Cameron vows to keep free health service in U-turn on Tory policy

David Cameron invoked the long hours he has spent at the hospital bedside of his severely disabled son, Ivan, as proof that the Tory party he leads will improve the NHS, rather than scrap it.

His speech yesterday included a confession that a proposal in the Conservatives' election manifesto last year, which Mr Cameron helped to write, was wrong, philosophically and in practice.

The proposed "patient's passport" - which would have allowed patients to claim money from the NHS towards the cost of private operations - has been dropped as Conservative policy, Mr Cameron confirmed.

The choice of subject for his first big policy speech of the year is a sign of Mr Cameron's determination to position his party in the political centre ground - although Labour seized on his remarks as proof the right has lost the argument over health care.

Mr Cameron told the King's Fund, a London-based health charity: "I have a child who's not too well, so I've seen a lot of the NHS from the inside. In fact, in the last three years, I've probably spent more time in NHS hospitals than any other politician apart from the few doctors that there are in the House of Commons. I've spent the night in A&E departments and slept at my son's bedside."

He was photographed with the ambulance drivers who take the boy to school each day, and praised them by saying: "They're not just drivers, they're carers, they're helpers, they're friends."

It was even rumoured that the Tory leader planned to include three-year-old Ivan in the photocall, but Conservative Central Office insisted: "It was never part of the plan."

Mr Cameron promised that he would "never" advocate scrapping a free national health service, funded by the taxpayer, in favour of a US-style system of medical insurance.

"The right has spent too much time trying to get people out of the NHS and into the private sector," he said. "Margaret Thatcher's support for giving tax relief on private medical insurance, and our patients' passport policy were examples. But I think both these approaches are flawed - for a practical reason and a philosophical reason.

"The practical reason is that neither of them is about improving the NHS. The philosophical reason is that they misunderstand the basic values of the NHS.

"The NHS should be neither a state monopoly, nor is it something charitable or demeaning - so we should not use taxpayers' money to encourage the better-off to opt out."

Mr Cameron also took a swipe at W H Smith and other newsagents for promoting the sale of chocolate when almost a third of children aged between two and 10 are overweight.

"Try and buy a newspaper at the train station and, as you queue to pay, you're surrounded, you are inundated, by cut-price offers for giant chocolate bars. The check-out staff have all been trained to push this at you, whatever the customer is actually trying to buy. Why?

"As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does W H Smith promote half-price chocolate oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?

"You cannot regulate business in this regard, but you can point the finger, ask awkward questions and put some pressure on. I believe politicians and others should do that."

The Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, said later that abandoning the patients' passport policy demonstrated that the Conservatives are in "headlong retreat". She also urged Mr Cameron to admit that higher taxes are needed to pay for real improvements in the NHS. "David Cameron is having to abandon policies he himself wrote only eight months ago because Labour is winning the argument," she said.

"The real test of Cameron's credibility on the NHS is whether he will state his unequivocal support for Labour's plans for continued investment, as well as reform," she added.