JEREMY CORBYN tore into Theresa May yesterday for being too ineffectual to sack Jeremy Hunt even after he’d turned the NHS into a “sinking ship.”

The Labour leader said she had wanted to sack the Health Secretary for overseeing the NHS crisis but had instead promoted him during this week’s reshuffle by adding social care to his portfolio.

She “rewarded” Mr Hunt with a promotion and new job title but this “won’t disguise the fact that £6 billion has been cut from social care since the Tories came into power,” he said during Prime Minister’s Questions.

Mr Corbyn recounted Mr Hunt’s pledge not to “abandon ship.”

“Isn’t that an admission that, under his captaincy, the ship is indeed sinking?” he asked.

Mr Corbyn cited reports that nurses were “spending their entire shift treating people in car parks” due to backed-up ambulances.

He asked: “If the NHS is so well-resourced and so well-prepared, why was a decision taken last week to cancel the operations of 55,000 patients during the month of January?”

Labour frontbenchers shouted “apologise” at Ms May, who claimed she had already made clear her apology during PMQs.

She said: “We will make sure those operations are reinstated as soon as possible. We are putting record funding into the NHS and record funding into mental health.”

Mr Corbyn hit back, saying she “knows full well” that mental health budgets “have been raided” and that 55,000 people who have to wait longer for an operation join the four million people also waiting for one.

Mr Corbyn went on to raise the case of Vicky whose 82-year-old mum spent 13 hours on a trolley in a corridor, arriving three hours after 999 was first dialled. He said this was not an “isolated” case.

Ms May offered to examine the case but accused Mr Corbyn of “giving the impression of a National Health Service that is failing.”

Later during PMQs, Ms May reacted angrily to suggestions that the private sector’s role in the NHS had increased under the Tories.

Mr Corbyn pointed to Mr Hunt’s constituency county of Surrey, where a clinical commissioning group had to pay compensation to Virgin Care because the company did not win a contract.

He added that Virgin Care got £200 million in the last year alone  – a 50 per cent rise on the year before.