This is quite interesting. Labour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth has finally given Health Service Journal an interview about Labour health policy.

Being asked to choose a Prime Minister between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn is like being asked whether you'd prefer constipation or diarrhoea. The obvious answer is 'neither, thanks'.

It's not quite a Hobson's Choice of a General Election, but it's not far off.

Baroness Harding is the highly executive and very vocal chair of NHS Improvement. She is saying many of the right things about the change of culture needed in the NHS, which is thoroughly welcome and greatly to be applauded. We must hope it will happen.

The Baroness is now seeing executive tendencies in other, specifically in Health Service Journal. Speaking at the NHS Confederation's conference in Manchester, Baroness Harding suggested that we are currently in an era of "trial by HSJ".

Why is this allegation and perception on the mind of NHS Improvement's chair just now?

I don’t lightly encourage people to watch interviews with ‘Appless Matt ‘Ancock, Secretary Of State For The Time Being.

But I have to make an exception for this classic.
 
It starts at 4 minutes 30 in, and is notable for two things.

In the ongoing bonfire of the sanities that is Brexit, the ‘Appless ‘Un tells a grateful nation that as part of the ‘no deal’ plans for crashing out of the EU on 29 March 2019, he has become the biggest buyer of refrigerators in the world.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE – Health Policy Insight's been on a hiatus for a while because, well, life. This column was written for my regular Monday HSJ slot, and delayed due to legal concerns. It now appears, following HSJ editor Alastair McLellan’s barnstorming editorial on the matters in question.]

Those whom the Gods of health policy would destroy, they first make over-enthusiastic about tech solutions.

L P Hartley's 'The Go-Between' opens with the magnificent line "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there".

For HPI's favourite lying-buffoon-turned-Foreign Secretary Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson, the truth is increasingly becoming a foreign country.

The historian Robert Conquest is famous for his 'three laws of politics':
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Budget Day rolls around fast: this year, the cacophony of requests for more funding for the NHS has been almost incessant.

In my HSJ column, I assumed that the NHS is not going to get the £4 billion a year it needs to keep things stable as they are. (This doesn't include a staff pay rise, not getting waiting times back on track.)

Fireworks Night was three days ago, but you wouldn't know it from NHS Commissioning Board boss Simon Stevens' bold intervention at the NHS Providers conference in Birmingham.

In a delightful display of political chutzpah, Stevens is using the '£350 million bullshit bus' to bolster the case for a meaningful funding increase in the Budget on 22 November.

Who's the audience for this intervention?

And will it work?

Bypassing the politicians

Twitter legend CCG Cassander has welcomed me back to Health Policy Insight duties with this guest editorial: his brilliant suggestion for fresh transatlantic learning opportunities for the NHS

As I write, much digital ink is being spilled over a proposed “NHS Airbnb” scheme, where private landlords would be paid to provide rooms to recovering patients.