Over the Christmas break a couple of people used a very powerful political metaphor to explain to me why they think it was inevitable that the Conservatives would mess up their reform of the NHS.

The analogy, now 40 years old, springs from the way in which long term peace was made between the People’s Republic of China and the US in the early 1970s. Only my very oldest blog readers will remember that after World War 2 civil war in China continued with Chairman Mao and the Communists eventually winning on the mainland. The defeated nationalists retreated to the island of Taiwan. The US did not recognise Communist China, choosing instead to recognise Taiwan as representing the Chinese state.