Yahoo Finance Boris Johnson slapped down by the chancellor over his ‘selfish’ £5bn pledge to NHS
Boris Johnson has been knocked back by the chancellor after proposing an extra £100 million a week to help the crisis-hit NHS.
The foreign secretary was expected to discuss the pledge of an extra £5 billion a year of funding for the heath service at Tuesday’s weekly Cabinet meeting.
But news of his plans brought a withering response from chancellor Philip Hammond, as well as anger from Tory MPs and the Opposition.
Mr Hammond made it clear the NHS is not Mr Johnson’s department.
“Mr Johnson is the foreign secretary,” he told reporters as he arrived for a meeting of EU finance ministers in Brussels.
“I gave the health secretary an extra £6 billion at the recent Budget and we will look at departmental allocations again at the spending review when that takes place.”
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Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, accused Mr Johnson of using the NHS to advance his own standing.
He told the BBC: “He’s calling for an extra £5 billion. It’s just Boris Johnson playing games, isn’t it? He’s weaponising the NHS, if you like, for his own internal Tory party games.
“We had a budget last autumn where the Tory government completely failed to give the NHS the funding it needs. Where was he ahead of that budget?
“I’m afraid this is all about Boris Johnson. He’s not really concerned about those patients waiting on trolleys in corridors and those elderly people in the backs of ambulances in the freezing cold waiting to be treated. It’s just about Boris Johnson’s tedious political games.”
Mr Johnson’s latest intervention also provoked an angry response from some Tory MPs, with former minister Anna Soubry warning prime minister Theresa May he would bring her down unless she sacked him.
The row broke out amid signs of growing frustration among some backbenchers at the government’s performance prompting renewed speculation that the foreign secretary was “on manoeuvres”.
Last week he again drew attention to his controversial claim during the EU referendum that leaving the bloc would release an additional £350m a week to spend on the NHS, claiming the figure was actually an underestimate.
It is understood he intends to use Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, when health secretary Jeremy Hunt will update ministers on the NHS winter crisis, to demand around £5 billion a year extra for the health service.
Ms Soubry, a prominent pro-EU campaigner, said the time had come for the prime minister to get rid of him.
He had shown “longstanding incompetence and disloyalty” and unless Mrs May acts now “Boris will bring her down”, she said.
Mrs May’s former chief of staff Nick Timothy also hit out at Mr Johnson.
“Breaching collective responsibility and leaking Cabinet discussions are bad enough but part of political life,” he said.
“But pre-briefing your disagreement with government policy ahead of Cabinet?”
