The ballot for the next president of the Royal College of General Practitioners will soon be upon us. The field is strong, the going expected to be good, and in the interests of a spirited but fair race, Dr No offers – or perhaps that should be would like to share with you – his Ten Top Tips for RCGP Presidential Candidates.
1. Establish, first and foremost, that you care. You must make it clear that you care so much it hurts. Never miss an opportunity: books, blogs, twitter and media appearances are all ideal settings in which to show how much you care.
Once upon a time, there were no GPs, only apothecaries. These corner-shop chemists evolved over time into today’s GPs, but their shop-keeping origins are still present even in today’s super-surgeries, and all the more so in the small lock-up single handed surgery. The short appointment times (it’s usually only a shopping trip, for Heaven’s sake), and expectation that the shopper-patient will not walk away empty-handed (what shop-keeper would so disappoint his or her customer?) are two leading characteristics of today’s general practice that stem directly from its apothecarial trade roots.
Word is in the air that The Beard is out to spike Max Pemberton. The redoubtable and excellent Max, whose weekly column in the Telegraph has repeatedly shone penetrating light on the sinister implications of the Tory NHS reforms – and here it is good to praise the Telegraph for printing copy critical of Tory policy – has, by way of his latest column, lit a burner under The Beard, and the balloon has gone up. Word further has it that the balloon is to be navigated to a position directly over Pembers, from which position it will descend hard on him, like a ton of bricks, or more precisely, £90,000 or more of legal costs. The threat follows an earlier failed attempt to drop a injunction banning publication on the Telegraph. You can – for now at least – read the article that provoked such corporate ire 
The Blameless Broadcasting Corporation, which doth protest too much, because it did take sides, by providing skimpy superficial coverage of the Health and Social Care Bill, have at last done something useful. An independent