Health Minister Reveals "I Quit - I Wasn't Sacked"

Jane Kennedy has gone up in my estimation. Finally a Minister who quit for the right reasons. This is from today's Observer...

"Jane Kennedy, a long-standing loyalist who was thought to have been sacked from the government in Friday's dramatic reshuffle, disclosed that she left the Department of Health on grounds of conscience following fears about the impact on children's hospitals of changes to NHS finances. The blow came as Kennedy, who was deputy in the Commons to Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, revealed she had offered her resignation last Thursday. 'For some time I have had disagreements with the way in which certain aspects of health reforms were being dealt with: and it obviously led to some disputes with fellow ministers and some at Number 10,' she told The Observer. 'I had been asked to do a job and bring political judgment to the job. When you try to apply that judgment and you are told you shouldn't be expressing your opinions you realise the government needs to get somebody else.' Kennedy's Liverpool constituency includes Alder Hey hospital, one of several children's hospitals which had warned that the new NHS system of payment by results - where money follows the patient - could damage their ability to provide treatment. She said she had struggled with the 'uncomfortable question' about why payment by results had been applied if hospitals were not ready and had also objected to an appointment to her local health authority. Kennedy's intervention will be seized on by Labour MPs already anxious about the NHS debt crisis and the impact of further reforms."

Good on her. I wonder what Caroline Flint and Rosie Winterton will have to say. Watch now as the Number Ten smear machine swings into action. "Not up to it", "Useless", "Semi detatched". She'll get all these thrown at her by anonymous sources. You just watch.

Click HERE for the full story.