I missed the story in The Sunday Times about Monitor's executive chair Bill Moyes' expenses. There was much to miss.

Good morning to you. Time is not my friend today, so this will be by way of a short catch-up.

Item! I am no longer acting press officer for NHS Alliance. The real press officer returned to work yesterday (welcome back Ana), and so both you, dear reader, and I can lose any concern about me using this as a mouthpiece for a client. I hope we both know I wouldn't, but you've got to be open about these matters. Ask MPs.

Surgical sexism

Posting twice in one day? I am spoiling you, Ambassador ...

However, this piece in the Staggers caught my eye irresistably. I don't think I have chuntered on yet about the Loi Bachelet, which basically proposes that managers will decide what care hospitals deliver.

Good morning and happy Friday to you. The sun is shining. Hurrah.

Fingers crossed, from the middle of next week a more normal service will be resumed here, as I will have finished a book on the NHS (touch wood), and finished being the acting press officer for NHS Alliance. Both are interesting challenges.

The art of management books - for such we must call it, as there's certainly no science - is to suggest that success and wealth are as easy as ABC, if you'll just do it the way Jack Welsh / Jim Collins /Tom Friedman / insert guru of choice here, tell you to.

Good evening to you.

Just a brief alert to the arrival of a new and prophetic Maynard Doctrine column here tonight.

There has been no briefing to Professor Maynard (you will probably be aware that trying to brief such a man is unlikely to benefit anybody). This excellent analysis arrived in the editorial inbox unbriefed and unheralded.

But it chimes with what we have been suggesting here for some time: that economically, things are much, much, much less rosy for the NHS than many are still assuming.

Professor Alan Maynard OBE wonders why the NHS fails to prepare for the worst, when facing dire economic circumstances

Where are the UK’s finances now?
The current economic situation is grim, and this must inform our planning to ensure that we protect as best we can both the volume and quality of healthcare delivered to the local population.

Here are two key issues to bear in mind:

The sun has finally set on a good day. I have had a good day, good sleep, a glass or two of good Chablis, a good barbecued dinner.

Sometimes, you just need a good day to remind you what they feel like.

Today was a good day.

Good evening. Another unexpected leave of absence ends - or was it absent without leave? It's so hard to tell these days.

Anyway, you have had fresh Maynard Doctrine, revealing the Conservative Party's modest proposals on public spending for their inexorable-looking arrival on the preferable side of the Mace next summer. And you are not the complaining types: I know you.

Professor Alan Maynard OBE makes full disclosure of a document passed to him anonymously

The postmark on the brown envelope in which this document was sent to me is, unfortunately, too blurred for legibility, and the address printed on a label. There is, in short, no indication as to who sent this document or why.

Nevertheless in the zeitgeist spirit of freedom of information, its contents are as follows.

[DOUCUMENT BEGINS]
Private and Confidential

Memorandum: Plans for the Reform of the NHS in 2010

No, this is not going to be about redundancy pay-offs for sacked chief executives. What were you thinking?

No, this is going to be about Lord Darzi's 'Innovation for a Healthier Future' scheme, announced today. £220 million is to be made available across the ten SHAs over the next five years to encourage innovation. The National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and the Young Foundation will work as advisers to the SHAs.