The Sketch: Tories have tin ear but Fox is smarter

Ann Winterton was in the House. She'd just been sacked for making a racist joke at a rugby club dinner. Perhaps she appeared to show us she was bloody but unbowed. I can imagine at least one of the adjectives being applied to her by Tory high command over the weekend.

Her question featured the word "penny". The punchline of her after-dinner joke consisted of Pakistanis being "10 a penny". The word penny has a frisson at this time and place in the mouth of Ann Winterton, even when it's a penny on income tax.

She has a tin ear. Her party has a tin ear. She was doing perfectly well in the party and, truth to tell, perfectly well on the front bench. But she Just Doesn't Get It. She's a representative Tory.

It was Health questions. The attractive Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, declared that the Tory health strategy came in four stages.

The first is to say that the NHS isn't working. The second is to say that it's never worked, the third is to say it never can work, and the fourth is to get more and more people to pay for their own healthcare.

That strikes me as an excellent strategy, and if the Tories aren't following it I'd like to know why not.

Liam Fox implemented parts one and three in his questions.

He revealed that a trust had instructed a hospital to cancel operations the day before operations were due, to minimise same-day cancellation figures. He thought that typical of the Government's statistical harlotry.

Labour's Yvette Cooper said this was "nonsense". She had nothing to add, and that took another five minutes to get through.

Dr Fox then made the best point of the day. He identified the reason why the extra £300m given to local authorities will not solve hospital bed-blocking (the single largest reason why operations are cancelled). The perverse incentive in the Govern- ment's new system means that the best way a GP can get an old person into a care home will be by putting them into hospital first. That'll help, won't it?

Dr Fox was on good form. He's picked up something of Tony Blair's new character, the one I laboriously describe as "public school scrum half in a public bar whose sister's been insulted". It's very direct, quite earthy, not rude, but urgently communicative with the polite but distinct offer of proportionate violence if things don't go the right way.

Dr Fox's deputy, Tim Loughton, also did well, a nice young wing forward, quite burly considering his weight. He asked about the story published at the weekend revealing the existence of secret waiting lists with 250,000 people on them. In view of the National Audit Office exposé of the Government's brothel-keeping – or statistical analysis as it was put – why would anyone believe what they had to say?

John Hutton said calmly: "No, the figures are reliable". He also said it was to do an injustice to the NHS to suggest anything else. Mr Hutton is a reasonable sort of fellow, so his dictum was shocking. Calmly, he continued: "It's important we reduce access to diagnostic care."

It was a slip that Dr Freud would have been pleased with.

Simoncarr75@hotmail.com