The full story of Cameron's visit to NHS Hospital, with new confirmation from a visitor, patient & journalist.
As many of you reading this will know, I published various details of the Prime Minister's Wednesday visit to the Newcastle Royal Victoria Infirmary on this site over the last couple of days. What I now intend to do is talk you through a chronology of what happened that day. (all links appear in red writing)
News of the Prime Minister's Wednesday visit emerged the night before, when Conservative Central Office announced that the PM would be making a high profile visit to a hospital in the NE to a) bolster support for his NHS reforms & b) raise the importance of the damage binge drinking is doing. It was heavily trailed by the Murdoch press (see here for example). Two of my sources, privately, tell me that the staff were not informed of the PM's intended visit. Publicly, a governor of a Foundation Trust @RichardBlogger confirmed that this has happened before, where visits by the PM to his hospital were not even confirmed or cleared with the Board of Governors. In addition, @Adrian_Pearson, who is a chief correspondent at several North East newspapers, confirmed through a series of tweets in advance of the PM's visit that it was all very top secret because the last time the PM had visited there were protests (I do not recall those protests being reported do you?)....read much much more
http://eoin-clarke.blogspot.com/2012/02/full-story-of-camerons-visit-to-nhs.html
