I very rarely blog about non-health issues but the petrol crisis created by ministers last week made me think about how Andrew Lansley's communication skills seem to have become part of the way in which other cabinet members now  talk to the public.

At the beginning of the week the Government thought it might be a useful political dividing line against the opposition to argue that Unite, a trade union they claim owns the Labour Party, was going to bring the country to its knees over Easter. This appeared to them to be a clever way of establishing the Labour opposition as being to blame – and in some way the cause of long petrol queues.