On the second day of the third strike, the junior doctors are standing as solid as ever, just over half are on strike, with most of those not striking staying in to cover emergency work. Thousands more non-urgent operations are cancelled, adding to the backlog already growing due to the extreme pressure the NHS was under long before this.

It’s an impasse. The new contract has been imposed and the government has withdrawn from all further talks while these young-ish doctors have been radicalised by the way they have been treated: they look unlikely to buckle any time soon – on the picket lines, they are garnering waves of public support in beeps, claps and whistles.

“Our door is always open for talks”, says the BMA, but Jeremy Hunt’s door is slammed shut. Crucial to all this is public opinion: if Hunt thinks it will swing his way he may be making yet another of his serial miscalculations. So far, YouGov finds only 17% on his side, with a minority even of Tory voters thinking he’s “doing a good job”. The public backs the doctors, with 62% of the population believing they are overworked and giving that as the biggest cause of medical compensation cases.

Today’s latest figures on the state of the NHS show how badly it’s coping with its tightest ever financial squeeze. More than one in 10 patients are waiting longer than four hours in A&E, the worst performance for more than a decade. The number of patients waiting in emergency departments to be admitted to hospital has spiked to almost 52,000, the worst since “trolley waits” started being recorded, and delays in discharging patients are also rising. The King’s Fund, sober health analysts, say: “These are symptomatic of the perfect storm through which NHS trusts are trying to steer – with pressures on services across the board. Most trusts are operating with very high bed occupancy which makes it difficult to respond to unexpected fluctuations in admissions.” Winter, say many health economists, is the new NHS normal.

Hunt, brought in to pour oil on the boiling waters of the NHS after the wreckage of Andrew Lansley’s regime, has poured on petrol. And he keeps doing it. Cameron’s manifesto pledge of a “truly seven-day NHS” had no money attached. Why did Hunt start with the juniors, who already do more seven-day working than the rest? How did he think it could be done without adding any money to their pay? What’s needed for seven-day working is more diagnostics and other services, some outsourced, all of which cost a lot more. The seven-day trope has come under the microscope, with the editor of the British Medical Journal indignant at Cameron and Hunt’s abuse of weekend death rate figures, misused from research the BMJ published. Some 11,000 more people do not die at weekends. The fact that more of those admitted over those days die within 30 days has multiple causes, including the case mix of patients going into hospital Monday to Friday.

But all that makes it harder for the government to back down now. The consultants are next in line: will they be handled any better? Far from calming strife, Hunt is threatening to sack entire trust boards if they fail to both fix their debts and improve their quality – impossible under current pressure. This week he produced a new league table of shame listing the best and worst trusts at “learning from their mistakes”, which stirred even the supinely obedient NHS Confederation of employers to indignation at “crude use of data”. How many more parts of the NHS can he alienate and outrage?

This strike would have been centre-stage, with No 10 anxious about the deadlock, but political attention has been diverted to the pointless and destructive EU referendum, which has immersed Cameron in war with his own party. Two more two-day strikes are scheduled, and the question is who blinks first. Hunt is described inside NHS England as a dead man walking, expected to be removed in a post-referendum reshuffle – assuming remain wins, so Cameron remains. But three and a half months is too long to wait for a new minister to resolve this, as NHS waiting times lengthen. Making peace now would be the wise strategy, if No 10 were focusing.

Tomorrow, the NHS bill gets its second reading; put forward by Caroline Lucas, it is supported by Labour and a roll-call of the great and good and distinguished campaigning medics. It seeks to restore the NHS to a single unified service, ending the expensive and disruptive fragmentation caused by clinical commissioning groups purchasers tendering out services for providers to bid for. That is what Simon Stevens, head of NHS England, is trying to effect quietly, but he may not succeed without a change in the law, as private companies are already protesting if they are denied their legal right to bid.

Most strikes end badly and sadly, in my experience, with a compromise and a bit of a climb down on both sides, a deflating anticlimax for staff who have stirred up great collective endeavour. But this one will leave deep scars on the NHS that will last for years. These junior doctors, who work harder than almost anyone in Britain, will not forgive. They will become the consultants and NHS leaders of the future, and will be unlikely to acquiesce so easily to myriad abominations imposed by politicians for the sheer fun of re-disorganising the service from the top. The government should beware radicalising the cleverest, most dedicated, most popularly admired people in the public sector. Hunt will be long gone, but they will be there for decades. No 10 should remember that 98% of them voted for this strike, so it’s time to recognise Hunt’s monumental error and back down fast.