How long before Rishi Sunak goes off his own pledges?

When I was a student, my housemates and I would buy our groceries from a shop that offered only days of the week as the best before. We had a lettuce that went off on ‘Tuesday’, bread that would go stale on a ‘Thursday’, and so on. It was useful for the shop, and useful for a bunch of cash-strapped students as we could effectively decide which Tuesday the food would spoil by, rather than throwing it out. 

I thought of that lettuce this week when Downing Street decided to make one of Rishi Sunak’s five ‘immediate priorities’ – to have NHS waiting lists falling – impossible to meet. The release accompanying the Prime Minister’s speech said ‘by March, NHS waiting lists will fall’. Which March? It couldn’t possibly be this coming March: the forecasts, leaked to The Spectator’s Kate Andrews, all assume that waiting lists have got a way to rise first.