Mr Cameron made a huge error when he embraced the NHS But I cannot help thinking that our rage against the "anonymising" of the former officials is a form of displacement. It is simply the easiest thing to hold on to in a story where everything is so long-drawn-out, complicated and appalling that it is almost impossible to focus. The CQC report this week is about (in part) the suppression of another CQC report which was itself looking at whether the CQC had done a proper inspection into a hospital trust before registering it. In the background is yet another report (about which the CQC was not, allegedly, informed) about what happened in Furness, where not only poor Joshua but several other babies and two mothers were also SUIs (ie dead). Reading through the evidence, you keep coming across new mind-boggling facts. You learn that there were, at one time, three Joint Collaborative Reviews of similar things going on. You encounter jargon, such as this from the meeting notes of CQC's Regional Director, which says "Bulleting to cascade lessons learnt shared across trust has been developed." And sloppiness: an investigation manager decides not to pursue the story of Joshua Titcombe after he has given himself only an evening to study 13 documents and 95 pages of information. "I do not think the case meets are [sic] criteria for further investigation," he emails yawningly when he wakes up the following morning. You gradually understand that the system doesn't and can't work. Those employed inside it recognise this. If they are brave people, they complain, and this makes them unpopular. If they are average, not very brave people, they simply do their best to survive, pretending to hit the targets which are themselves pretences. If they are unpleasant people, they grab such power as the system affords - the power to appoint your cronies, secure large pensions, accumulate honours, invent new "training toolkits" for Equality and Diversity etc, and work out how to use their present job to get an even better-paid one. "Wherever we find failure," proclaimed the CQC annual report in 2010, the year when it gave the Furness hospital trust (UHMB) the unwarranted all-clear, "we do not hesitate to take appropriate and proportionate action." The resemblance to communist regimes boasting about their five-year plans as the harvest fails or steel production becomes unsellable is spooky. In the Sir David Nicholson/Cynthia Bower scheme of things, patients play the same role as workers in the old Soviet system - forever invoked, forever oppressed. Like Politburo members doing well out of the Ukrainian famine, Sir David and Ms Bower rose to even greater power through their triumphs in Mid Staffs where (over a period which extended longer than their own particular terms of office) 1,200 patients died unnecessarily. After the Francis Report into the Mid Staffs scandal appeared, David Cameron made a critical error. Instead of showing Sir David the door, he praised his "grip and grasp" of the NHS. Sir David stayed. Now the great man has finally told us that he is leaving his job as Chief Executive next year, but he departs full of official honours, gripping and grasping a pension pot of £1.9 million. The Government has not emphasised that the currently disastrous shape of the NHS and its regulatory system is the creation of Labour. The Nicholsons and Bowers are figures of the Blair/Brown era. They are the breed of managerialists who have come up through directing social services, working for trade unions, running local councils, unsullied by any humane education, professional knowledge (hardly any of those who run health are doctors) or experience of business. They have titles and salaries which ape the private sector, but a mindset and a network which are the purest creations of pre-credit-crunch welfarism. Why hasn't the Coalition, especially its dominant Tory partner, made hay with this? Because it made a huge strategic error very early on. Mr Cameron became Tory leader largely because he rightly recognised that his party needed to commit itself to public services. How could a party govern unless it could be trusted with health or schools? But he wrongly decided that this meant endorsing existing forms. In his first party conference speech as leader, in 2006, he said: "Tony Blair once explained his priority in three words: education, education, education. I can do it in three letters: NHS. Instead of endorsing what mattered - health care for all - Mr Cameron endorsed our particular system delivering it. It is the worst in the Western world. It is organised from the centre and run by the producers and the trade unions. The one thing it cannot do is what we all most want - to look at the whole patient and meet his or her medical needs. Anyone on a waiting list (currently 24 weeks in our area for a rheumatology appointment) experiences this. So does anyone elderly, or with an elderly relation. So do the queues in A and E, the sick who cannot get a GP at weekends; so did the dead in Mid Staffs or Barrow-in-Furness. Out of a sense of their own weakness, the Conservatives put themselves in hock to the sort of service that a man like David Nicholson delivers. It was out of a similar vulnerability - in Labour's case, about how to deal with capitalists - that Gordon Brown abased himself in front of the bankers. It has all gone wrong. As the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt rushes from studio to studio trying to get ahead of the story, you can tell by his hunted look that he sees this, too late.