The Titanic’s second sinking, the late Ron Paul, the re-emerging Nick Clegg, the nerd asking Labour’s questions, the rising unemployed, the collapsing NHS, the demanding IMF, and the strange demise of Mr Kurt Kumschick.

Trending on Twitter at the moment is the news that Titanic 2 is the latest sequel movie. The view is 99% that it’s a daft idea (I’d call it more desperate than daft) but as ever the 99% just might be wrong. Myself, I’m intrigued to know WTF T2 could be about. Titanic resurfaces and takes revenge on icebergs everywhere, accelerating global warming? (Sponsors: University of East Anglia). The mind boggles…in a vague, not very interested sort of way.

Truly mind-boggling, however, is the only way I’d describe the possibility that, at long last, US GOP voters may have decided there’s no difference between a Gingrich and a Perry when you want to be shot of an Obama. Albeit trending from miles behind, the legendary Texan banker and Congressman Ron Paul is catching up with the Republican leaders for the Presidential nomination. Several press media in the States are now predicting that a snowball effect for Paul could wipe out Gingrich in Iowa. The general liberal view of Mr Paul is that he’s a nut, but I like the bloke: he has sensible ideas, is economically and fiscally literate, loathes debt, and is calling for an ethical revolution in the US. Good for him: I hope he blows Newt right out of his tank.

But if American voters dump Perry along the way, will Dave dump Clegg? Tory backbenchers were close to tumescent at the prospect on Monday and Tuesday this week, as EU events conspired to turn a cock-up in Brussels into a triumphantly brave Prime Ministerial decision. But then Slick Nick turned up for PMQs yesterday, and at a stroke he and Cammers were the best of jolly old pals again. Even worse for the eurosceptic wing, the FCO is already hard at work rebuilding bridges with Berlin, and looking for other elephant traps into which badly briefed Ministers might fall.

Ed Miliband clearly saw the Clegg reappearance as an opportunity to stick one in, but he walked into two sucker punches from the PM, who these days tends to swat the Labour leader rather than debate with him. You always know where you are with Labour: they always choose completely inappropriate leaders. In 1994, they chose one who wasn’t even a socialist. Now they’ve chosen a claymation Nerd who sits looking like a truculent 3rd former once Dave has socked him on the jaw yet again.

Ed did of course have the perfect aperture to catch Cameron red-handed, when a grovelly Tory backbench question on immigration evoked a completely misleading answer from the Conservative leader. Camerlot has failed to even slow down immigration: but that’s a no-go area for Labour, which thinks the more immigrants there are, the merrier we will be. I’d say “cosy” rather than merry, but there you are. The piffle talked about ‘skills shortages’ in the UK completely ignores the fact that, as of yesterday, we have 2.46 million unemployed people here, and a disagraceful 22% level among young people under 24. They’re unemployed primarily because of our potty economic bias and irrelevant educational choices, but they can be retrained: isn’t that what Labour oppositions are supposed to demand? Hmm: not if they get a job and move up the social scale….then they won’t vote Labour any more.

But for my money, next to the inferno about to rip through our economy from the European Bunion, the large cricket bat about to swing and thwack Camerlot right between the eyes is the NHS. I’ve posted about Andrew Landslide so many times now, it’s well beyond a joke. Rarely in the history of health ministers has one clown produced such an appalling mess, from which by far the deepest in the poo are the patients themselves.

We have a cold winter forecast, and quite one of the nastiest flu-bugs in years taking hold among the elderly. And if you haven’t been on the ground recently as far as the NHS is concerned, I’m afraid the sad truth is that hospital waiting times, incoherent patient care, and appalling standards are already on the rise again.

The Coalition answer has been to tinker, because the LibDems and Tories have very little genuine common ground when it comes to public healthcare. Left to themselves, the Tories would simply hand all the budget to GPs, and sell all the hospitals to BUPA et al. The Cleggies, by contrast, would just keep chucking money at it, while telling everyone else to keep their hands off it. Add Andrew Lansley to this mix, and you have the menage a trois masquerading as policy that pertains currently: patching up botched PFI hospitals, and pretending that selling hospitals to dodgy combines is really mutuality. I have only one senior contact in the NHS these days (all volunteers as sources gratefully received), and she describes the general mood in the service as “despair”. She is not prone to exaggeration.

We will never stop the National Health Service being a political football stuffed with bureaucrats and diversity outlook managers until we take it out of politics. My answer remains what it has been for three years: make every area health authority a mutual company – unavailable for sale, and owned by staff and community. Dump free at the point of purchase completely, bring in tougher pharmco negoiators, make more people pay more for prescriptions, but ultimately stop seeing GPs as wannabe enterpreneurs: they do not compete, and would drown if asked to. They are there to be doctors, not bloody healthcare tycoons.

Onwards and upwards. Dave says we are ‘only’ going to throw away £10bn on a currency we don’t use. And UBS says a very big boy did something naughty and then died. The bank’s late marketing head Kurt Kumschick (with a name like that, you’d die of shame) turns out to be the man in the dock in the case of UBS creating a 100% illegal offshore investment vehicle for its richest client, Anil Ambani. Being no longer of the physical realm, Herr Cumqwat is not around to contest this allegation, although he did leave an email behind blaming himself entirely.

How very thoughtful of  him to get his affairs in order prior to death. And how very convenient for his surviving colleagues.