Lansley has won, in a way

At two thirty this afternoon, the Deputy Speaker announced to the House of Commons that the Queen had granted Royal Assent to the Health and Social Care Act. It seemed fitting that the House was debating assisted suicide at the time. The agonies of watching this cursed legislation twitch and stumble its way onto the statute book were enough to make anyone with half a concern for well-ordered public policy start Googling the names of Swiss exit clinics. Albeit there would have been the risk that Number 10 had already paid for Andrew Lansley’s ticket to join you there.

Suddenly, though, the politics of health are very different. Mr Lansley, for all the opprobrium he has borne, has his Parliamentary mandate. He has won. Labour, and all the other critics who made it such an overriding objective to stop the Bill, have lost. It will be fascinating to see how these forces now deal with the changed circumstances.