Labour may sue Hunt over ‘cover-up’ tweet
pharmafile | October 7, 2013 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | Hunt, Labour, NHS, Twitter, cover up
The Labour Party is considering suing the health secretary Jeremy Hunt over an alleged libellous Twitter post made on the mini blogging site last week.
Hunt posted the tweet to Andy Burnham, the former Labour health secretary, deriding: “@andyburnhammp’s attempts to cover-up failing hospitals”, and went on to say that the coalition government would legislate “to make sure this [a cover up] can never happen again”.
This comes after Burnham, who is now shadow health secretary, has been under increasing pressure from the Conservatives over how he dealt with evidence of poor care coming from NHS hospitals when he was health secretary between June 2009 and May 2010.
But last week the government was given more ammunition against Burnham after the publication of an email exchange between staff at a health quango in 2010, which suggested his department blocked a press release about failings at Basildon and Thurrock hospital in Essex.
The release of these emails in turn prompted Hunt’s tweet about the alleged cover up. But a Labour party spokesman told the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper: “Instead of focussing on what he should be doing and tackling the A&E crisis, Jeremy Hunt has spent all year orchestrating a smear campaign against Andy Burnham. On Friday, he went a step too far. This is behaviour unbecoming of a secretary of state.
“Andy Burnham is not prepared to accept these unfounded slurs on his character and the last government. He has therefore instructed lawyers to act on his behalf.”
Burnham initially responded by writing to Hunt asking for an apology and a retraction, but when Hunt refused Burnham began consulting lawyers.
Sources close to Burnham say he feels Hunt’s intervention on the social networking site ‘crossed a line’, according to the Sunday Times, and that he regards it as ‘unprecedented’ for a secretary of state to impugn the integrity of a predecessor in such a manner. He instructed Labour’s lawyers, Steel & Shamash, to write to Hunt over the weekend.
But Hunt has made it clear he will not remove the tweet, insisting there is ‘compelling evidence of a cover-up’.
“The NHS needs to learn from past problems and transform its culture through openness and transparency,” he said. “The tragedy here is that Labour refuse to acknowledge what went wrong on their watch, and are still trying to defend the indefensible.”
Ben Adams
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