It seems as if the candidate pool has reduced to three in the race to succeed NHS England chief executive Lord Stevens of Birmingham (the artist formerly known as Simon Stevens).

HSJ reports that NHSE deputy CE Amanda Pritchard, KPMG's Dr Mark Britnell and Leeds City Council boss Tom O'Riordan remain in the race.

Ooops.

The US Food and Drug Administration yesterday asked Innova to stop sales of its Innova SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Qualitative Test.

NHS Improvement chair Baroness Dido Harding on Woman’s Hour: a rough transcript. Interview by Emma Barnett.

Emma Barnett: Is TAT system robust enough to deal with Covid19? It’s been in the papers yesterday about your possibly going for the top NHS England job once Sir Simon Stevens goes. Have you applied?

It’s The People’s Dominic Show day.

The PM’s former chief advisor is giving evidence to the Commons Health/Science select committees’ joint ‘lessons learned’.

Mr Cummings was at the heart of Government during the pandemic. He now has the political and scientific nation’s attention.

This write-up will be as accurate as I can make it, but it is in real time: there will be elisions, omissions and lots of typos.

DC's answer to the opening question states that the Government failed disastrously, and he apologises for his part in that.

Excuse me?

Actually announcing new lockdown restrictions? Out loud, in the real world? (Always fashionably too late, obvs.)

Oh pur-lease, darlings. That's peak cheugy.

So 2020.

The 2021 trend is here, and it's fab-u-lous.

This season, it's all about the 'shush'-y lockdown (a trend first spotted by the fashion bible Manchester Evening News).

Since yesterday's announcement of the abdication of The Sun King Of Skipton House, Sir Simon Stevens, a lot of people have rushed to ask 'who's next?'

Mmmmm. If not mmmmmmmm. As our classicist Prime Minister Boris Johnson might advise, 'festinare lente': more haste, less speed.

It has been simultaneously an open secret, and a jealously guarded one (the date, that is, not the announcement).

This afternoon's news that Sir Simon Stevens will step down as NHS Commissioning Board chief executive gives the end date - the end of July 2021.

Sir Simon has been in post for seven years, which is a long time to do such a job. He is smart enough a man to know that you can stay too long in such roles, and it has not been a secret that he has been developing an exit strategy over the past two years.

'Taking back control'

Meet Emily Gilruth.

She's a jockey.

She had a significant fall in the 2017 Badminton Horse Trials, from which thankfully she made a good recovery.

I'm a fan of the idea of crowdfunding, and of insurgent media organisations holding the powerful to account.

I am not, however, a fan of blatantly misleading people.

It's disappointing that the crowd-funded Open Democracy, which has had some important stories about the pandemic, is misleading its funders and readers in its report that it "won our lawsuit" over the NHS contract for using the Palantir software and tools.

This is, in fact, untrue. It is the opposite of the truth.

Simon's off.

No, not that Simon: the other Simon.

The demotion from being director of communications for The Sun King Of Skipton House Sir Simon Stevens to working for a mere Prince of Wales is a tough fall from grace in the royal pecking order.

However, if anyone can manage it, then it's the affable and cheery Simon Enright, literally and metaphorically the outgoing director of communication for the NHS Commissioning Board.

He announced his exit to his fellow NHSCB staff in the letter below.