The doctors are getting restless. Labour may have been welcomed in 1997 as the saviour of the NHS, but political capital eventually runs out.

Too many shifts, too many initiatives, too many targets and not enough respect paid to medical expertise have run the tank dry. Few doctors can even remember now why they loathed the Conservatives so much.

Most professionals do not enjoy the luxury of running down their masters with impunity. Loyalty, or at least silence, is bought with the pay packet. Not so doctors, whose hard-won expertise combines with their vocational convictions to make them almost impossible to silence.

But are their latest complaints just another example of medical grumbling, which tends to surface at all times and in almost all circumstances? Not quite.

In about 2000, the Department of Health decided that the medical mafia was an obstacle to progress. Nobody ever quite said so, but policy spoke louder than words.

Much of what has happened since then — independent-sector treatment centres, patient choice, payment-by-results — has as a sub-text its effect on breaking the ability of the profession, especially consultants, to call the tune.

Sheer clumsiness also played its part. The National Programme for IT was introduced with almost no medical input at all, on a “take it or take it” basis. This was fatuous because a complex system needs the wholehearted commitment of its users, and that has never been sought, far less obtained.

Doctors’ attitudes to the NHS are complex. On the one hand, they like its universality and claims to equity. On the other, they dislike its bureaucracy and mistrust its managers. Hovering in the background is the conviction of a lost golden age when doctors ran things much better.

Asked when this was, few could answer.

If the poll has a single message, it is that the Government has lost the support of the very people it needs to make reforms work. To have done so while crossing their palms with sacks of silver is a political failure of almost laughable proportions.

The Government cannot smash the doctors and force through its reforms Thatcher-style, but it has lost the knack of working with them. And, like virginity, once lost that is gone beyond recovery.

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