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.

Today's BBC Radio 4 World At One interview with Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt sends three unambiguous messages, two of which were certainly intentional.

Roses are red,
Stalin is too.
Love the NHS?
Comrade Sir David's watching you!

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt's speech to the Reform conference yesterday was a well-delivered mixture of the thoughtful and the analytically confused.

Presentationally, Hunt gives good speech, as both this and his presentation at the Kings Fund's annual conference last November showed. The 'not being Andrew Lansley' effect remains evident as a plus.

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Shadow health minister Liz Kendall - speech to "The New NHS' Reform conference 12 February 2013

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

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It’s a week since Sir Robert Francis published his report on the failings at Mid Staffordshire Hospital.

Courtesy of the DH website, here is the text of Health Secretary Jeremy hunt's speech to 'The New NHS' conference held yesterday by Reform.

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