Blair in a Pickle

You think that President Bush is in a mess. Prime Minister Blair is in meltdown. This week three separate scandals hit the fan. And next week are the British local elections.

The first problem is that the National Health Service is running over budget and so hospitals are laying off doctors and nurses. It’s got so bad that Health Secretary Patricia Hewett was booed by nurses at a convention.

But that was just the light relief. The big deal is that the British prisons have been releasing foreign prison inmates and that over a thousand of these “former inmates were “lost” between an incoherent Prison Service and an inept Immigration and Nationality Directorate,” according to the London Times. Some of them went ahead and committed rapes and murders.

You might wonder how the Brits expect two branches of the Home Office to communicate with each other, and you would be right. It is unconscionable to expect government employees to do much more than just show up. But still. Don’t these bureaucrats have any shame?

Scandal Number Three is really not worth worrying about, except that it is a question of ethics and all that. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has been having an affair with his civil-servant secretary. “[T]his relationship between a prominent politician and a civil servant in his office was unprofessional as well as unethical in other respects,” says the Times. Lucky he isn’t a corporate CEO, but merely a politician. Then he would have had to resign.

The conservative press are, of course, enjoying the meltdown of New Labour immensely. It merely demonstrates the essential unseriousness of the Blair regime: all spin and no substance.

But the British people thought that Blair would be different.