Last week, 18 months into his tenure as Secretary of State, Andrew Lansley made a speech at Reform where he unfortunately confirmed that he was going to bail out inefficient hospitals. I will return to that later in the week.

But it would be very churlish not to note that in this speech – for the first time – he dropped his obsession with structural reforms and began to address the crisis that is developing in many of the nation’s NHS hospitals. He said,