Politics | 20 June 2009

George Osborne was in bed when he heard Andrew Lansley on breakfast radio last week discussing health spending. It was an unremarkable story about Labour’s budgets, with no hint of the political bombshell about to drop. The shadow health secretary was saying that the Tories would increase health spending — which is, of course, official party policy. But to pay for it, Mr Lansley announced matter-of-factly that all other departments under a Tory government would have to suffer a budget cut of about 10 per cent.

Suffice to say that Mr Osborne did not get much more sleep after that. Mr Lansley had not quoted an official party figure, but used a calculation first carried out by The Spectator to show what would happen if David Cameron were so unwise as to leave the bloated NHS budget intact. The Institute for Fiscal Studies had worked out that Alistair Darling’s Budget involves 7 per cent cuts over the three years to April 2014.