Whoever could have predicted it? Data just released by Monitor (in great detail) and the TDA (in scant detail) show the NHS provider sector is on the widely-predicted course to at least a £2 billion deficit for 2015-16.

In other exclusive news, bears shit in the woods.

This latest dispatch from the health policy trenches begins with news of Jeremy Hunt in the toilet.

Literally.

It is a Virgin toilet, as we would expect for a Very Important Secretary Of State. However, this is a Virgin toilet in a Virgin Train to the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester.

The former NHS Comrade-In-Chief Sir David Nicholson gave the second NHS Providers Annual Lecture a few weeks ago.

It was a thoughtful, amusing and insightful presentation, expanding on some themes from his July seminar on what the Government should do about NHS finances, and introducing others anew.

In the interests of mischief, here are some key lines from his lecture, and what they might mean translated.

I have previously mentioned that NHS England Sun King Simon Stevens has a way with legislation that doesn't suit his strategy: he simply ignores the shit out of it, in the sure and certain faith that he won't be challenged.

The traumatic legacy of the 2012 legislation is such that PM David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne want to re-onshore health policy from Simon as much as they want a return to recession.

If it hasn't been done already, the socio-cultural impact of classic phrases from Lancashire is undoubtedly a PhD thesis waiting to happen.

Lancastrians are a withering lot, which presumably you need to be if you're going to fight people from Yorkshire about flowers.

It's been an interesting few weeks in health policy. A lot of things that have happened have been even less reasonable than usual.

In fact, it has gotten downright weird. In the words of the late Dr Hunter S Thompson, "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro".

Interview by Andy Cowper

Health Policy Insight: How are the new Vanguards doing?

Simon Stevens: The selection for the first crop of PACS/MCP Vanguards was only four months ago, and the ones chosen were not by any means all the usual suspects; nor were they in parts of the country universally deemed to be 'doing well'.

Transcript of Sir David Nicholson seminar, Civitas 20 July 2015 'Is the Government still ignoring the NHS's finance problem?'

The term 'The Nicholson Challenge' was health select committee chair Stephen Dorrell putting a target on my back. Recently, George Osborne called the Five-Year Forward View (5YFV) 'The Stevens Plan'. Simon will have noticed ...

This Local Government Chronicle story by David Paice, cross-posted on HSJ, shows why the health policy universe needs to understand the circumstances in which health secretary Jeremy Hunt would unleash his Johnson.

And one of the worst-kept secrets in the NHS is revealed: Monitor and the TDA are to sort-of-merge. Both organisations will continue to exist legally, but there will be a new chief executive appointed by both boards.

And it will not be Dr David Bennett.

Dr Bennett feels that he has been fighting a rearguard action with Jeremy Hunt on FT performance for too long.