The Conservatives yesterday invaded a Labour election stronghold when they unveiled a £52m 10-point plan to tackle the "Labour-created" epidemic of MRSA in hospitals - which Michael Howard explained had killed his mother-in-law.
The "matron's budget" would re-empower matrons to close infected wards and operating theatres rather than allow managers to insist they stay open to meet government targets for operations and shorter waiting lists, the Tory leader and his health spokesman, Andrew Lansley, told a campaign press conference.
But they ran into scepticism among reporters that the £8bn which they plan to save through cuts identified in the James Review on waste - and to re-direct more efficiently within the NHS - is unlikely to prove practicable. Tory officials stand by their figures.
Mr Howard unveiled the 10-point plan after a morning visit to a south London hospital. He said the plan would also mean all wards having access to 24-hour cleaning, clean beds and increased hygiene, something nurses complain they do not have the time to do properly.
The Conservatives say they would also scrap Whitehall's hospital targets.
The Conservatives have chosen MRSA as a symbol of where Labour's "bureaucratic" approach to NHS modernisation is going wrong.
"Florence Nightingale once said that the very first requirement in hospital is that it should do the sick no harm. Under Mr Blair our hospitals are failing in that most basic duty. Let's be clear - MRSA is avoidable," Mr Howard said.
But, he added: "For me cleaning up our hospitals isn't politics. It's personal. Three years ago Sandra's mother died from an infection she picked up in hospital. Yes, she was frail. Yes, she was old. But she still enjoyed life, and she need not have died."
The health secretary, John Reid, and his deputy, John Hutton, fiercely rejected charges that they had taken their eye off the MRSA ball, claiming that the superbug infection had taken hold in NHS hospitals in the Tory years and was only now being tackled.
But there was no knock-out when Mr Hutton, Mr Lansley and the Lib Dem health spokesman, Paul Burstow, slugged it out at a mock-Question Time staged by the King's Fund, an independent health thinktank, which saw Mr Lansley do best on MRSA.
In seeking to give matrons the power to close wards, Mr Lansley said, he merely wanted the NHS to follow the recommendations of its own infection control teams. If the teams recommend a ward be closed, after taking account of all the risks of spreading infection, that recommendation should be followed.
Yet, the National Audit Office discovered that 12% of such recommendations were rejected by NHS managers, Mr Lansley later repeated.
Mr Hutton was left to speculate that some of these managers might be doctors deciding the matter on clinical grounds - not the bureaucrats being condemned by Mr Howard.
Mr Lansley claimed to know the names of hospitals where infected wards stayed open after a recommendation to close. "I have not named these hospitals because it would not be fair to turn them into a cause celebre," he said.
Professionals in the audience backed the Lib Dem call for a total smoking ban in public places, rather than Labour's partial ban or the Tory call for voluntary agreements.
