Political bruisers in head to head

THIS week's Cabinet reshuffle has set up the first real confrontation of the new parliament.

By bringing back Ann Widdecombe to the Tory front-bench as Shadow Health Secretary, William Hague has lined up an intriguing stand-off between her and Frank Dobson.

Both are old-style political bruisers from the old-fashioned wing of their parties.

Miss Widdecombe, a 50-year-old spinster convert to Roman Catholicism, is hard-right in the traditional way - once described as "a pale carbon copy of Mrs Thatcher".

Health Secretary Mr Dobson is Old-Labour left and defiantly bearded to boot.

The 58-year-old father of three is from the London council nursery of politicians and has the sort of old-style liberal views on abortion, unions and local government that should sit ill with his being in a Blairite Cabinet.

But the fact is he has proved a most effective Cabinet Minister and has impressed his civil servants both with his grasp of the brief and effectiveness in winning cash concessions from "Iron Chancellor" Gordon Brown.

Indeed one senior Mandarin said: "We knew is was going to be fun with Frank, but we never dreamed of quite how good a Secretary of State he would be." Mr Dobson has moved up in the pecking order from one of the likely candidates for the axe in any government reshuffle to a permanent fixture in one of the key areas for Prime Minister Tony Blair and his team.

His main problem is the rising number of patients on hospital waiting lists - a weak point Miss Widdecombe is determined to exploit.

Against her second-rate predecessor John Maples, Mr Dobson got away with it by his brand of cheek, honesty and false naivety, claiming to be embarrassed but determined to tackle the problem.

The fact that he is understood to have described the pledge to cut waiting lists by 100,000 under Labour to a colleague before the election (and before he took over health) as "barmy" in no way reduces his need to honour it now.

As both he and Miss Widdecombe know, the key issue for patients is not how many people are on the list but how long they have to wait.

In addition, every time the list drops locally, GPs are quick to load a few more patients they have been treating in the surgery on to the queue for hospital treatment. A second line of attack for Miss Widdecombe - whose experience with the NHS comes from administering medical schools at London University and dealing with innumerable constituency cases - will be what else will suffer in the mad dash to cut the numbers .

She said she will watch like a hawk to see where else performance suffers.

Miss Widdecombe hopes to launch a rational debate on how a cash limited NHS meets ever increasing and unreasonable demands - something that her predecessor never did.

Indeed, in the fiasco over alleged hospital cuts he fell victim to a classic "Dobbo" sucker punch. After the Health Secretary confessed to confusion about the Tory claim of a central government list of proposed closures and cutbacks, Mr Maples demanded to know why he didn't know the facts.

A triumphant Mr Dobson replied that he did not have them because there was no list and the whole idea was a Tory fabrication - especially as his Tory predecessors had sanctioned some of the changes.

Miss Widdecombe will not be so foolish and certainly this week's first confrontation at Health Questions was far more bruising and entertaining than anything for a year.

But Miss Widdecombe did show herself thin-skinned and was keen afterwards to rebut claims that as Prisons Minister she had defended women inmates being chained in childbirth.

She had supported them being restrained before and after Labour but not during it, a distinction she believes is important but which is lost on most other people. But it is here that Mr Dobson's advisers see her weak point.

Accepting that she will be far more effective than Mr Maples, her old-fashioned far-right views will be ruthlessly exploited.

Her absolute opposition to abortion, her rejection of sex education in schools, her criticism of family planning services and support of the "internal market" Tory NHS reforms Mr Dobson is dismantling they believe will prove her Achilles heel.

And as a second front they will try and expose the division between her and her deputy - the thrusting new right-winger and friend of Mr Hague Alan Duncan.

As young, smooth and as New Tory as his opposite number Health Minister Alan Milburn is New Labour, his right-wing libertarian views on issues like to possible legalisation of drugs are far from Miss Widdecombe's.

Government strategists think that there will be far more tensions to exploit between their two main opponents than there are in the surprisingly harmonious double act between Mr Dobson and Mr Milburn.

Mr Dobson believes that the choice of Miss Widdecombe indicates that Mr Hague has no expectation of winning the next election and that she will eventually be seen off.

And while the exchanges between her and Mr Dobson will be entertaining and exciting, the odds suggest

he could be right.

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