PATRICIA HEWITT’S eyes are huge and bloodshot, she has a cold, and it has been, she admits, a dreadful week for the Government.
One colleague was revealed to have had an affair with a junior member of staff, another admitted that he had presided over the release of 1,023 foreign prisoners without considering their deportation. The Health Secretary was heckled by members of the Royal College of Nursing for telling them a few not very controversial things that they would rather not have heard. Yet it was the job of Ms Hewitt and not Charles Clarke that was whispered to be under threat. Did she think that there might be an element of sexism at work here? She agreed readily. “We all get attacked” (a common ministerial form of self-medication this week), “and I think you’re absolutely right that women ministers, we get attacked in a very sexist way. There is a set of stereotypes that get applied to women ministers that are about being patronising or nannies.”
We do know. And we also know that some get accused of being inhuman a bit more than others do . . . “Oh, the clone!” she laughed, slightly nervously, and excavated history for her response. “Well, look, I worked for Neil Kinnock when we were in opposition and things were really tough. Neil was being abused in the press, it was just disgusting.”
She is still cross about it after all these years. “What Neil got was a real class snobbery, which John Prescott is also the victim of, and I’m afraid I just think is part of British culture, and particularly English. There is a class snobbery and with Neil it was because he’d been to Cardiff University and he had a Welsh accent and with John Prescott, you know, working-class lad who went to Ruskin and doesn’t speak in complete sentences.”
Talking of which, surely it has been the other end of Mr Prescott that has been the trouble this week. What is her opinion of a chap in his position carrying on with his secretary? “I think that is a private matter and I’m not going to comment on it.” She has no view, not even as a committed feminist? “I was the first women’s rights officer of Liberty. I campaigned for the Sex Discrimination Act, but no, I’m not commenting. He has had a rotten week.”
So back to talking in complete sentences. Everybody mentions it, that precise, infuriating, nursery school diction used by Ms Hewitt. That “Sit down, George, while I explain in slow, slow, Janet and John sentences, exactly why it is you have been such a naughty boy” manner of address. Why on earth does she do it? It turns out that as a girl in Australia she was taught to do it. “My parents, when I was a kid, made sure I did what was called in those days ‘speech and drama’, and part of that was about learning to speak in complete sentences and all the rest of it.” It was also, in those days, called elocution. Once a passport to social acceptance, it is now a one-way ticket to ridicule. “Well there you are,” Ms Hewitt reflected. “You get attacked if you don’t speak in complete sentences and you get attacked if you do.”
Did it get to her? “Of course I listen to criticism,” she replied. “And sometimes when people have been really personally abusive I think,” here she shuddered and then exhaled, like a bishop’s wife taking off shoes that have really begun to pinch, “Oooh, that’s really horrible. But you know if people say ‘she drones’ and ‘she speaks too slowly’, of course I try and change that.”
On Wednesday, when she was being shouted down, was that an “Ooooh” moment? First comes the rationalising: “People who fear for their jobs are entitled to be angry and upset and they are entitled to make their point in the way that they choose to make it.” Which, of course, is nonsense, and Ms Hewitt quickly established that there were much better choices for the RCN.
Earlier in the week, for example, she had been mildly heckled at the Unison conference: “There are Unison members who are also scared for their jobs and they tend to include our lowest-paid staff. But the woman chairing the Unison conference was absolutely clear and strong. She said, ‘In Unison if we disagree with somebody we say so but we say it politely. We don’t scream and yell at our ministers.’ And when a few of the delegates tried to boo and heckle she just repeated it. She was very solid about it. And for whatever reason, the RCN chairman didn’t do that.”
Unions, she reminded us, always risk becoming a vested interest. “And what I was thinking actually as I listened to the RCN delegates was, what is it they are actually asking for? What they are asking for is no redundancies, ever, of any NHS staff member, particularly a nurse. They are saying, no new hospital if it’s going to be built using PFI. They are saying, no independent-sector treatment centres, and presumably closing all the ones we’ve already got. Bail out the over-spenders. Now, that sounds to me like a set of non-negotiable demands.” So they can (she doesn’t quite say) all go to hell.
The iron entered her soul, as she reminded us again and again, when she, Charles Clarke and John Reid worked for the seemingly perpetual Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock. With the miners’ strike and Militant, it was a tough time. “The bottom line is, I’m 57, I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve been through a lot. I’ve learnt a lot of lessons. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and I’ve learnt the lessons from them and at the end of the day I think if I do what we believe to be right, if you’re honest with people and you’re direct and you tell the truth as you see it about the good stuff and the bad, well, at the end of the day people judge you on that.”
She reserved her delight for a letter in The Times from the chairman of the British Medical Association. “Here we are! Improving efficiency! [quoting from the letter] ‘The NHS will need to respond to the tide of rising expectations and need by improving efficiency and responsiveness’!” Her eyes were lit with excitement.
It may not be what would light your fire. Yet Patricia Hewitt is not a machine politician. She is good company and she does, as she claims, seem to listen. But the problem is that you don’t hear her listen on radio or on TV. You hear that painful, archaic, decades-old Australian speech and drama course coming between the Health Secretary and her ability to sell policies to the nation. Some elocution teacher in Canberra has a lot to answer for.
HEWITT CV
BORN
December 2, 1948, Canberra, Australia
EDUCATION
Church of England grammar school, Canberra Australian National University Newnham College, Cambridge
CAREER
Liberty and Age Concern (1971-74) Press officer for Neil Kinnock (1983-87) Policy co-ordinator to Neil Kinnock MP (1987-89) Deputy director, IPPR (1989-94) Director of research, Andersen Consulting (1994-97) Vice-chairman, British Council (1997-98)
POLITICAL CAREER
MP for Leicester West since 1997 Economic secretary to the Treasury (1998-99) Minister for small business and e-commerce (1999-2001) Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and Minister for Women (2001-05) Secretary of State for Health 2005-
RECREATIONS
Gardening, music, theatre, cooking
