Fifteen years ago, Boris Johnson wrote a mostly waffle-filled column for the Daily Telegraph, complaining at length about an argument he’d had at a dinner party. Despite deriding his evening interlocutor at length in the national press, Johnson claimed she was a “friend” and a “classic posh-liberal” (the prime minister was born to upper-middle-class parents and educated at Eton College, rather than being born in a sewer to wolves) who had made the error of praising the National Health Service (NHS) as a program that “unites the nation.” She had seen an NHS dermatologist and had a small growth (that Johnson termed “a Rice Krispie”) removed for free. This fact troubled him: “it is unjust, surely, that the taxpayer is coughing up for Rice Krispie removal, the kind of cosmetic operation that in France or Germany would almost certainly be covered by insurance. What my friend fails to understand is that she has a choice in healthcare, where millions have none; and what the Tories want to do is extend that choice.”

Stating that you wish to privatize the NHS is considered political suicide in the United Kingdom. Conservatives, therefore, argue extensively for back-door privatization and other forms of subterfuge to make the prospect more palatable, because the fact that health care is not fully open to the market rankles them. In the same column, Johnson opined that middle-class people are brainwashed because they “feel all gooey and warm inside because they have participated in the socialising marvel of free healthcare,” letting slip the fact that socialized medicine is still too close to socialism for comfort for these ideological hard-liners. “Labour believe they have a monopoly on virtue and on caring and that they somehow have an ideological freehold upon the NHS,” he complained. A decade and a half later, this remains the complaint Conservatives make whenever the issue of health care is raised in the general election.

During the first television debate, the one Johnson actually bothered to show up for, Jeremy Corbyn waved a 460-page document at the audience: minutes of meetings in which US and UK officials explored a post-Brexit trade deal that would include the NHS. The document Corbyn waved at that moment was almost entirely redacted. The context was that, back in June, Donald Trump had said “everything will be on the table” when asked if the NHS should be in a trade deal, as then-prime-minister Theresa May visibly grimaced next to him in London. Corbyn’s question was therefore astute: Why was the document redacted if the NHS were not for sale to the United States, as Johnson insisted? At Labour rallies and manifesto launches, “NHS: not for sale” has become an omnipresent chant and a slogan throughout the election. Polls show that despite Conservative attempts to frame this as “the Brexit election,” the NHS remains the top political concern for many voters across the country, and any Tory prevarication is likely to harm them electorally.