Happy new year to all Health Policy Insight readers: best wishes for 2013.

We return from our festive shenanigans to the latest phase in Project Francis Is Coming: Look Busy!, in the shape of the announcement that the Friends And Family Test is to have a PR push.

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The following is an extract from our subscription service Health Policy Intelligence, which funds the existence of this site, and costs £69 a year. Email andycowper@hotmail.com for details, or tweet @HPIAndyCowper

Health Policy Intelligence Issue 52 – 21 December 2012

Francis is coming. Look busy!
Welcome to the latest edition of Health Policy Intelligence, the analysis and summary of the key events in policy by Health Policy Insight editor Andy Cowper
editorial@healthpolicyinsight.com / www.Twitter.com/HPIAndyCowper

I may be a world-class curmudgeon, but I do take requests - especially when they come from my friend Alastair McLellan, editor of the indispensable Health Service Journal.

With that in mind, here are a few thoughts about top pollsters Ipsos MORI's 2012 Almanac.

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For some time, I've been meaning to write about the challenges facing provider reconfiguration.

There are a few significant ones, really.

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Click here for details of 'I'm a Health Secretary: Get Me Out Of Here!', the new issue of subscription-based Health Policy Intelligence.

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A wry smile played around the corners of my well-chiselled features when I read Matthew Goodman's piece in The Sunday Times that Ali Parsadoust is to get a pay-off worth £400,000 from Circle, as well as £40,000 a year for his ongoing work as a non-executive director.

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Health Service Journal editor Alastair McLellan has just broken the news on Twitter that Ali Parsadoust, chief executive of Circle Health, has stepped down.

The Circle Holdings property firm announced to investors that he has been replaced by Steve Melton as interim CE.

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Lord Ashcroft, whose tax domiciliary status was such a political talking point in the last decade, contines to spend some of his not inconsiderable fortune on party political opinion polling. Health Policy Insight previously picked up his previous findings here and here

Given Monitor's importance in the new NHS, their recent evidence session with Dr David Bennett, Adrian Masters and Stephen Hay to the Health Select Committee recently is worth reading.

Courtesy of the wonderful Hansard.

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In the finest tradition of Russian Matryoshka dolls, NHS Commissioning Board chief executive Comrade Sir David Nicholson is - to borrow Churchill’s line about Russia - “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, wrapped up in perhaps the most effective politician in Whitehall.

Politics is, after all, the getting, keeping and exercising of power. On those terms, the Comrade-In-Chief has no serious rivals, and few trivial ones.

The DH has published the Secretary of State For Health's mandate to the NHS for the next two years.

It's not actually too bad, but it's no reason to get excited.

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Click here for details of 'I'm a Health Secretary: Get Me Out Of Here!', the new issue of subscription-based Health Policy Intelligence.