17:15

Health policy editor Denis Campbell, at the junior doctors demonstration in central London, has just filed this quick analysis of today’s event.



What has today’s demo achieved? It’s hard to say. But the impressive attendance, the fact that the marchers are truly representative of junior doctors not BMA dupes of Jeremy Hunt’s imagination and the support for them from the medical profession as a whole, as well as widespread media and public support, all mark this out as a dispute that is now very tricky for ministers to defuse.

That said, Hunt is playing an ever-harder version of hardball, insisting that junior doctors are in effect having the wool pulled over their eyes by the scheming BMA - a tactic of dubious value - and still insisting that 11,000 people a year die when they shouldn’t just because they were admitted to hospital at the weekend, even though the research paper he cites as the source of that claim specifically does not say that. If anyone is misrepresenting key facts, it’s him.

A Downing Street spokeswoman told me on Friday afternoon that David Cameron is still completely happy with his health secretary’s handling of the dispute and that they remain as one over the government’s offer to England’s 45,000 junior doctors.

The BMA’s move towards holding the ballot for industrial action they first decided upon three weeks ago - details of when it will be held will emerge in the next few days - is likely to bind Cameron and Hunt together, at least publicly.

While the BMA insists that it has been backed into a corner by Hunt - in effect forced to resort to the ballot because their pleas for an agreed settlement have fallen on deaf ears - the reality of them taking industrial action, which is likely to involve action short of a strike, like a work to rule, could yet prove their undoing.

Unlike members of other trade unions like Tube train drivers, it’s very hard for doctors to actually strike, as their patients depend on them.

Indeed, some very senior doctors fear that taking action will hand the initiative back to Hunt, who is currently very much on the defensive.