Last week, the iridescent Professor John Appleby, chief economist of the Kings Fund, wrote this excellent ten-point checklist about the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), due at 12.30 today.

Here we sit, in a very short-lived PCT (standing for pre-CSR tension).

Which I will illuminate with a story from a colleague who had a chat with an external consultant to the Department of Health earlier today.

Said external consultant reports that Health Secretary Andrew 'The Liberator' Lansley is, contrary to appearances, distressed by the adverse "commentary" that his White Paper has been generating.

Scanning the early editions, I found this piece by Nick Timmins in the FT, which concludes that the fabled efficiency and cost advantage of the private sector in the delivery of public services is not proven.

The CBI's comic response to the NHS White Paper is duly put into context.

Here we go again, again.

Another attempt at getting revalidation of doctors off the ground is hoping to fly by the summer of 2012. Truly timely: it has thus far proven an Olympian task.

Is the GMC going to be up to it this time?

I'm pretty sure HSJ had the names last week, but the portfolios have been released this afternoon.

Unsurprisingly, John Healey will shadow health secretary and liberator Andrew Lansley.

BBC News' Laura Kunessberg reports an anonymous briefing that an extra £2 billion funding for adult social care will be announced on Wednesday at the Comprehensive Spending Review.

And I think I know where most of it might be coming from.

The Department of Health's rather belated consultations on patient choice and an "information revolution" are now online.

Fill your boots.

It's interesting to see that the two centre-left 'broadsheet' newspapers start the week of the Comprehensive Spending Review with stories about threats to NHS funding.

The Guardian focuses on the £15-20 billion productivity improvement, and quotes Mark Porter of the BMA consultants committee as saying that every hospital department is facing a 8-9% cot in 2010-11.

Interesting times continue, as the minority SNP government in Holyrood choose to make prescriptions free in April 2011 by dint of cutting 25% of senior NHS managers in Scotland.

The target group will be senior managers in Scotland's health boards.

So 25% of managers in health boards do work that isn't needed? Crikey.

In a masterpiece of comic timing, the DH yesterday issued a statement that mandatory generic substitution in primary care would not be pursued.

Today, the Office of Fair Trading announced that Reckitt Benckiser has "agreed" to pay a £10 million fine in recognition of its abuse of UK and European competition law by withdrawing and de-listing Gaviscon Original Liquid from the NHS prescription channel in 2005.