Now I’m not saying that when I was advising new Labour Ministers on health reform that we didn’t sometimes do the wrong thing. Of course we did. But generally when someone came up with a really crazy idea someone would say “Hang on – let’s just think about that for a bit longer shall we?” A warning bell would go off in somebody’s head – and we would all calm down.

It is perhaps a measure of the trouble that Andrew Lansley is in that when he said, “ I have this great idea of playing a continuous loop of me on every TV in all the nation’s hospitals”, that everyone around him appears to have said, “Great idea Andrew – lets do it!”