Many of the larger establishments thought the government must be kidding, and some have paid the price.
The Tory establishment think they have the right to govern the country at any time.
Which leaves the question: why does the political establishment think it will be successful now?
Yet its rigid, hierarchical system provides little opportunity for the young, women and foreigners — precisely those who might help the establishment think differently.
"Tight economic times, costly technological requirements and challenges by organizations that look and act like think tanks are testing what the establishment think tanks do," he said.
The establishment think tanks understandably believe they can, despite acknowledging that choice and competition policy "appears at times to run contrary to the desire for integrated care".
This is the anodyne language of establishment think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations — the kind of places that foreign-policy hawks have always held in a certain degree of contempt.
The occasion of the story is a new report from the establishment think tanks, the King's Fund and Nuffield Trust, to the NHS Future Forum which, in turn, is expected to shape policy at the Department of Health.
Still, the sociopolitical anthropologists and the Eastern establishment think tankers from both parties have been parachuting into the infields and campgrounds of the tracks at Darlington and Daytona, Las Vegas and Fontana, Bristol and Richmond with their clipboards and their digital recorders and their questions, trying in a weekend to understand Nascar dad's complex tribal customs.
What does the establishment think?
"(T he British Establishment think that they have an Empire; that we're it," he said.
