Health economist Professor Alan Maynard offers an August examination result on Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s tenure

Jeremy Hunt has been Secretary Of State For Health since 2012 - over 5 years. In grading his performance, it is essential to examine the policies he has championed and progress he has made.

Before you read this, what grade would you give him?

Hunt’s policies

Amidst Brexit and the plethora of Government initiatives following May's June General Election, there is ambiguity about whether (even if desired by voters) it is possible to roll back austerity and restore public services.

Is the smaller state desired by Cameron and Osborne and produced since 2010 here to stay?

Background

Regular readers will be aware that I am not a particularly big fan of chocolate teapot Labour 'leader' Jeremy Corbyn.

If any further proof were needed that Mr Corbyn is an weapons-grade arsehole and onanist, he furnished it with his mendacious comments in a recent interview with Sophy Ridge on Sky News.

Mr Corbyn's target was the late Andrew Roth, whose columns on health and politics I had the pleasure of editing in my tenure running the British Journal of Healthcare Management.

Health economist Professor Alan Maynard is far from convinced that things are working out well

The NHS is in crisis due to inadequate funding: a product of ideologically driven policy choices favouring a smaller public sector. The crisis is the familiar product of competing political parties and the famines and feasts in funding, often of biblical durations of seven years.

The War On Reality is nothing new.

Right: let's sing the bass line together:

"Dum dum dum du-du-dum-dum
Dum dum dum du-du-dum-dum"

Theresa May has blinked first in her ill-advised face-off with Sun King Simon Stevens. (Facing off against a Sun King: I mean, you're bound to blink first, no?)

And admitted that "the NHS is under pressure".

Karl Marx wrote in the eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, quoting Hegel, ”all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He (Hegel) forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”.

I wrote yesterday that Team Theresa May's founding philosophy appears to be 'if at first you don't succeed, make precisely the same mistake again - but even harder'.

Six months since her arrival in 10 Downing Street after the other Conservative leadership candidates disappeared in puffs of stupidity and self-importance, we can tell the founding philosophy of Team Theresa May.

'If at first you don't succeed, make precisely the same mistake again - but even harder'.

The punishment leakings will continue until morale improves

Health economist Professor Alan Maynard calls Mayday on Number 10's health and care policy position

Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of the Emperor being tricked by two weavers into selling a magic set of clothes that did not exist led to their victim being “naked as the day that he was born”, and subject to universal ridicule.

After six months in office, Prime Minister May appears to have no clothes and is subject to increasing ridicule. Admittedly, her agenda is broad and dominated by bewilderment about how to manage Brexit.

Connoisseurs of U-turns are going to have some fun with Prime Minister Theresa May’s administration. The Teflon determination on absolute control that served Mrs May well at the chaotic Home Office is a poor approach to running the whole of government.

Today's U-turn isn't surprising. Following the Autumn Statement, I wrote on Twitter ”there will be quite a few Conservative MPs who are surprised and uncomfortable that nothing new was done for social care today”.