I predicted this on here a few times, and indeed another quarto of the Book Of Things That Are Not Surprising is stitched and bound with this HSJ news report that Unison's bid for a judicial review of the White Paper has failed.

In truth, a brand new government - even a coalition government - was not going to get judicially reviewed on its new health policy. Unison's bid was good PR, but bad effectiveness.

On a day when the abolition of overall government quangos is big news, and the DH quotient is medium-sized news, it is at once amusing, depressing and instructive to see a classic bit of wheel-reinvention under way at the DH's National Quality Board.

Part of the NQB is its prioritisation committee, whose members have been told that the committee will now be disbanding.

I have to wonder why the NHS Information Centre appears not to be telling the truth.

You may remember from my story yesterday about the IC's refusal to answer my questions about the £8 million sale of its shareholding in Dr Foster Intelligence: one of their pretexts was that they actually were part of the DH.

Congratulations to Mark Britnell of KPMG, who in the best tradition of all things world-class, has now gone global. He is to be the management consultancy's Global Head of Healthcare, and oversee the company's global healthcare strategy.

This will include setting up three regional centres of excellence Americas, Europe and Asia and the South Pacific. KPMG also plans to appoint up to 15 new partners in the next year to join its growing global health team.

Regular HPI readers will remember my previous exclusives revealing the sale of the NHS Information Centre’s share in commercial joint venture Dr Foster Intelligence to the Secretary of State for Health, and subsequent follow-up piece about Dr Foster’s “put” option on their shareholding in DFI, allowing them to compel the IC or SoS to buy the Dr Foster shareholding at market value until 2013.

The answer, it seems, is thirty organisations across the English NHS.

The question is less straightforward to discern, but the answer certainly seems to be thirty organisations across the English NHS.

This information is drawn from my story yesterday looking at Slide 29 of Sir Philip Green’s report for the Cabinet Office into (in)efficient government purchasing.

That slide is pretty clearly about the DH: it gets the number of SHAs right (10), although it slightly misses on the correct number of PCTs

Health Service Journal has obtained a statement from FT network chair Peter Griffiths in response to the NHS Confederation's suspension of FT network director Sue Slipman yesterday.

This is going to get messy, clearly.

Irwin Brown of the Socialist Health Association looks at the bid by the Local Government Association’s bid for a prominent place in the post-White Paper future

The responses to Equity And Excellence are now in. Support for the aims but almost universal agreement that the proposals will not deliver the aims, at least not without high risk, as argued with great authority by the Kings Fund.

The Guardian carries the sad news of the death of former nurse, midwife, agony aunt and patient movement champion Claire Rayner, aged 79 at her home.

She had been living with cancer since the early part of this decade, and in 2006 wrote this piece about it for the BBC website.

The NHS Confederation's response to the White Paper Equity And Excellence is published today.

In common with most of the responses so far, it opens with a statement of support for the aims of focusing on quality and empowering patients, and for greater clinical involvement in commissioning decisions.