Photo: Liam McBurney/PA
Good morning. Rishi Sunak is in Belfast today, meeting political leaders including the new Prime Minister, Michelle O’Neill, and Deputy Prime Minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, and the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister), Leo Varadkar. This is a (rare) good news story because, with its two revisions to the Northern Ireland Protocol (the Windsor Framework announced last February, and the Safeguarding the Union adjustments and improvements to the Framework last week), and the DUP finally its two- After a year’s boycott of Stormont, Northern Ireland can now move forward with a devolved government and the disruption of Brexit, if not over for good, is at least subsiding.
But Sunak will know that Prime Ministers never get any credit from British voters for their achievements in Belfast, so there’s an equally important story in an interview he gave to Piers Morgan on TalkTV, which airs tonight. Sunak admitted he has failed on his NHS waiting list target.
It is of course not news that he failed. Last January as one of his five promises, Sunak said: “NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly.” He did not say when, but waiting lists have risen and that is why every assessment over the past month of how Sunak delivered on his promises, such as the Guardian’s, has labeled it a failure.
But getting a frontline politician like Sunak to admit failure on this scale is another matter, and Morgan made headlines by forcing the Prime Minister into an awkward moment of candor. Last month, in interviews about the commitments, Zonak claimed he was “making progress.” But when Morgan asked him about waiting lists, Zonak said almost the opposite: “We haven’t made enough progress.”
The exchange continued:
Morgan: “You didn’t keep that promise?”
Zonak: “Yes we have.”
Morgan: “Because you said NHS waiting lists will fall. In fact, they are now declining slightly. But the waiting list is still almost half a million more than at the beginning of last year. Do you accept that?”
Zonak: “Yes. And we all know the reasons for that and what I would say to people is: look, we have invested record amounts of money in the NHS, more doctors, more nurses, more scanners. All these things mean that the NHS today is doing more than ever before. But industrial action has had an impact.”
Here is the agenda for the day.
9:30 am: Rishi Sunak will meet Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little-Pengelly, the new First Minister and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, in Stormont. He also meets Leo Varadkar, his Irish counterpart.
Morning: Sunak is expected to hold a press conference.
2:30 PM: Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, answers questions in the House of Commons.
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