The issue got so bad that Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers – the membership organisation for all of England’s 217 ambulance, community, hospital and mental health trusts – told Johnson to stop the rhetoric. On 7 June, Hopson said: ‘The real concern is that we don’t have that same degree of trust, because we’re not having the kind of honest and open debates that we need. We seem to be resorting to kind of fairly cheap political rhetoric about stuff being world-class, when it clearly isn’t.’
