Against all the disenchantment that has piled up against New Labour, credit must now be set for the truly spectacular initiative to revive the NHS.

The party's leaders have committed themselves, and the country, to a publicly-funded health service, matching the ideals of the NHS founders and the wishes of the vast majority of the British people. Vague though they are, the Tory alternatives would reduce the NHS to a rump emergency service in which being an NHS patient would be a kind of stigma. How out of touch the Tory leadership is on this is revealed by polls showing that most Tory voters support the extra one per cent on national insurance, provided it delivers the goods.

The overwhelming public backing for the dramatic tax-funded boost mirrors recognition that the NHS is our shining achievement. Making it once again the best in the world would enable us to hold our heads high.

But why, I wonder, is Health Secretary Alan Milburn taking the edge off a reform in the best tradition of Old Labour by presenting it in the Thatcherite context of "personal choice"? By 2005, he says, patients should be able to go where they please.

Surely, what people want is to know that their local and/or regional hospitals can provide treatment as good and as fast as anywhere? And that GPs are able to prescribe the best drugs available.

Perhaps ominously, Mr Milburn's list of choices for 2005 even includes hospitals overseas. But most people will consider his reforms a failure if it is still necessary to go abroad. Uniform excellence across Britain is what we expect for our extra money.

Just as shocking as the brutal attack on 77-year-old Marie Watson, the Tyneside widow robbed for her fish supper, was her release from Newcastle General Hospital on the evening of the day she was admitted - with broken ribs, a fractured right arm, extensive bruising and, not least, shock.

Suppose the Queen, a year younger than Mrs Watson, had received similar injuries, merely in a fall. What chance she would have been dishcarged from hospital within hours, rather than kept in overnight or perhaps for a couple of days?

No longer considered an IRA assassination target - if she ever was one - former Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam is to lose her round-the-clock protection team.

And Mo isn't best pleased. Describing the withdrawal as "vindictive'', she says: "I do miss the protection officers... You're driven everywhere and they collected the dry cleaning and did the shopping.''

No doubt Mo's celebrated unaffected charm will prevent anyone seeing anything offensive in mentioning such trivialities as dry cleaning and shopping in the context of IRA terror.

'The lads are pleased to have this out of the way early on.'' You bet. A nice little £200,000 bonus for each England player if the team lifts the World Cup. But for captain David Beckham, spokesman for "the lads'' this amounts to just two weeks' pay. What restraint. It would never have done for Arthur Scargill.

Published: 24/04/2002