I can understand how impatient the current Secretary of State must be to get the discussion about the nation’s health back to ‘the big picture’ and away, for example, from the detail of who, out of the NCB, Public Health England, the local Health and Well-being boards and the local Clinical Commissioning Groups is actually responsible for commissioning services that will decrease the number of smokers. (The answer being of course, all of them).

Yet this impatience cannot explain the blindness to his own culpability shown by his interview with the Daily Telegraph yesterday.