Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the Parliamentary water, a big beast resurfaces.

Lord David Owen made some of the best speeches in the Lords debate over the Health and Social Care Act 2012, in very much the same way that Baroness Shirley Williams didn't.

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On Saturday, I saw that Enfield North MP Nick de Bois (a Conservative) had published an open letter on his website in response to Sir Bruce Keogh's Guardian interview asking politicians not to attack plans for NHS provider reconfiguration.

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In the wholly spurious interests of binary 'balance', here are five snarky observations about shadow health secretary and Mascara Kid Andy Burnham's health policy review launch speech and subsequent Q&A this morning, followed by five non-snarky ones:

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From the Labour Party website

'Whole-Person Care' A One Nation approach to health and care for the 21st Century

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The Mascara Kid, also known as Labour’s shadow health secretary Andy Burnham, will give details of his party’s launching of its health policy review at the Kings Fund this morning.

He has an article in today’s Telegraph, and has also briefed details to Health Service Journal.

There has been considerable debate about nurse staffing levels, with the Telegraph story from the weekend drawing together CQC assessments that 17 acute trusts are dangerously under-staffed.

The imminent arrival of the Francis Report will return the issue to salience.

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We're not very far away from the arrival of the NHS Commissioning Board now.

The Health Select Committee's new report on the Care Quality Commission pulls fewer punches than an un-bribed boxer, stating that even though "the CQC has developed a much keener focus on patient safety and has a better appreciation of what it exists to do (not much of an achievement) ... we remain to be convinced that the CQC has successfully defined its core purpose.

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Reading through the Mid Staffs Public Inquiry's leading council Tom Kark's summing up, I was taken aback to discover the following text on page 168 (which is on page 42 - they are laid out four-up).

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So, after a weekend of speculation about what the Francis Public Inquiry Report will say (which brought us precisely no new information), today we got the Coalition Government's Mid-Term Review.

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