Health minister Lord Hunt of King’s Heath, the minister responsible for the NHS National IT Programme, followed Commons Leader Robin Cook and resigned from the government over Iraq.
Lord Hunt was Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health in the House of Lords. His portfolio included responsibility for the NHS National IT Programme, and he headed the ministerial task force responsible for co-coordinating and overseeing development of the Programme.
Lord Hunt told the BBC’s Today programme: "I’m under no illusion about the nature of the regime led by Saddam Hussein.
"I recognise the tremendous efforts made by the Prime Minister and other ministers to try and secure a second resolution.
"But I do not feel we are justified in taking pre-emptive action without broad international support, or the clear support of the British people.
"I’m also concerned about the long-term consequences for international stability of such pre-emptive action."
Lord Hunt’s resignation will deal a blow to the implementation of the complex NHS National IT Programme, which is due to see an additional £2.3 billion invested in NHS IT over the next three years.
He was appointed a life peer in 1997 becoming the government’s health spokesman in the Lords in 1999. Earlier, he pursued a 25 year career in healthcare, first as a hospital manager and then as chief executive of the NHS Confederation and its predecessor organisations.
The healthcare IT role has had an infamously high ministerial casualty rate, but Lord Hunt’s exit is unexpected. At a recent conference he joked with former Conservative health minister, Tom Sackville, about whether he would be the first government healthcare IT spokesperson to survive the experience unscathed.
His resignation clearly caused further pain for the government which faces severe unease on its own backbenches over the war on Iraq. An angry-sounding deputy prime minister, John Prescott, claimed on the Today programme not to be aware of who Lord Hunt was. Later in the interview he apologised for his ignorance.