Don't know about you, but I flinched when I saw those 'Nurses: now the backlash' and 'Nurses fly into blood money row' headlines. They were all about the two British nurses released in Saudi Arabia, of course, but in a week of headlines about bogus angels and clamps left in patients one comes to fear the worst.

As the Journal noted last week, Frank Dobson also took a beating from the loyal Mirror with that 'Embarrassed, Mr Dobson? You should be bloody well ASHAMED' splashed across the front page. It surfaced two days after the paper's post-war presiding genius, Hugh Cudlipp, went to his final deadline. So perhaps that Cudlippian attack was a sub-conscious tribute.

Very unhelpful all the same, especially when Tory leader William Hague chose to make those rising NHS waiting lists his theme of the week at Question Time in the Commons next day and duly duffed up Tony Blair. Whenever the PM protested that it would take time as well as money to cure the Tory legacy, Mr Hague said that Labour's famous five early pledges 'did not come with all those footnotes and excuses'.

Which is only marginally unkinder than the Mirror's Jill Palmer (with whom I worked half a lifetime ago) in her page 1 outburst. As the Journal noted, we are running up to reshuffle time and Mr Blair does not like colleagues who let him down. 'He likes performance,' one tough Labour insider stresses.

So what was again impressive about Dobbo was that he did not let grass grow under the ministerial feet. He summoned Ms Palmer back to the Department of Health sofa to rattle off his achievements - from breast cancer cash to the hospital building programme - and to insist that waiting lists have risen for the last time. 'Embarrassed, yes. Ashamed, no,' he told her.

On an equally practical note his political bagman, Joe 'Enforcer' McCrea was dispatched to the grubby press corridors of Westminster to tell people like me how the quarterly waiting list figures - published just before the Whit recess, as Mr Hague quipped - weren't quite as bad as predicted - or leaked. A 35,700 increase, when 40,000 had been predicted, a slower rate of increase and so on. We were left feeling that Dobbo was positively thrilled the figures were so good. 'Break open the Wincarnis, Mrs D,' he probably told his wife that evening.

The week's flurry of activity had started with a recycled pounds68m for mental health and ended with the publication of those carrot-and-stick waiting list targets for each region, supervised on Dobbo's behalf by NHS chief Alan Langlands in person. You and I may complain that talk is free and 'rebuttal units' expensive. But the contrast between Mr Dobson's appearance of being in control - I put it no higher - and the apparent drift at the Foreign Office in the first week of the Sandline crisis puts Robin Cook in the poorer light.

A more challenging question was raised by Tony Hockley, one of Mr McCrea's Tory predecessors as special adviser at the DoH. He complained that Oppositions make too much of a fetish of waiting lists, then get caught on their own hook when they come to office. The more you trade waiting list statistics, the more discontented folk become about them. Publicity also fuels demand and makes things worse.

Using budgets to restrict access to non-urgent surgery (are we talking about my kidney stone here?) further twists the spiral of mis-matched expectations, suggests Mr Hockley, who now works for fashionable think tank the Social Market Foundation. Waiting list politics 'feeds activity rather than quality', he protests - a phrase that sums up much hyper-active Blairism.

I'm tempted to ask who re-started this waiting list caper. Why Dame Virginia, of course. So naturally, Dobsonians are dismissive of this kind of talk. They point to Liberal Democrats like Evan Harris for making Hockley-ish points about waiting list politics distorting clinical priorities - while his colleague, Simon Hughes, bangs on about, well, waiting lists actually.

But what about this extra pounds6bn for the NHS that Comrade Blair is supposed to be promising to mark its 50th birthday in July, I hear you ask. The rumour that it would come as part of the reallocation of resources arising from the comprehensive spending review started in the Indy, but is not Dobson-inspired.

'Tell the Indy I am not **** going to **** say anything about the **** spending review and you can **** print that,' the People's Frank is supposed to have declared, Mo Mowlam-fashion. Dobson has made a virtue of not leaking lurid accounts of his battles with 'Iron' Gordon Brown. Yet pounds6bn over four years is not a huge amount and the plan seemed quite plausible to me. But the word is, there is no word. 'It's Shtum City here,' say sources close to the Enforcer.