Cuts, queues and death dominate PMQs

Cuts, queues and death. These motifs dominated the New Year instalment of PMQs. At the end of the last episode, shortly before Christmas, there were 12,000 patients lying in ambulances in hospital car parks. Two weeks later, according to Mr Corbyn, the figure stood at 17,000. Excellent news for Mr Corbyn because it sounds as if the queue has got nearly 50 per cent longer. But has it? In fact, the 12,000 pre-Christmas patients have been treated and sent happily on their way. The new figure represents the post-Christmas blow-out casualties. But Mr Corbyn obscured this point. And he created the impression that a patient in a nice warm ambulance is in fact languishing in a torture-unit from which few emerge alive. Mrs May warned him against suggesting that the NHS ‘is failing everybody that goes to use it.’

Our system, she said, ‘has been identified as the number one system in the world’.