POLITICS

Published: 11/03/2004, Volume II4, No. 5896 Page 19

When Labour chief whip Hilary Armstrong calls for greater discipline and solidarity among restless backbench MPs - as she regularly does at prime minister Tony Blair's behest - she can hardly be thinking of level-headed chaps like Tony McWalter and Kerry Pollard. Can she?

Yet the two leftish old chums, allies in opposing the Iraq war and much else, have fallen out over hospital reorganisation in Hertfordshire, where Mr Pollard captured St Albans after Peter Lilley fled in 1997, and Mr McWalter took neighbouring Hemel Hempstead on the Blairite tide.

These are swing commuter constituencies north of London which Labour lost to the Thatcherite surge in the '70s, just about the time when the first attempt was made to obtain a consensus to modernise acute services provided by ageing local hospitals.

It failed then because neither St Albans nor Hemel was prepared to see its local hospital close in favour of a mid-way greenfield site. The same thing happened five years ago.Meanwhile, St Albans had lost its acute facilities and Hemel's hospital had been built up. But increasingly, to quote Mr Pollard, 'the status quo was not an option'.

When I rang both MPs on Sunday night, they were pretty cross: Mr McWalter with what he calls 'fairy godmother economics', and Mr Pollard with what he sees as obstructive politics. So why has all this got the two friends squabbling at Westminster this month?

Because Mr McWalter, who backed a 'hands around the hospital' demo and many other protests, believes a disastrous and costly stitch-up was effected by Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire strategic health authority and its allies last autumn.

And because Mr Pollard believes his friend's decision to back a legal challenge against the decision to go for option 2 is 'a step too far'which will cost£250,000 in lawyers' fees alone. It might also test health secretary John Reid's patience so far that he spends the earmarked£500m (nearer£1bn, says Mr McWalter) on some other needy private finance initiative project.

Mr Pollard is confident that the consultation which preceded the decision was exceptionally thorough.He wants the Dacorum Hospitals Action Group to be required to pay both sides' bills if its application for judicial review is rejected in the high court - as he says it will be.

'This was not a flawed process, ' the MP told me. That would make losing an alarming prospect for 75-year-old Mrs Doreen Hill, the Labour activist who is fronting Dacorum's legal appeal.

Just as Mr McWalter voiced his anger against 'a desperately bad, wasteful and nugatory decision' in a Commons debate on 4 December, so Mr Pollard retaliated - he mentioned no names - when he set out the SHA's case in a debate last week.On both occasions ministers invoked the principle of devolved decision-making and the sub judice rules to avoid direct comment.

We await the climax.

You may know all about this, especially if you live in the area and use Watford General Hospital (near the Vicarage Road football ground), Queen Elizabeth II Hospital at Welwyn Garden City, Lister Hospital at Stevenage or the district hospital at Hemel, whose local primary care trust is the aforementioned and grandly named Dacorum PCT.

Option 1, rejected last year, would ostensibly have built up Hemel and the Lister. The successful option 2 would have built a new hospital on the St Albans/Hatfield border, close to Hertfordshire University, whose medical training facilities would be expanded to include full doctor training. It would be a bigger PFI deal than even University College Hospital London.

All good stuff. East-west communications in this area are tricky, dominated by the north-south M1 and A1(M) network and equally over-loaded M25.Wealthier residents can take their illnesses to London teaching hospitals.

It is important to get the upgrade right.

But Hemel's spanking new facilities would be sharply and 'deceiptfully' reduced, says Mr McWalter;

its retained accident and emergency facilties are really no more than a minor injury unit.

Officials give him the impression that money is no object in the new NHS: it is.What enrages the MP are late changes to the plan in August to substantially rebuild Watford's hospital - to keep Watford on side.

At£370m, this pledge almost doubles the total bill. 'I am a maths graduate, ' the ex-philosophy lecturer protests.

Mr Pollard is equally adamant.His colleague is being misled. 'Why should John Reid fanny about with us when there is crying need in other areas?' 'Hemel is being heaved over the side of the lifeboat so that others have a better chance, ' counters his old shipmate, Mr McWalter. l