British Prime Minister Tony Blair is presiding over a ”government of the living dead” as his ministers await the sack once he leaves office, the opposition leader scoffed on Wednesday.
Conservative chief David Cameron said the government was paralysed while it waited for Blair to quit and his successor to be installed, during rowdy, knockabout exchanges with Blair in Parliament.
Blair is expected to announce his resignation plans on Thursday and trigger a seven-week contest that will likely see his ally-turned-foe, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, replace him as the governing Labour Party’s leader, and therefore prime minister.
Several ministers have either pledged to step down too, or fear the axe in a Brown Cabinet reshuffle.
”The government is now paralysed. We’ve got a home secretary [John Reid] splitting his department, but he’s already resigned,” Cameron charged.
”We’ve got a foreign secretary [Margaret Beckett] negotiating a European treaty that she won’t be around to ratify.
”And we’ve got a prime minister who … simply doesn’t understand that it’s over.”
Blair retorted: ”I’ll tell you what I will be concentrating on over the next seven weeks and that is policy — the policies for the economy, health, education and law and order.”
But Cameron continued the fun.
”You just don’t get it,” he hit back.
”How can the Health Department sort itself out when we all know the secretary of state [Patricia Hewitt] is for the chop?
”The new justice minister [Lord Charles Falconer] was pathetically pleading for his job on the radio this morning. Everybody knows he’s not going to last five minutes.”
Interrupted by howling from Blair’s ministers, Cameron said to raucous laughter: ”I don’t know why the Cabinet are all shouting. The chancellor’s spin doctors are wandering around the lobby handing out their jobs!
”This is the government of the living dead. Why do we have to put up with even more paralysis?” — AFP
