I don’t lightly encourage people to watch interviews with ‘Appless Matt ‘Ancock, Secretary Of State For The Time Being.

But I have to make an exception for this classic.
 
It starts at 4 minutes 30 in, and is notable for two things.

In the ongoing bonfire of the sanities that is Brexit, the ‘Appless ‘Un tells a grateful nation that as part of the ‘no deal’ plans for crashing out of the EU on 29 March 2019, he has become the biggest buyer of refrigerators in the world.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE – Health Policy Insight's been on a hiatus for a while because, well, life. This column was written for my regular Monday HSJ slot, and delayed due to legal concerns. It now appears, following HSJ editor Alastair McLellan’s barnstorming editorial on the matters in question.]

Those whom the Gods of health policy would destroy, they first make over-enthusiastic about tech solutions.

L P Hartley's 'The Go-Between' opens with the magnificent line "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there".

For HPI's favourite lying-buffoon-turned-Foreign Secretary Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson, the truth is increasingly becoming a foreign country.

The historian Robert Conquest is famous for his 'three laws of politics':
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Budget Day rolls around fast: this year, the cacophony of requests for more funding for the NHS has been almost incessant.

In my HSJ column, I assumed that the NHS is not going to get the £4 billion a year it needs to keep things stable as they are. (This doesn't include a staff pay rise, not getting waiting times back on track.)

Fireworks Night was three days ago, but you wouldn't know it from NHS Commissioning Board boss Simon Stevens' bold intervention at the NHS Providers conference in Birmingham.

In a delightful display of political chutzpah, Stevens is using the '£350 million bullshit bus' to bolster the case for a meaningful funding increase in the Budget on 22 November.

Who's the audience for this intervention?

And will it work?

Bypassing the politicians

Twitter legend CCG Cassander has welcomed me back to Health Policy Insight duties with this guest editorial: his brilliant suggestion for fresh transatlantic learning opportunities for the NHS

As I write, much digital ink is being spilled over a proposed “NHS Airbnb” scheme, where private landlords would be paid to provide rooms to recovering patients.

Hello. I've been a bit busy of late, so as a thing that doesn't earn me any money, Health Policy Insight has had to pause.

Why the un-pause, now?

Oh ... there's been a tipping point coming, which I've been tracking in the new weekly 'Cowper's Cut' column for HSJ every Monday.

Last night's BBC Newsnight had a good exposition of the issues facing the service.

Regular readers will be aware that I am not a particularly big fan of chocolate teapot Labour 'leader' Jeremy Corbyn.

If any further proof were needed that Mr Corbyn is an weapons-grade arsehole and onanist, he furnished it with his mendacious comments in a recent interview with Sophy Ridge on Sky News.

Mr Corbyn's target was the late Andrew Roth, whose columns on health and politics I had the pleasure of editing in my tenure running the British Journal of Healthcare Management.

The War On Reality is nothing new.