Chancellor claimed he 'couldn't finish' This Is Going To Hurt

Adam Kay has hit ack Jeremy Hunt after the new Chancellor said he ‘couldn’t finish’ the comedians’ bestselling NHS memoirs.

This Is Going to Hurt concluded with a stinging criticism of Hunt’s six-year tenure as Health Secretary – which included the 2016 strike by junior doctors.

In a Q&A with Times about his ‘cultural fix’, Hunt said  he found This Is Going to Hurt ‘rather insulting’ – and said the last few pages  were a ‘letter to me as the bogeyman Health Secretary suggesting I should get out on the front line and see what doctors actually do’.

He insisted: ‘I used to do just that pretty much every single week of my time as health secretary, including changing bedpans, washing beds and doing tea rounds in wards. But the fact he thought the opposite showed just how crossed the wires were in the junior doctors dispute’ - before plugging his own book about his time in charge of the NHS.

On Twitter Kay noted that that Hunt was mentioned only in the final 250 words of the book adding: ‘If you didn’t finish the book, did you read it . . . backwards?’

He added: ‘If you changed bedpans every week for six years, how did you misread the situation so worryingly badly?’

Published: 20 Oct 2022