Now that Sir Nigel Crisp has been assisted to leave the NHS most of us are left wondering what he will do with his enormous golden handshake.

Perhaps more importantly, there are also some who are wondering what on earth is going to happen to the National Health Service now.

In living memory every election promise ever made contained the phrase, "An increase in spending in real terms on the NHS" and the sum of all those promises is a National Health Service in which more authorities than ever before have run into debt, debt that can only be supported by cutting the services the extra spending was meant to maintain.

Sir Nigel Crisp was a man with a vision for the NHS that did not involve simply spraying it with more money in the na