Post-Brexit doctors

I’m glad of my filing cabinets, with their endless stacks of cuttings, because it keeps me in touch with the recent past. So much news coverage is urgent, and instant, without any memory of what happened before. I watch Jeremy Hunt on Peston, talking confidently about the twenty thousand new doctors that Johnson has said he’ll supply, but acknowledging that of course in addition to that we’ll need more doctors from abroad. And Peston nods, and goes on to the net point, as if that were simply common sense.

Am I the only person in the country to remember the tory Party conference of 2016, when everyone was Brexit-mad, and excited by the vision of our exciting future, from which all foreigners would be barred? And Hunt was there, with a straight face, confident asserting that sure, we could have an all-Brit NHS. It was nonsense then and it’s nonsense now, but somebody needs to say that he was lying through his teeth.