Junior doctors are awol because they’re on strike – what’s the government’s excuse?

The first thing Rishi Sunak did on becoming prime minister was stand outside Downing Street and promise a return to what he called “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”.

To take those in no particular order: one of the very next things he did was receive his second fixed penalty notice of the year, this time for filming an advert in the back of his car while not wearing his seatbelt, which is not necessarily the absolute height of professionalism.

On the integrity front, he published his long-awaited tax return, the one with the millions of pounds worth of dividend payments, right in the middle of Boris Johnson’s box-office appearance in front of the privileges committee, in the clear and obvious hope that it would be ignored, which it kind of was.

So that leaves accountability. He had been in the job for just a few days when the government announced that a minister would no longer be made available for interview every morning. That was a convention to which even Boris Johnson adhered, albeit at the same time as boycotting outlets such as Good Morning Britain for the crime of not being sycophantic enough toward him.

In the Sunak era, whenever the government has difficult questions to answer, it decides it would rather not bother.

There’s a junior doctors’ strike on this week, lasting four days. It has been described as possibly the most severe strike action in the history of the NHS, with a real impact on the treatment people can expect to receive if they have the misfortune to have to visit a hospital.

And they might very well have to visit a hospital, as there are floods and gale-force winds forecast for half the country, for which formal warnings have been issued by the Met Office.

So what’s the government advice, then? What should you do? If a tree falls on your head but there’s no one in the hospital to treat you, are you even injured?

Perhaps the government is hoping that having presided over the creation of a country that feels like a metaphysical thought experiment, less actual reality and more Oxbridge interview question, that it might somehow get away with it, on the basis of everything being so bad people have stopped believing it’s even real.

What are we meant to do exactly? Well there’s no point turning on the TV or the radio, because a return to professional and accountable government doesn’t extend to the health secretary or any of his underlings bothering the breakfast TV and radio studios to offer advice on how to get through this most recent round of rolling permacrisis.

By 3pm on Tuesday, the health secretary, a man called Steve Barclay, had offered some pointless words for use on the early evening news bulletins. “My door is open,” he said. “We are willing to engage with junior doctors.” But only once they’ve accepted that their requests for a pay rise are “not reasonable”.

Maybe 35 per cent is not reasonable, maybe it’s never going to happen, but Barclay and Co should know by now that the reason this strike action is going on for so long, and has had varying degrees of success, is because for once the public, generally speaking, are on the strikers’ side. They know that junior doctors need a pay rise, because they need one too.

They can, by and large, probably accept that the NHS has gone awol and that they’ll have to make do. That the government has done so too they are less likely to forgive.