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The summer is over, schools are back, parliament is starting up and party conferences are just around the corner. The political - and journalistic - world remains transfixed by the Hutton Inquiry. The reasons are obvious. Putting aside the eventual verdict - most likely a "score draw" with Blair and Campbell vindicated on the charge of "sexing up" the infamous Iraq dossier but with Labour damaged in the eyes of the public - for anyone with the remotest interest in politics this has been a feast. The painstaking interrogation of witnesses combined with the unprecedented disclosure of internal memos and e-mails has offered an extraordinarily detailed insight into how the current government operates. Only a fraction of the documentation has reached the broader public gaze through the pages of the newspapers, but what a rich haul that has been. We have seen the briefing that Alastair Campbell provides for Tony Blair for Prime Minister’s Questions - and it amounts to a script, complete with soundbites. And we have seen exactly how dominant the prime minister’s office is in Whitehall - at no stage in Geoff Hoon’s evidence, for example, did we get the impression that as Her Majesty’s secretary of state for defence he had any real autonomy. Students and political scientists will mine the data on the Hutton Inquiry’s website, not for the disclosure of secrets but because here is revealed the fine grain of an administration.

However, as autumn advances normal service will resume. The focus will return to the hard grind of government. So what will we see in the new term? First, there will be increasing optimism about the National Health Service. The chancellor’s generous increase in funding combined with the massive capital improvement programme initiated in Labour’s first term is now delivering tangible improvement on the ground. Though headlines are still dominated by horror stories we are close to a tipping point. For some time now NHS chief executives have been telling me that services are being vastly improved - their stories are now being echoed by anecdotal evidence from friends and acquaintances. When word-of-mouth reaches critical mass then we will realise that our NHS is once more world-class - after all, unlike France we did not have 10,000 excess deaths because of the heat-wave. Second, the city agenda will continue to gain in importance. City leadership is undergoing a real renaissance. From Ken Livingstone in London through Howard Bernstein in Manchester to Donald Anderson in Edinburgh we have politicians and chief executives with real vision and the skills to deliver. And the big challenges - from race and immigration to productivity - will only be met if our cities succeed. Interesting times indeed.

John McTernan is a political analyst.