Just when you thought it was safe to start reading the papers again, there’s a another outbreak of political twattery - this time from the new lot. Andrew Lansley wants to fine hospitals if they re-admit patients within 30 days of discharge. None of you need me to point out what a facile load of ordure this represents - others have done that already, and when even The Guardian’s health correspondent can foresee problems, it should be clear to anyone that the Secretary of State for Health has inherited his predecessors’ difficulty concerning orifice selection when making policy statements.

Still, it will open up a whole new area of practice for the Trust Loophole Department (you know, the people who dreamed up the ‘clinical decision unit’ concept to avoid breaching the A&E 4 hour wait target, and the re-badging of any nurse with more than three GCSEs as a ‘consultant’ to avoid the inconvenient tendency of real doctors to want to keep patients hanging around long enough to actually examine them). They will now be able to support the focus-group driven initiative to provide care closer to the patient’s home by establishing a complex bureaucracy to ensure that no patient gets re-admitted during the penalty period. This will give GPs a valuable opportunity to hone their skills and acquire new ones. COPD patients, discharged after their latest exacerbation, will have their day 14 left anterior descending occlusion managed for a couple of weeks by Dr Finlay and the home angioplasty team (one nurse practitioner who has ‘done the course’ assisted by a couple of slack-jawed teenagers undertaking their work-experience as Auxiliary Interventional Technicians), until they (well, the lucky few) can be admitted to the CCU for salvage on day 31. Brave new world indeed.

To think that we had high hopes of Andrew. Perhaps they really are all the same? That would be depressing.

Oh well, it won’t matter for most of us, if the Daily Mash is to be believed - we’ll all be on the beach.