After her appearance on BBCtv Question Time on 29th September 2005 Secretary of State for Health Patricia Hewitt was described by one correspondent as “irritating” and “patronising” and “like a school teacher talking to a class of very unintelligent infants.”
She was described by a blogger as a “two-faced turncoat” because she is a former deputy chair of Liberty, the civil rights organisation in the UK, and now proudly sits in a cabinet which slowly erodes civil liberties, using such tactics as the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, ID cards, and detention of “terrorism” suspects without trial. The same blogger remarks that she is masking her natural Australian twang with a received pronunciation worthy of Margaret Thatcher. As long ago as 1980 as a Labour Party delegate she appealed for the preservation of socialist values. Now she sits in a government which is privatising the NHS by stealth, which has not repealed the privatisation legislation which devastated UK railways despite its pledges when in opposition, and is responsible for the biggest explosion in paid (and unelected) consultants to government ever. [She has even declared that the NHS’s projected £623million overspend can be resolved by "turnaround teams" of management consultants (Mulholland, 2005)]Three years later during the contest for the party leadership she wrote each of the candidates (Roy Hattersley and Neil Kinnock) an identical letter of support asking to become their Press Secretary. She subsequently became Kinnock’s Press Secretary and her long and inexorable climb to power began.
Another blogger remarked of Hewitt’s response to criticism thus: she “closes her eyes, puts her fingers in her ears and sings la la la la I can’t hear you”. Her inability to answer straight questions makes her an ideal cabinet minister and one of the adoring brood known as Tony’s cronies.
