Vicarious masochists, sadists and health policy geeks (you do the Venn diagram) can enjoy re-watching Comrade Sir David Nicholson's evidence session to the Commons Public Accounts Committee this afternoon.

The only possible description of the session was a ComradeShambles.

Ignorance or incompetence?
When the only defences open to you are that you were ignorant or incompetent, you are not in a good place. That is where the Comrade-In-Chief finds himself.

Taken from the fabulous Hansard, below follows the transcript of yesterday's debate on NHS accountability and transparency in the House of Commons.

Charlotte Leslie (Bristol North West) (Con): I beg to move,

Today's Telegraph carries what looks very much like a Number 10 briefing that a plan has been hatched to liberate Comrade Sir David in 2014.

The knowledge of text messages from the PM to the Comrade-In-Chief is a bit of a clue.

I have written previously about Lord Ashcroft's polling of undecided voters, and what it means for the opposition.

The lucre-laden Lord's latest, 'Marginal Territory', does as its title implies and examines only marginal seats for the 2015 election.

At 9.30 this morning, Comrade Sir David Nicholson will appear before the Commons health select committee in connection with their inquiry into Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust.

This guest editorial by Professor Kieran Walshe, Professor of Health Policy and Management at Manchester Business School, looks at the future of Sir David Nicholson.

HPI readers are nothing if not down with the NHS Commissioning Board, and love its live-streamed board meetings.

In the spirit of the new transparency, I can reveal in advance all the key points of today's board meeting in Manchester.

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Click here for details of 'Francis is coming. Look busy!', the new issue of subscription-based Health Policy Intelligence.

Sports fans of a certain age will remember the days of non-seated terraces. Cheap but crowded, terrace culture had a street-level vibe and gave rise to one of the most useful phrases when dealing with politics.

Given the near-certainty of copious pre-match beer-drinking (oh yes, pre-loading is nothing new), and the difficulty of moving to reach any toilet in such crowded spaces, the terraces gave birth to the excellent line "don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining".

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Becoming the story, which Comrade Sir David Nicholson has rather comprehensively done over a poorly-hadled response to the Francis Public Inquiry on top of a regime of grip, is not usually associated with positive career outcomes.

New Labour's former chief spin-medic Alastair Campbell had a rule-of-thumb that if a minister were on the front cover of a newspaper for more than a week, that minister had to go.

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In today's Telegraph, there is a report that PM David Cameron feels someone should take the blame for Mid-Staffs.