It did not work out: the location of the second university itself became a community football.The later part of Bob Kidd’s official career was overshadowed by Ulster’s “Troubles”. In 1969 he became Second Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, and after 1972, when Sir David Holden was committed to the Northern Ireland Office and the new mechanisms of Direct Rule, Kidd became de facto Permanent Secretary. But that is politics.There will, I suggest, be three main areas of good news – good in the sense that the concerns of recent months will appear to be muted There will be three bits of bad news. And there will be an implicit wider message for all of us.The first and most obvious chunk of good news will be growth.

Those of us who doubted that the economy would grow by as much as 2 per cent last year have been wrong. The budget will be significant, too, because at last there is some credible opposition and the emergence of a bit of product differentiation between the parties. It is a week to the budget, presumably the last significant one before the election. Assuming that comes in the summer of next year, we will be so close next March that there will only be room then for a bit of pre-election sweetening. The Tories will fight the next election asking, “You paid the extra taxes, where are the extra nurses?” I will happily point them in the direction of the Royal London – but how many other people have heard enough about their hospital’s extra nurses to do the same? j.hari independent.co.uk
More from Johann Hari. The biggest increased investment in the NHS in a generation is at risk of going unappreciated. Politicians watch the signals from public opinion carefully: if investing in hospitals yields no political gain, they will stop bothering, and a slow privatisation of public healthcare will become inevitable.

But part of the blame also lies with a wildly negative media that dismisses all improvements in the NHS as either spin or too boring to print.If the perception gap is not closed soon, the results will be disastrous. Part of the responsibility for this lies with the Government itself. They chose to freeze funding from 1997 to 1999, so for several years Labour really didn’t make any difference At an early stage, people saw no change. Maybe you’re right, but it doesn’t feel right.”Britain is full of people who think their own hospital or GP’s surgery is a lucky exception, a rare slice of excellence, while the bigger picture is disastrous. What I discovered in the Royal London was slow, steady improvement. The opinion polls suggest a sizeable majority of those who use the NHS get the same impression of their own little part of it.