The Health Secretary was ostensibly booked for broadcast interviews on Friday morning to talk about the resolution of the GP contract dispute, but of course he ended up answering questions on that meeting in the White House.
And more defining than that GP contract was the departure of Amanda Pritchard as chief executive of NHS England (NHSE). She decided to resign after it became clear that Streeting wanted to make changes to the structure of the health service that were too radical for her. But she was already clearly on her way out: while Streeting had always taken care not to criticise Pritchard in public, some of his parliamentary colleagues had been rather more forthright, with two select committees taking the highly unusual step of saying they were “disappointed” with her lack of “dynamism and drive”.
Pritchard’s replacement Jim Mackey is, according to a source in the Department of Health and Social Care, “totally aligned with Wes on the future of NHS England, on where it is currently getting things wrong and where there is space for big productivity improvements”.
Mackey will be expected to make major cuts to central management, creating a “leaner centre”. Streeting and colleagues have been unimpressed by the number of teams in the NHS and his department which are essentially doing the same job, and want to merge them.
This is not the first time ministers have tried to pull the NHS leadership closer: when he was Conservative health secretary in 2022/23, Steve Barclay demanded that Pritchard and other senior figures work from the department on a regular basis. His intention was the entirely reasonable one of ensuring ministers and health service figures were interacting properly. But the NHS leadership saw it as a charade they just needed to perform regularly, rather than anything meaningful.
How team Starmer celebrated his Trump success - and the one outstanding issue
Read MoreMilburn is rightly praised for the improvements he oversaw to the NHS in the New Labour years, but he was also well known for being part of a control-freak tendency in a government so obsessed with delivery that it created a health service that grew obsessed with targets rather than quality.
Mind you, that’s what New Labour promised too, and this week has probably been this Government’s most New Labour yet.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator
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