When the Spectator hosted a debate on Britain’s cancer crisis at the last Conservative party conference, the sponsor gave Editor Fraser Nelson a shocking ultimatum: drop Professor Karol Sikora or lose £25,000 in sponsorship. Fraser tells the story in the Spectator.
We want to discuss the questions that matter. A classic example was a debate in the last Tory conference: ‘How to fix Britain’s cancer crisis?’ The lineup was Elliot Colburn MP, vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer, Dr. Katharine Halliday, president of the Royal College of Radiologists, Dr. Owen Jackson from Cancer Research U.K. and Prof Karol Sikora, perhaps Britain’s best-known oncologist. It was also sponsored.
But the sponsor had a condition: no Sikora. Why? We tried to be open-minded and work out the sponsor’s concerns. Fair enough if we had found a loudmouth doctor with no cancer experience, or a bad communicator. But Sikora’s credentials are impeccable. He’s eloquent, has 40 years’ experience and is a former director of the World Health Organisation’s Cancer Programme. The sponsor said he did not align with its “values”: that he was too controversial, too political. Again, odd: he has lambasted both Labour and Tories in the past so he’s hardly parti pris.
But he has been a critic of the NHS, and it soon became clear to me that this was the issue. The sponsor was an NHS supplier and leery about platforming an outspoken heavy-hitter likely to deliver a few home truths about NHS failings. I can see the logic: which NHS supplier can afford to annoy the NHS, a behemoth and number one purchaser of health services in the country? So we ended up with a choice: keep Sikora, or keep the £25,000 of sponsorship.
We could easily have dropped him. So sorry, professor, we have overbooked. Come back another time! All we’d have to do is go down to three panellists (plus the sponsor) or find another, bland oncologist. No one would ever know. But not for a second did we consider cancelling Sikora. The Spectator is about promoting wide and vibrant debate or it’s about nothing. How could we have a debate about Britain’s awful cancer rate without discussing the elephant in the room of NHS structure? I’d argue that the U.K.’s woeful cancer record is, in part, caused by a refusal to discuss such questions.
Fraser doesn’t mention it, but you have to wonder whether Prof. Sikora’s outspoken opposition to Covid lockdowns didn’t also play a part in the sponsor’s judgement that he did not align with its “values”.
Worth reading in full.
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