Pizzas galore!

The NHS was another key issue — and in Warrington, Dixon was finding that Labour’s vaunted improvements had far from solved all their problems.

Dixon is not a well woman. She is clinically obese, diabetic, suffers from chronic renal failure, anaemia, bronchitis and heart failure. Surgery would be risky, so much so that from the start her consultant explained that at best she had a 70% chance of survival. It meant that the hospital needed to have a “high dependency bed” (one level below intensive care) available at the time of her operation. But there were only four in the hospital, which serves 190,000 people, and other cases kept taking priority.

“They kept starving her for an operation to take place the following morning and every night I would be saying ‘Bye, bye’ not knowing whether she would survive,” said her husband Ken. “By December, Margaret had been prepared for the operation five times in eight days and she was in hospital for two weeks.”

On one occasion Dixon was on a trolley and heading to the operating theatre before the surgery was cancelled.

“I got home one evening and I thought, ‘I cannot go on like this, I’ve got to get someone to help us’,” said her husband.

By chance a newsletter from Fiona Bruce, a local solicitor and councillor, had recently dropped through the Dixon’s letterbox. It carried her telephone number. “I picked it up and I wondered whether she would be able to put us on the right track,” said Ken Dixon.

“I rang her up and she listened when I told her about the problems, that we wanted some information about a date for Margaret’s operation.”

Bruce contacted the hospital, but there were more delays. When a new operation was scheduled for January 21 the high dependency unit was again under pressure. It had to cope with a case of renal failure, a patient who had collapsed after an operation and another suffering from a virulent brain virus.

That left one bed, earmarked for Dixon. Then just before she arrived a patient from a traffic accident had to be admitted with a serious head injury. Dixon’s operation was cancelled yet again.

This time her local MEP, Den Dover, wrote to Reid, whom he knew personally. He got no reply.

Exasperated, Bruce, also the Tory candidate for Warrington, contacted Chris Grayling, Tory MP for Epsom & Ewell and a former candidate for the Warrington South constituency. Grayling brought the case to Howard’s attention.

In the new, more aggressive atmosphere inculcated by Crosby, Howard’s aides immediately saw the potential of using the case to articulate their message of Labour’s failures in the NHS.

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