On this night two years ago, millions of people stood on their doorsteps for the second week running to applaud the NHS as it grappled with the onset of the Covid pandemic. It seemed like a very unBritish gesture and yet it caught the popular imagination for 10 weeks at the start of the crisis. This expression of thanks has been subsequently considered a public affirmation of faith in “our NHS” as an institution when in truth it demonstrated the gratitude of many for the doctors, nurses and others in the front-line. At the time they were placing themselves at great risk, and more than 600 died.

But people are quite capable of distinguishing between the performance of the NHS as the country’s largest bureaucracy and those working in it. The annual survey of satisfaction with state health care has dropped to its lowest level since it began 25 years ago. The British Social Attitudes poll found that just over one third of respondents were happy with the service last year, down from 53 per cent 12 months earlier. Given the central position held by the NHS in the public mind this is a remarkable finding.

It owes much to the performance of GPs during the crisis, with surgeries closed and doctors accessible with difficulty and only remotely. There is a serious problem with primary care as evidenced by patients complaining about the difficulties they encounter trying to see a GP face-to-face. Many people find the system cumbersome and off-putting, so much so that the diagnoses of serious ailments have been delayed.

The survey is hardly surprising when the working practices of GPs are often inconvenient to patients, with evening and weekend surgeries unusual. GPs feel they are being unfairly scapegoated but the system is broken and it is high time it was sorted out.

The Government in its desperation to be seen as the “party of the NHS” is reluctant to do anything approaching major reform. It is pouring more money into hospital care though, as the Ockenden report into the catastrophic failures that led to the deaths of mothers and babies at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust has shown, this is not about money but the way the NHS is run.

As the survey suggests, saying we support the NHS and throwing more money its way is no longer enough. The party the voters will back is the one that takes seriously the need for radical reform.