whom a tobacco control plan is a perfect opportunity to distract attention from the state of the NHS and stamp their mark before moving on to the next job.
When Thérèse Coffey was appointed I hoped that, finally, we had a Secretary of State for Health we could relate to.
More important, she struck me as someone who in return could relate to ordinary people - those of us who are neither paragons of virtue nor paragons of health.
Liz Truss may be history but Thérèse Coffey? Your country still needs you!
Reader Comments (1)
She will get the boot by a cowardly party that has stabbed two leaders in the back in its bid for electoral suicide. At least ASH and lifestyle bully co-conspirators will be happy to be in charge of the Dept of Health again even if that means the NHS will continue to decline as money that should go to patient care and services get diverted to fund the lifestyle propaganda wing instead. Shame on them.