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.

Hello. I've been a bit busy of late, so as a thing that doesn't earn me any money, Health Policy Insight has had to pause.

Why the un-pause, now?

Oh ... there's been a tipping point coming, which I've been tracking in the new weekly 'Cowper's Cut' column for HSJ every Monday.

Last night's BBC Newsnight had a good exposition of the issues facing the service.

Health economist Professor Alan Maynard asks what regulation is actually delivering

Public and private sector regulatory schizophrenia
There are two remarkable aspects of regulation.

Firstly, regulations are costly and usually created to protect and benefit the public, i.e. they usually involve significant costs and benefits. Those favouring their abolition generally assume deregulation is virtually costless in the absence of evidence.

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.