If the upper classes have a flaw - and I, for one, am happy to concede the possibility - it is perhaps a tendency to overlook "the little man". This term, obviously, should not be taken literally. The people's historian Andrew Roberts may be diminutive but he, most assuredly, is no one's idea of “a little man".

Equally, the shrill former Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Öpik may be over six foot tall but in so many, and increasing, ways he is very much "a little man". In short, being "little" is a state of mind.

So it is that the "littlest" man in the cabinet is not Michael Gove but Andrew Lansley. We have all known Lansley since he was our boss at the Conservative Party research department in the early 1990s, and we have - with pretty good reasons - been ignoring him ever since.

To sum things up, the CBE he received for running Major's campaign in 1992 is widely acknowledged to be one of John's better jokes. When we took over the party, AL was in situ as shadow health secretary and, with more pressing things to detain us, we never quite got round to replacing him. And then with all the kerfuffle and confusion surrounding cobbling together the coalition, he once again avoided the axe.

“He's a safe pair of hands," we said to each other when it dawned on us that we had forgotten to sack him. "He may not have much going for him, but he's very good at doing nothing," was the reassuring consensus. This judgement call proved to be a mistake. Lansley, while idling his time away talking to GPs, was, from this most unpromising of beginnings, quietly plotting a revolution.

I must say, I've never really understood GPs. The whole point of being a doctor, surely, is to work in a hospital. Everything else is just padding.

This, as we have learned to our cost, is a view that Lansley does not share.The South Cambridgeshire man clearly, and perhaps uniquely, not only listens to GPs but reveres them to such an extent that he regards them as potential providers of that most elusive of elixirs, affordable health care. "The Little Man", with grinding predictability, has entrusted the future of the NHS to the "little men and women". And now, because we took our eye off the ball, we are lumbered with defending a policy that is borderline bonkers.

Understandably, Dave "NHS" Cameron is less than thrilled by this development and the more Lansley's Grand Plan unravels, the tetchier he becomes. He rails against members of the cabinet; he rails against his enemies, real and imagined; he rails, dear reader, against me. And I quite understand.

When the NHS collapses under the weight of general practitioner inefficiency and stupidity there will be only two people blamed for the chaos, and one of them will be utterly overlooked in the rush to destroy our dear Prime Minister.