During the 2019 general election, I produced and displayed leaked documents proving that Boris Johnson’s government was in secret talks to give US healthcare companies “total market access” to the National Health Service (NHS) in post-Brexit trade deals. To me, and to millions of people across the country, this was a potentially election-defining moment. To Boris Johnson and his many allies in our media, however, it was an example of a “Russian disinformation campaign.” Today, US health insurance company Centene Corporation is the largest single provider of NHS primary care in England.

I will never know whether those who discredited my claims — many of whom had obligations of political impartiality — believed their own nonsense. It doesn’t really matter how they choose to comfort themselves. What matters is what those opposed to transformative change were prepared to put on the line: the principle of universal, publicly owned healthcare, free at the point of use. As I saw the exit poll in 2019, I watched the foundations of the NHS disappear before my very eyes.

By December 2019, the NHS was already in a desperate state, reeling from a decade of lethal public sector cuts. Bed occupancy levels were dangerously high. Waiting lists were through the roof. And a fear of an overwhelming winter illness loomed large. After the election, and the Conservative victory, came the reckoning. In January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) identified a dangerous virus of epidemic proportions, telling member states to prepare for a pandemic by testing their populations as soon as symptoms occurred. Boris Johnson’s response was to accuse the WHO of fomenting propaganda and to line up various Tories to call for Britain to withdraw from it altogether.