Labour’s Nye Bevan came up with a brutally effective method to deal with doctors who opposed the setting up of the NHS in 1948, famously declaring: “I stuffed their mouths with gold.”

More than 70 years later, it seems that turning on the money tap is still regarded as the best way to get more output from the medical profession, with NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard setting out an upgraded payment schedule for general practitioners participating in the Covid booster programme.

GPs from now on will get £15 for every jab administered to a patient Monday to Friday – up from £12.58. Enhanced payments of £20 for a Saturday jab and £30 for jabs administered to housebound patients in their own homes are also on the way.

“We will ensure that they are properly rewarded for their efforts, particularly when they take time to visit vulnerable housebound patients who can’t travel to vaccination sites,” said Ms Pritchard.

Her decision to reach for a carrot rather than a stick comes as GPs across the country have faced a growing outcry from some patients about a collapse in the availability of face-to-face appointments, with claims of a knock-on impact being felt by already-overloaded hospital casualty departments.

Anyone hoping to hear a Government minister take a sterner line with family doctors and simply demand they restore pre-Covid working patterns and service levels should probably brace themselves for a very long wait.

Because the truth of it is that politicians have simply lost the inclination and maybe even the ability to take on GPs in the court of public opinion. A quick look at public attitudes towards the two groups gives a clue as to why.

According to the 2021 Ipsos Mori “veracity index”, 94 per cent of us would generally trust a doctor to tell us the truth. That compares to just 31 per cent who say the same of Government ministers. Only estate agents, advertising executives and “social media influencers” rank lower than politicians, while only local pharmacists and nurses rank above doctors. 

The sanctification of the NHS and pretty much everyone who works in it and the parallel denigration of politicians, much of it heaped upon themselves it has to be said, has made it very much harder for any government to build up a head of steam for improving healthcare productivity. Ministers are simply no match for medics and their fearsomely well organised professional associations.

It’s not that GPs are lazy – given our ageing population and medical advances coming up with more viable treatments for more complaints each year, the volume of work is on a steep upward curve.

Yet there are plenty of reasons to believe that better productivity could be attained via a more rigorous approach to management.

For a start, we have somehow reached a situation where 90 per cent of the nearly four in ten GPs who are salaried, rather than contractors, are working part-time. 

That’s an awfully large number of expensive medical training places leading only to part-time output. And contrary to claims that GPs need to be paid more, it could be a sign that pay is now at such a high level that more and more doctors can afford to reduce their working days for lifestyle reasons.

Last year the average income for GPs in England topped £100,000, so clearly it is now possible for many family doctors to reduce their hours worked and still enjoy an affluent standard of living. It is absolutely right that doctors should expect to be well paid given their immense expertise and life-saving skills. But there must also be a case for rationing the availability of part-time posts.

Another aspect of the GP shortage affecting patients is the sky-rocketing early retirement rate in the profession, which has more than trebled from 401 in 2007/8 to 1,358 in 2020/21. Of course, some medical bodies will tell you that this is largely due to excessive workloads. Prof Martin Marshall, the chair of the Royal College of GPs, told the Guardian earlier this year: “These figures reflect what we are hearing from our members in general practice. The intense workload and workforce pressures that GPs and our teams have been working under…are taking their toll.”

Yet the BMA acknowledges that much of the early retirement is motivated by the understandable desire of GPs not to exceed the pension pot lifetime allowance of a little over a million pounds (£1,073,100 to be precise) after which extra tax penalties kick in.

“Repeated surveys from the BMA have demonstrated that over half of doctors plan to retire before the age of 60, with the majority citing pensions taxation as their primary reason,” according to BMA pensions committee chair Dr Vishal Sharma. So good and experienced GPs are being needlessly lost years early because of a combination of a generous gold-plated pension scheme on the one hand and an ungenerous tax regime on the other.

So long as we, the great British public, continue to see doctors as heroes and politicians as villains we are unlikely to break the unhealthy stranglehold that the medical trade unions exert over the healthcare system.

Ministers whose motives on healthcare are widely doubted will always be tempted to, in effect, bribe GPs to do jobs they are already being paid for. Stuffing mouths with gold can clearly get things done. But it is a very expensive way to go on.