There was a big row about a little hospital yesterday. The shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, complained angrily to the Speaker that the deputy prime minister had just misled the House. It was not true, he said, that Hinchingbrooke — the first (and so far, only) NHS hospital to be privately administered — had been “privatised” under Labour, as Nick Clegg had just claimed. That, said Mr Burnham, had happened under the coalition.
We will return to the question of Hinchingbrooke anon. But on the same morning there was another contretemps when the B ritish Medical Journal revealed that, in the year after April 2013, when the coalition’s reforms kicked in, a third of NHS contracts in England had been awarded to providers in the