My good friend the late Professor Bob Sang accurately described himself as a "constructive subversive". Two other examples of this happy breed are GP, journalist and Countdown cynosure Dr Phil Hammond and the redoubtable patient advocate Daphne Havercroft.

Bristol health services and Phil Hammond have form: you will remember his role in using his seminal 'MD' column in Private Eye to express the concerns of Steve Bolsin and colleagues about the standards of paediatric heart surgery at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

No man who will don a moustache throughout November to support a prostate cancer charity, as shadow health secretary John Healey did, can be deemed to lack a certain reckless chutzpah (bless you).

Healey is carrying this verve and elan into his opposition, as this letter to PM David Cameron, cc'd to Andrew Lansley and Oliver Letwin, shows:

Rt Hon David Cameron MP
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London SW1A 2AA

01 December 2010

Dear Prime Minister

It would be easy to think that the future NHS manager will be a GP - as Health Secretary Andrew Lansley seems to do, with his repeated confusion of prescribing and referring with commissioning.

It would also be wrong.

However, the future NHS manager won't be the previous NHS manager either.

Healthy Lives, Healthy People, the new public health White Paper, is out a few hours ahead of the scheduled embargo, and was not worth even this slightly-shorter-than-anticipated wait.

Sure, it's a bad title, but then Shark Sandwich is already taken.

Morning, people. Hope you are all well and not too snow-bound.

I will be back later today with some proper stuff about markets, but just having signed a contract on some new freelance work, want to update you on that, in case you're interested in conflicts of interest.

Cabinet Office permanent secretary of government communications Matt Tee (former prelate of the DH communications parish; ex-of Dr Foster and the first chief executive of NHS Direct) will lead a major review of the Government Central Office of Information, prior to moving on to new challenges at the end of March 2011.

They will miss him, I suspect. He brought to the party a good strategic sense and proper common sense: a double less prevalent than one would wish.

With the launch today of the new NHS Atlas Of Variation, the Department of Health has done something brilliant.

Talent borrows, genius steals
It is not, of course, something original - simply a UK version of the famous US Dartmouth Atlas mapping variation in healthcare provision.

Which makes it even better. If we are learning how to steal good ideas, then there is almost certainly some kind of hope.

The chair of Monitor is going to be a serious power in the brave new world. They will be the economic dictators of the new system: setting tariff; doing anti-trust; promoting NHS competition; and having regard to quality.

The health select committee meets to hear evidence from Health Secretary Andrew Lansley (AL), NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson (DN) and DH director of finance Richard Douglas (RD).

(There are going to be a lot of typos in this) - and the corrected transcript is here.

Chair Stephen Dorrell (SD) wants brief questions and answers.

Good evening. As the temperature drops again, and autumn leaves carpet the gutters, a few things are becoming clearer through the November fog.

Some of this came from sources at the HSJ 100 launch last week; other material from the NHS Alliance conference. In the instances where I can't give a name, I'm not relying on a single source.

1. Health Secretary Lansley is known to be in trouble