People's Partridge and Secretary Of State For The Time Being Matt Hancock graced the broadcast airwaves on Sunday morning trying to clear up after being defeated by the Good Law Project over his failure to publish the PPE contracts on the Government's Contractsfinder website in a timely way.

There is a not-good report out today from the self-identified think-tank 'Reform'.

I'm not linking to it because it's pretty poor and pointlessly sensationalist in parts, but it suggests that the NHS Referral To Treatment (RTT) waiting list will hit 10 million by this April.

Oh dear.

This is not going to happen, as my HSJ colleague James Illman neatly summarises.

"Guess who's back - back again?"

You can't keep a good man down, so the saying goes.

Apparently you can't keep ex-Vote Leave supremo and then ex-chief SpAd to Boris Johnson, Barnards Castle Eye Test specialist Dominic Cummings down either.

It's been a fairly lively week.

“And here I sit so patiently, waiting to find what price
You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice”
Bob Dylan, ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’

Sometimes, the past has useful lessons we can learn.

This bit does, anyway.

In 2010, I spent a huge amount of time getting to understand the things that became the 2012 Health And Social Care Act.

History, and this website, record that I was not a big fan of those ideas.

“The Health and Social Care Act 2012 put a regime in place which put competition as the organising principle for improvement in NHS care. This has in some cases hindered integration between providers. In practice, the NHS has not operated as the market intended by the 2012 Act …