No one will, or should, put out the bunting to greet the news that public satisfaction with the NHS has risen for the first time since 2019. It’s a six per cent rise, a statistically significant improvement on last year, but it comes from a historic low point and with a caution that, still, only one in four Britons feels satisfied with the service. Nevertheless, if you’re Keir Starmer and you’re looking for a reason to get up in the morning, it’s a pretty solid achievement.

Clearly, it doesn’t amount to anything like a shining new dawn, but it may be something to provide balm for Starmer’s battered and bruised reputation. And it is undeniable that incremental improvements in the NHS – the one institution that we British people have never stopped believing in – is of vastly greater importance to voters than any amount of strutting on the world stage.

When Labour came into power in 2024, Health Secretary Wes Streeting was often heard saying that the NHS was “broken”, attributing this to 14 years of underfunding by successive Conservative governments. And today, buoyed by the results of........

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