 Jeremy Hunt was health secretary during the height of austerity. He oversaw the biggest sustained squeeze in the NHS budget for over half a century. He also went to war with junior doctors. But as chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, now a conservative backbencher, not a conservative cabinet minister, coronavirus has allowed him the opportunity to have a bit of a rebrand. He can often be found asking pertinent questions in those select committees, or giving what seemed like on the surface fairly decent interviews in the mainstream press to give him credit. He was one of the people I remember back in March, who was saying it seems ridiculous that we're still allowing visitors into care homes. There was a moment where I was like, God, do I want him to be health secretary again? Obviously, it was a strange, strange, strange, strange moment in my life this year. He continued this week to say decent things on television. This is him speaking on Channel 4 News on Tuesday. Well, we are unique because we are introducing test and trace at a stage when community transmissions of the virus are still running at, you know, over 3,000 a day. So that's why it's going to be trickier to get it to work. But I do think it's the right approach. I just think we should go further. Can you say it's going to be trickier? Is it actually impossible when transmission is running at such a high level? I mean, you were quite kind describing as you as unique. That's our unique problem, isn't it? It is. And that's why I think we have to be imaginative with doing things that they haven't had to do in Taiwan and Singapore and countries like that, which is why I think we should have mass testing of NHS and care staff, for example, so that every week or every fortnight, everyone in the NHS automatically has a test. Everyone in care homes automatically has a test because we know that up to 20% of the people with coronavirus in hospitals actually caught it in that hospital. That was a very good point that Jeremy Hunt there made on Channel 4 News. What he's saying is that in countries such as South Korea or Taiwan, when they've successfully suppressed the virus, you don't need to do mass testing that much because, you know, if someone gets symptoms and gets found to be positive for coronavirus, then you'll have an app, you can contact loads of people. You only really need to get tested if you've been, you know, if you've been in contact with someone with coronavirus. That doesn't really work in a country like Britain because so many people have coronavirus that in general, in certain sectors of the economy, we should just do mass testing. It doesn't matter if you're a care home worker or a doctor, if you haven't been called by the test and trace system. You're in such a sensitive position in the social care sector, in the economy that you should get tested all the time. And we know that so many people during this crisis have caught coronavirus in hospital or in care homes, precisely those places which should be most secure from it. He there is suggesting, let's do mass testing of people who work in hospitals and care homes, very sensible, weekly testing. There is a problem though. Before you buy into this narrative that Jeremy Hunt is a changed man, now he doesn't just care about his own career and effectively cutting the NHS while sort of justifying it to the public, going to war with junior doctors. He is not a changed man, okay? And the evidence for this is that what he was arguing for there, mass weekly testing, that was voted for in Parliament last week. So the Labour Party put forward an opposition day motion, which was to say, look, exactly as I've just been explaining, as Jeremy Hunt's just been explaining, if we want to get our hospitals and our social care sector back up and running and running effectively in a non-dangerous way, we need weekly tests. How did Jeremy Hunt vote? Let's take a look. You'd have thought this guy, he's so positive about this idea. You'd have thought he'd voted for it. Nope, he voted with the government. So Jeremy Hunt one day on the television saying, look, we need to do weekly tests. He has an opportunity to put his money where his mouth is and vote for it. He votes against. How difficult is it to vote for something you believe? He's not even in the cabinet. It's not like he would have had to resign if he'd voted for this obviously good motion, which he evidently agrees with. So why vote against it? Why undermine your credibility like that? Dali, what do you make of this story? I'm not going to claim to understand what goes through Jeremy Hunt's brain. What I do think is that, as you said, when people have vested systemic interests in particular models, for example, we know that Jeremy Hunt was absolutely desperate to sell off parts of the NHS when he was Secretary of Health. We know that he has familial and professional connections to companies that want to privatize the NHS or privatize parts of the NHS. And that doesn't change overnight. What frustrates me is that you say that the vote happened before this interview, right? So my question is, why does Kathy Newman let him get away with saying something that is totally inconsistent? He knows he has to say it because it's basically the only common sense response that can possibly fly at this point in time. But she lets him get away with basically not practicing what he preaches. And I think this is, again, a kind of ongoing issue with our journalists where I'm not seeing them holding people, holding government account to account rapidly and robustly enough at a time when this kind of double-speaker is literally costing so many lives. I mean, and politicians just don't... I mean, it's sort of just... It's an obvious point that sort of just comes to me. Politicians are never held to account, are they? I mean, you can literally... Tony Blair can still appear on the television as a respectable figure who can comment on foreign policy after entering the most catastrophic... Well, catastrophic foreign policy event of this century. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Theresa May, the other day, the Labour Party was sharing a clip of her sort of criticizing the government. I thought, fine, exploit internal divisions within the Conservative Party. But the fact that Theresa May... I can't remember a single time since she resigned as Prime Minister that she was asked about the Windrush scandal. As a politician, what consequences are there for causing immense pain? One of the key reasons why our NHS was so underprepared for coronavirus, why our social care sector was so underprepared for coronavirus is because of a decade of squeezed budgets which were implemented by this man, Jeremy Hunt. And now he is. And as I'll admit, he asked some decent questions. But really, could we not find someone to ask decent questions who wasn't responsible for precisely the catastrophe that we're in? I mean, it's infuriated. I mean, it is incredibly infuriating. And I think it comes down to the fact that behind the scenes, a lot of these prime-time journalists and a lot of politicians are mates. There's this sense that in order to gain access, in order to gain exclusives, in order to be the journalist who can nab the leak or have, you know, information leak to them, that you have to become sort of friendly and go to the same cocktail parties and do the same kind of like, come from the same background and have gone to the same schools. And that creates inevitably forms of kinship and forms of, and lack of accountability and a very unhealthy media culture. And when you talk about, you know, the fact that we're in this problem because of 10 years of austerity, let's not forget that the economic fallacy that the national economy is run like a personal household budget that, you know, labor overspent. And that's what caused the economic recession, which was a global economic recession. So how Gordon Brown was responsible for that, I think that's vastly overestimating the level of influence Gordon Brown has had over anything. That, you know, he, that labor caused the recession by overspending. And so now we all need to tighten our belts, which means that nurses have to have a pay freeze for the next 10 years. That was an economic fallacy. That was something that was demonstrably untrue and any economist worth their salt can tell you that. But the government was allowed to have that narrative run throughout every major newspaper and taken for granted as making sense, even though it could be verified as not true. And I think it comes down to this, this very cushy relationship that exists between people who are powerful in the media and people who are powerful politically. It creates an unhealthy media culture and it creates an unhealthy political culture as well.