FOXING THE GOVERNMENT

Sion Simon says the Tory health

spokesman's policies are fine, but his politics aren't

THERE'S something of the leprechaun about Liam Fox. Though I'm not quite sure what. He's not Irish, but his posh Glasgow accent is so musical that some- times he might be. He's not noticeably small, but he does have what this maga- zine's editor called 'cornflower blue' eyes and a tufty haircut of the kind one might expect atop a leprechaun head.

He's young, still only 39, though he entered Parliament in 1992. He started at Glasgow University aged '17 years and nine days, I think. I qualified [as a doctor] when I was still 21.' He was a partner in general practice in Beaconsfield by the age of 25, and fluked a safe Tory seat in the West Country before he was 30. When I put it to him that he had a speculative try at selection, it came off and he couldn't quite believe his luck, he says: 'That's a very, very good summary of how it hap- pened, actually. As someone said to me at the time, "You never know if the chance will come past you again. Grab it with both hands." And I have never looked back. And I was very, very lucky in the first term. I was in the whips' office in government, and I was actually in the Department of Health as a government whip, and in the Treasury and the DTI as a whip, and then I was a Foreign Office minister.'

Fox frequently makes the (actually rather unconvincing) point that being a doctor makes him a better shadow health minister. When I suggest that the notion of a 21- year-old doctor is rather terrifying, he says, `It was pretty terrifying for me, I'll confess,' which is not quite what I meant. He adds that 'I think it is necessary for the House of Commons to have a wider range of experi- ence in it, and I do think that if you fill it with social workers, accountants and lawyers, you're much the poorer for it.' And which do you think would be the worst of those three for it to be filled with? 'Well, that depends whether you're talking legisla- tively or morally. I don't think I could possi- bly put them in order.'

Now that I think of it, though, lep- rechauns are actually quite wrinkled. Per- haps I was just inferring a certain boyish charm from the rumours which so delight- ed us a couple of years ago that Dr Fox was amorously entangled with a pop singer called Natalie Imbruglia. But when that question was put to him later that day (by someone else; I didn't ask because my sources had suggested it was unlikely to be true), the boy Liam (as one cannot help but think of him) would say only that Ms Imbruglia's manager was a good friend of his. Shame. The tatty circus of politics could use some glamour.

The Member for Woodspring (suburban Bristol and Bath) was guarded from my ter- rier-like tendencies by his loping Central Office press hound, Bill Clare. Bill has been half-fingered of late for being the Downing Street mole, which is not really fair, because it isn't him. I mention it because I fear it may have been me who let the dogs out. With a certain insouciance, but more than half an eye to the dramatic effect, Bill remarked, as we were passing behind the Speaker's chair on the way to the good doc- tor's quasi-subterranean office, that this time last year he had been working in the Downing Street press office, having been enticed there from civil service anonymity by Alastair Campbell himself.

Later that day, when writing about the mole, it occurred to me to check on exactly when old Bill had upped sticks and decamped to Smith Square. On discovering that he left No. 10 last August, I knew he couldn't be the talpida in question. Unless Downing Street gave him special 'return and steal documents now that you are work- ing for the Tories' clearance nine months after leaving the civil service. Which is a tad unlikely, even in the wacky world of White- hall. No, Bill is not the mole; though I sus- pect he looks a bit like him.

Getting back to that other cute-looking but mischievous creature, Liam the lep- rechaun is softly spoken and genial, but rather earnest. Being the shadow secretary of state for health, he is naturally keen to talk about his health policies. I sense that he is particularly glad to give them an airing because he feels a sense of vindication. In January he simultaneously floated the ideas that more people needed to buy more pri- vate health insurance, but that private healthcare firms should perhaps be massive- ly taxed in order to claw back some contri- bution towards the cost, currently born entirely by the state, of training the staff through whom they realise their profits. Everyone was annoyed. Then, last month, he announced plans to stop taxing employ- er-provided healthcare as a benefit-in-kind. Initially to halve the employee and scrap the employer National Insurance component, but to move towards 100 per cent tax relief.

He clearly feels that the announcement went well, that his stock within his own party has risen, and that the government is on the defensive. Yet Labour is equally upbeat about Fox's advocacy of private insurance. From their perspective, it seems like the perfect ammunition for a general- election barrage of 'Tories will privatise the NHS' scares. Having unleashed such, and having won the election, Labour's most likely course of action would probably be broadly that laid down by Dr Fox. Anyone can see that the NHS can only be properly modernised by increasing the amount of Private money in the system. Intelligent members of the government recognise (though they never admit it publicly) that the challenge isn't really to keep the NHS entirely tax-funded, but to introduce private funding (private provision is only a very early step) without compromising equity, which anyway doesn't exist. In my cynical way, I put this to the dryadic doctor. Look, Liam, your policies are fine, but surely your politics are stupid: you're just enabling Labour to paint you as privatising an NHS that they'll defend to the death. Then they'll get in, they'll priva- tise it, they'll get the credit and you will have failed. What's in it for you? But Liam, understandably, I suppose, is in `politician being interviewed' mode: `Sometimes it's possible to lead an agenda rather than simply follow it. It has become almost the accepted wisdom that you have to do what this week's focus group says' (in Tory circles these days that is as common a criticism of Hague as of Blair). 'In any case, if you do look at the opinion polls, I think that the public are way ahead of the politicians in terms of their understanding that you have to have greater partnership between the state and the private sector; that there is a role in supplementing the NHS with private healthcare. There's a danger of politicians being so hidebound by their own rhetoric and their own pre- conceptions that they can't see where the argument has moved on.' The pixie-physi- cian continues: 'It is a capacity problem that we have. Our private sector is too small in comparison with other people's private sectors, therefore there's less for us to supplement the NHS with. There has been a big discussion about whether we should do that by subsidising personal pri- vate healthcare or whether there's a better way to do it, and my view is that you'll get a bigger increase for any money you put in by doing it through the business sector.' He goes on to talk about his tax-break plans. It is all perfectly sensible.

Next it is the mutual societies, of whom he is 'a great fan'. 'They say, well, these are the most common conditions that cause loss of time from work for our employees. We'll cover these. And then they cover the common surgical conditions. Also, a lot of them will then actually cover mental health, which is another big time-loss from work and which nobody ever . seems to think about. The reason they're able to do it more cheaply through the mutuals is because they bring into the equation for insurance a lot of healthy young people. They're not the people who would seek out personal insurance because they're much less likely to need it, so it brings the premiums way down.'

Super. Can't believe nobody thought of it before. But hang on, Liam, why has nobody thought of this before? Why did even Mrs Thatcher never tread other than softly on these dreams? Is it so clever to be the first to start telling the truth about such things? Shouldn't you leave this stuff to Labour, particularly when they're in government? Apparently not. 'There's one thing that overrides all of this. Maybe it goes back to the doctor thing. Or maybe it's a combined political thing. I think that for anybody who's in charge of health poli- cy, your overriding aim should be that patients should get the quality of care they deserve within a time as quick as possible, and it shouldn't matter where they get it.'

Whoa, Liam boy. Are you saying that all previous Tory health spokesmen and sec- retaries were not motivated by that imper- ative? 'I think we have moved the argument on.'

But actually we never really moved the argument on from there. Perfectly sensible policies can often be foolish things to have. So never mind the policies, what about the politics? Why you? And why now, of all times? To these questions, he doesn't have a terribly convincing answer. In essence, it is the old 'are you brave or are you stupid?' chestnut. Liam thinks he is brave. It is rarely the right answer.

At one point he seemed to haul himself out of the hole, saying, 'I've never thought of myself as courageous in any way, shape or form.' Good lad. But then he blew it: `For mc, it was a necessary step,' he said, `and once you had accepted the logic of the argument, then it needed to be put into pol- icy.' Oh dear, Liam. Oh no. That way be monsters. That way lies the big black hole where the weird stuff happens. Sometimes it's a bad place to be. Ask a mole.

Sion Simon is a Daily Telegraph and News of the World columnist.