Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, is on the ropes. Yesterday, in the Commons, he announces a three months “pause” in the progress through Parliament of the Health and Social Care Bill so he can listen to his critics and reassure them.

We learn the Prime Minister is taking personal control of the NHS reforms.

The Conservatives are in deep trouble.

Burnley’s “hospital campaigner” rises to ask a question.

Birtwistle, if only he realised, has Lansley over a barrel.

He could demand the immediate reinstatement of (a) A&E at his local hospital or (b) the in-patient Deerplay children’s ward. Both went down the road to Blackburn.

He does neither.

Instead, he slags off the previous Labour Government for the umpteenth time.

He wants Lansley to say that the new NHS reforms will guarantee these things will never happen again.

The delphic Lansley obliges, adding

As we go through the painful process of examining how they (ie the new tests) are applied to the situations that we have inherited, on occasion we can say things to help colleagues, but sometimes we cannot.

Seems to me Lansley is telling Birtwistle to prepare himself for bad news and that he may not be getting the A&E department or the children’s ward back again.

Alas, Birtwistle is too dim to realise.

The one-term Lib Dem MP spends all his time pointlessly criticising “bureaucrats in the PCT and SHA and prime donna consultants”, unelected quangoes or the Labour Party rather than his own Conservative coalition partners who have the power to change things.

Elsewhere… My spies tell me that the North West Strategic Health Authority has now written to Lansley asking when he is going to make a decision on the closure of the Deerplay Children’s ward at Burnley General Hospital.

The indecisive and prevaricating Lansley has been sitting on a recommendation from the Independent Reconfiguration Panel since 21 January.

Cameron on Pakistan's rich

Cameron is absolutely right to insist Pakistan should start taxing its rich elite.

They buy expensive houses in Mayfair and in the Home Counties while scandalously paying next to no income tax in Pakistan.

It is a disgrace that only 1% of Pakistanis pay income tax which is, to all intents and purposes, a voluntary tax.

The ever swelling numbers of Pakistan’s poor and uneducated are ignored by the country’s self serving elite whose main preoccupation is the featherbedding of their own nests.

So when the UK gives a whopping £650m in aid to help tackle the shocking levels of illiteracy in Pakistan it is right there should be strings attached.

It's time for the country’s richest to dig into their own pockets and stop shamelessly sponging off others.