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Chris Philp |
Philp hopes Labour’s poor health will put pay to Glenda
Conservative hopeful for Hampstead and Kilburn launches attack at conference. Richard Osley reports from Manchester
CONSERVATIVE Parliamentary candidate Chris Philp launched an attack on Labour’s health record as he tried to use the party’s annual conference to gain ground in the race to unseat Labour MP Glenda Jackson.
Once in the spotlight on the main conference stage here in Manchester on Monday, he grabbed his chance to repeat his concerns about plans to move the emergency stroke unit away from the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.
Mr Philp, who has been a councillor in Gospel Oak for the past three-and-a-half years, also name-checked a New Journal investigation into the scarcity of NHS dentists in Camden.
Rapturous applause from delegates greeted his claim that Labour had spent lots of money on the health service but wasted the cash on red tape and bureaucracy.
While the other parties in the borough used the conference season to argue about the future of its council homes – perhaps the most divisive issue affecting Camden – Mr Philp steered the debate towards health, where he hopes to score points over Ms Jackson.
At one point on Monday he did make contact with shadow housing minister Grant Shapps but, scurrying between fringe meetings, Mr Shapps did not stop to talk about the homes crisis which has been on the minds of Labour and Lib Dems in recent weeks.
Mr Philp has been accused of scare-mongering over the stroke unit at the Royal Free, which is being moved to a new specialist centre at University College London where health chiefs insist patients will be seen faster.
But – given the chance by shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley, who he has worked closely with in the past – Mr Philp did not hesitate to raise the issue again.
He told the conference: “When it comes to the NHS, Labour have been big spenders, but they have not been wise spenders. Much of the money wasted has been wasted on bureaucracy and red tape which has prevented doctors and nurses doing their jobs, too busy chasing targets instead of focusing on patient care. That’s why we have more managers and administrators than ever, yet the emergency stroke unit in my constituency is threatened with closure.”
Rivals say Mr Philp has made little ground to the west of the new constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn, where a three-way battle has emerged between himself, Ms Jackson and Ed Fordham, the Liberal Democrat candidate, rated as a hot chance in a key seat by his party nationally.
And opponents are happy to point out that his party’s failure to win critical council by-elections, such as in Hampstead Town and Belsize, does not bode well for his campaign.
For his part, Mr Philp is firmly hitching himself to the David Cameron bandwagon as it heads for Number 10. “If we don’t win in Hampstead and Kilburn, then we won’t form the next government,” he was telling delegates in Manchester.
Back on stage – with his face beamed across screens throughout the conference complex – Mr Philp added: “It’s the job of the next Conservative government, not only to spend more money on the health service and spend it wisely, but to get more to the front line, to let doctors and nurses to take control of decisions and to trust patients to make choices over the way their care is organised.”
He added: “This is an approach that commands public support. Nowhere is a new approach needed more than in dentistry where literally millions of people are not covered by an NHS dentist. Labour’s changes put through two or three years ago have been a complete disaster. In Camden, the borough which I come from, in the two years after these changes, the local newspaper, the Camden New Journal, discovered that 10,000 fewer people had been seen by a dentist, which is truly shocking. The only thing the government has delivered in dentistry is fixed Gordon Brown’s teeth and whitened them, which is not much of an achievement.”
The conference season has served to open up the final stretch of the race for Hampstead and Kilburn, an intriguing chase in which Ms Jackson has defied many of her doubters by staying in the running.
She has held the seat since 1992 but boundary changes and the swing away from Labour in the last council elections has turned her Commons seat into one that all eyes will be watching come election night. As one source said: “It could be a bit of a Portillo moment. In 1997, when a big name like him was beaten, the TV behaved as if the game was up. It would be the same if Glenda loses after more than 17 years in the seat.”
Our friends in the North Camden’s Tories happy at the Manchester love-in
• NIC Careem? At the Conservative Party conference? Shurely shome mishtake... No, the former Labour council candidate, the man who credits himself with encouraging more minority ethnic members to join Camden's Labour Party in the 1990s, has jumped ship. In fact, the chatterbox from Kentish Town was the life and soul at a drink-up with the Tories in the Midland Hotel bar on Monday. He says a persuasive chat from David Cameron himself led him to grab a blue rosette.
• GOOD to see Richard Merrin still hanging out with his Camden friends in the Conservative Party, the PR whizz is somewhere behind Chris Philp’s head in our main picture. With the unfortunate record of losing more council elections in Camden than anyone can remember, he was disappointed again when George Lee pipped him to the candidacy to stand against Frank Dobson. Now, fighting the hard-to-win Hornsey and Wood Green seat, you can't knock Ricardo's perseverance.
• BACK to Nic Careem and the Midland Hotel bar. He turned the tables on BBC journalist Andrew Marr when he grabbed him and asked him: “So Andrew, how much are you worth?” Marr – who caused a stir by first asking Gordon Brown whether he got through the week with painkillers and then questioning David Cameron about his personal wealth – looked awkward. Marr didn't say how much he had in the bank, but did mutter that “maybe I had been a little harder than I first realised” on the Prime Minister.
• Speaking of Nic's switching sides, he must have had a lot to talk about at the bar with Nigel Rumble, the former Lib Dem from Belsize who also recently swept over to the blue side. With heady talk of defections in the air, even Chris Philp himself admitted he had once voted Lib Dem for tactical reasons in an election. He was never a member, he was keen to point out.
• WHISPERS in Manchester have it that Tony Travers, the well known professor from LSE, has been praising the New Journal. Some delegates reckon that he had personally recommended they kept an eye on our lengthy letters page. He might not read this bit then, but just in case you do, cheers Tony!
Conference sketch
THEY were biting their bottom lips, desperate not to let slip any complacency. It's a self-gagging mechanism.
These are the Tories, excited but trying not to appear as if they are.
In Manchester, the approach is meant to be one of serious business. A hard-edged urban centre, the venue makes the trips to Brighton and Bournemouth taken by the Labour and Lib Dems for their conferences look like jolly holidays. Conservatives would like you to interpret it as: let them paddle in the sea, while we work out what the next government will look like.
Yet desperate to avoid a polling backlash so close to the big day, the emphasis is on humility.
It's hard for some of these confident guys. Sentences up here still begin with “the first thing we will do is...”.
But finishing that sentence is not so easy. Even a Conservative supporter sat next to me at a fringe meeting with shadow education minister Michael Gove seemed a little unclear about what new policies are in store.
So nervous of blowing it, they are coy about saying exactly what they stand for. Better to let the Labour leadership dig itself into oblivion than build up their own vision.
That won’t work in Camden, where there is no victory by default.
How bittersweet would it be for our Tories if they won a general election but lost their stake in Camden’s politics on the same day next May. |
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