When I was a student, my housemates and I would buy our groceries from a shop that offered only days of the week as the best before. We had a lettuce that went off on ‘Tuesday’, bread that would go stale on a ‘Thursday’, and so on. It was useful for the shop, and useful for a bunch of cash-strapped students as we could effectively decide which Tuesday the food would spoil by, rather than throwing it out.

I thought of that lettuce this week when Downing Street decided to make one of Rishi Sunak’s five ‘immediate priorities’ – to have NHS waiting lists falling – impossible to meet. The release accompanying the Prime Minister’s speech said ‘by March, NHS waiting lists will fall’. Which March? It couldn’t possibly be this coming March: the forecasts, leaked to The Spectator’s Kate Andrews, all assume that waiting lists have got a way to rise first. Even March 2024 – which ministers have previously talked about – looks a bit ambitious. The government line up to this point has been that things are going to get worse before they get better. This target suggested the opposite.

Why set a target that no one had really expected you to meet? Someone thoughtful in Downing Street clearly asked the same question because late yesterday that ‘March’ label disappeared from the list. It’s a bit embarrassing given Sunak instructed the public to judge his government on whether it has delivered or not – as Fraser said on our latest Coffee House Shots podcast, getting into a conversation with voters about whether things are working under this government is pretty risky given lots of public services really aren’t.

There is a possibility that some waiting lists might start to fall by March: as Sunak himself said on Wednesday, the NHS has made real progress in cutting down the long wait lists. He said: ‘I believe in just a few months we will have practically eliminated waiting times for those waiting a year and a half. We’ve already eliminated those waiting two years and by next spring I think we will have eliminated those waiting a year.’ Those long waits are important: as New Labour found in 1997, you can pledge to reduce waiting lists to a meaningless number but what really matters is how long the people on even apparently short lists are having to wait.

Even if the government only has to resort to mild trickery of the kind the Prime Minister was dismissing this week and elective waiting lists do start falling soon, the problems within the NHS are so great that it will be difficult to convince the public that things are changing for the better. The crisis in emergency care has some shared roots with the elective backlog, including the difficulty of discharging patients from hospital and into the community with a safe care package. Staffing is another, and there is a real chance that the combination of the relentless pressure on healthcare workers and the morale-sapping nature of the pay disputes really does lead many to quit their jobs in favour of something that doesn’t leave them quite so physically and morally broken.

One of the problems that the government has is that it is now quite difficult to do much that will really have an immediate effect, largely because the crises have causes that take guts and little short-term gain to deal with. It might perhaps have been safer for Sunak to ask for the public to judge him on how hard he’s tried, like the effort prizes given out at schools, rather than on what he manages to achieve with the health service by this March or indeed the next. This particular iteration of the Conservative government has a longer shelf life than Liz Truss’s one – or indeed that of the lettuces that I bought as a student. But it still doesn’t have very much time in which to produce evidence that it is delivering.