He has lived life to the full as a rock and roll playboy, enjoys model railways and full-size sports cars, has eight children by five mothers, loves his football – he’s a Celtic superfan – and once turned up sozzled to chase ping-pong balls round a goldfish bowl while pulling faces on live television. That was his way of helping with the draw for the fifth round of the 2016-17 Scottish Cup.

Now Sir Rod Stewart has added incisive political commentator to that long list of skills and achievements. On Thursday afternoon, viewers to the Sky News phone-in watched slack-jawed as the magnificently coiffured 78-year-old singer pitched in with his tuppence-worth. The topic under discussion was the NHS and Sir Rod had a fair amount to say on the subject.

His opinion on the striking nurses? “They’re not asking for a great deal,” he said, to which presenter Sarah-Jane Mee should have replied: “Just as well, because they’re not likely to get one from this mob”. Instead she smiled politely and stared at the camera with just a soupçon of panic in her eyes as Sir Rod warmed to his theme. “I personally have been a Tory for a long time,” he continued, “and I think this government should stand down now and give the Labour Party a go at it … this is a bad time for us in Britain, it really is. Change the bloody government!”

Wow, did he just say what we thought he just said? Yes, he did.

The ‘it’ the Tories should let Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party have a go at, of course, is the small matter of running the country and with it the NHS. As somebody is probably whispering in Rishi Sunak’s ear right now, you know you’re in trouble when even wrinkly, Tory-voting rockers turn on you. Or they will be whispering it once they’ve explained who Sir Rod Stewart is.

While they upload that pop culture patch to the Prime Minister’s brain, somebody else (Katherine Hamnett, hopefully) is doubtless running off a few thousand ‘Rod Says Change The Bloody Government!’ t-shirts in time for the next wave of industrial action. Expect to see them on the picket lines, modelled by striking nurses who don’t know who Sir Rod Stewart is either.

What else did we learn from the rock and roll knight? He had been watching Sky News all day, he said, which is an admirable feat of endurance for someone of his age. For someone of any age, in fact. That aside, he recently had a scan himself – he referred to it as his “annual scan”, having been treated for thyroid cancer in 2000 and prostate cancer in 2017 – and had turned up half an hour late for said scan only to be told it wasn’t a problem as the clinic really wasn’t very busy that day.

If that sounds like it was extreme sarcasm from some over-worked nurse, it wasn’t. Sir Rod always goes private – “I’ve got a few shillings, as you know, Sarah” – and clearly the country’s private hospitals don’t have issues like waiting lists. That doesn’t stop him cherishing the good old NHS and its loyal, deserving staff, however. “This is heart-breaking for the nurses,” he said. “In all my years of living in this country, I’m sure I’ve never seen it so bad. And anything I can do to help …” That help stretched to him offering to pay for “10 or 20 scans, however much it takes,” a reference to a previous caller who had had difficulty accessing NHS services locally.

If he makes good on the offer it won’t be the first time he has put his hand in his pocket. Despite claiming he usually keeps his charitable acts “nice and quiet” he did reveal in 2022 that he had rented and furnished a house for a family of seven Ukrainian refugees, and undertaken to pay all bills for a year. “I am a knight, I should be using my power to do something for people,” he told the Mirror newspaper at the time. “I am sure that if there are people out there who see what I am doing, they will pick up some slack too.”

READ MORE: SIR ROD STEWART ON BEST SINGERS OF ALL TIME LIST

Back to the present, Sir Rod had some advice for the NHS itself. “It’s got to be rebuilt with billions and billions of dollars,” he said. “That’s the only way.”

The only way? Ears on the free market wing of the Conservative Party will have pricked up at that. And dollars too, eh? Does that mean that even as Sir Rod trash-talks the Tories he is tacitly backing the long-cherished dream some of them have of opening up the NHS to, er, competition (for which read: privatisation, i.e. flogging the whole kit and caboodle to the Americans, who will drive profits up and standards, wages and working conditions down)?

Probably not. Actually I think Sir Rod was just saying dollars because he spends so much time in America, where he has two homes. One is in Beverley Hills, in what local blatt the Los Angeles Times calls “a baroque Italianate estate”, the other is in Florida’s West Palm Beach. He likes to spend Christmases there. I would too if I was him.

Last week’s call was a local one, however. Sir Rod’s home in the UK is 18th century Grade II-listed Durrington House, a plush, 10-bedroom pile near Harlow. There his local blatt is the rather less storied Hertfordshire Mercury. “Rod Stewart’s Jane Austin-style mansion in the Essex countryside, located just a stone’s throw from the Hertfordshire border, also boasts a swimming pool, five bathrooms and four Grade II-listed cottages,” it reports. There’s a rather swanky-looking football pitch too.

As Rod signed off and Sky News returned to whatever passes for normal service after a rock legend had been on the phone unexpectedly, Wes Streeting was quickest out of the blocks. Scrolling through Spotify for an appropriate song title to riff on in what he hoped would be a zinger tweet – Da Ya Think I’m Politically Astute? Tempting, but maybe not. I Don’t Want To Talk About It? Better – the Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care finally alighted on one. “Maggie may have been a Tory,” he tweeted, “but Rod’s Labour!”. I’ll give him three of 10 for effort at least.

Other users on the social media platform went further. “The thing about Rod Stewart is that deep down I’ve always thought he was a bit of a legend,” wrote one. “However, his stunt calling Sky News today has changed my mind completely. Now I think he’s an absolute, total f****** mega legend with the deluxe legend upgrade package.”

The asterisks are mine, by the way.

Meanwhile Mr Streeting’s Labour colleague Angela Rayner wisely kept it simple. “I agree with Sir Rod Stewart” she tweeted. Brief and to the point.

Sir Michael Take, former Conservative MP for Dorset East, was less happy about Sir Rod’s intervention. For the sake of balance, here are his thoughts on the matter. “We don’t need heavy metal singer Rod Stewart lecturing us on politics,” he tweeted. “This buffoon should just stick to singing his boring & shouty hits such as ‘Maggie May’ & ‘Crocodile Rock.’ A lifetime of lechery & skunk has led him to such bizarre political views. Young pop fans, BEWARE!”

Sir Michael’s bonkers tweet would have made my year – yours too, probably – were it not for the fact that his is a spoof account. Michael Take equals micky-take, geddit? And there is no Dorset East constituency. Mind you, Mr Take did fool the Daily Mail last October when in a story about water quality its Mail Online website quoted his comments regarding what he called “the government’s sensible idea to disperse sewage in coastal waters.”

Hang on, though, because a horrible thought is right now occurring to me: how do we know that was the real Sir Rod Stewart on the blower to Sky News and not some sort of prankster? Perhaps to put it beyond doubt Ms Mee should have asked for a few bars of The First Cut Is The Deepest.