Dorrell to consider Redwood's health plans

The new ministers: A champion of the Conservative left holds out an olive branch to angry right-wing MPs; THE NHS

Stephen Dorrell, the Secretary of State for Health, is to have talks with John Redwood, the right-wing challenger for the Tory party leadership, about his agenda for the health service.

The move by Mr Dorrell, a champion of the Tory left, will be seen as an attempt to placate right-wing Tory MPs who are angry over the shift in the balance of power to the left in the reshuffle. In his leadership campaign, Mr Redwood advocated keeping open cottage hospitals, curbing spending on NHS bureaucrats and ensuring that mentally ill patients get more hospital care.

In his first interview since taking up his new office, Mr Dorrell told the Independent that the Government changes did not represent a shift to the left, and said there was a consensus in the party in favour of market-based economic solutions.

He did not expect William Waldegrave, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury who is in charge of public expenditure, to be a push-over for higher bids for health spending simply because he was a left-of-centre minister.

He said his meeting with Mr Redwood, the former Secretary of State for Wales, helped to show that there should be no simplistic left-right splits in the Tory party over policy. "There has been a lot of talk about the left-right balance. I just think that is rather wide of the mark, because I think it is applying an idea that works to an older generation, but doesn't work to the generation that makes up the centre of gravity of the Cabinet.

"It's much truer that there's a generational shift with the departure of Douglas [Hurd] and Mr Heseltine becoming deputy Prime Minister. If you look at myself, Mr Mawhinney and Mr Hague, and even Mr Forsyth, who is more clearly identified as of the right, this left-right argument doesn't work.

"I think the same thing is happening in social services as happened five years ago on economics. In the early Eighties, there was a huge left-right divide. It was freely fought over. That has disappeared."

There was "obviously a populist tinge" to Mr Redwood's agenda for ensuring there were adequate hospital beds for care in the community patients, Mr Dorrell said. But he had hit on a subject which interested Mr Dorrell when he was last at the Department of Health as a junior minister from 1990 to 1992.

He has promised to meet Mr Redwood to discuss further his ideas on the health service. "He was a Secretary of State - he understands the background to the health service. I want to see how that argument can be taken forward," Mr Dorrell said.

Firmly backing John Major's decision to fight the leadership contest, Mr Dorrell said the Prime Minister had created a new opportunity. "He reinvented the Government. He has reinvented himself."

Giving the portfolio to Mr Dorrell was seen as a move to defuse the NHS as an issue before the general election. At their meeting in Downing Street, Mr Major told Mr Dorrell he regarded health as being one of the key issues in the run-up to the election and saw it as necessary to ensure that the concerns were answered, and public confidence was maintained in the NHS. Mr Dorrell said he would be "listening more and explaining better" in a clear break with his predecessor, Virginia Bottomley.

Unlike Mrs Bottomley, Mr Dorrell has private health insurance. How could he expect to restore public confidence to the NHS if he did not use it, except for emergencies? "I regard myself as someone deeply committed to the principle of the NHS ... I have private health insurance like millions of others. Like many others, I rely on the NHS if I need emergency care. For expensive, high risk care, all of us rely on the NHS."