The Prime Minister launched an initiative this week to promote longevity with the aid of a few well-chosen lifestyle adjustments. Mr Blair will, apparently, consume more water with his one real vice — drinking too much tea and coffee — and walk up stairs instead of taking the lift.
If only his political staying power, as a leader who has expressed the fervent wish to serve a full third term, were so easily guaranteed. Mr Blair co-opted the Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, fresh from a mauling in Gateshead by the main health union (now there’s a bad day out) as his partner in the Longer Life initiative. Mrs Hewitt might have a thought or two about her own political mortality as she walks up the stairs at her department to another day of hospital trust deficits, nursing staff redundancies and agitating health unions.
Charles Clarke has certainly had his own memento mori as he revealed that the Home Office had managed to lose more than 1,000 convicted foreign criminals who should have been considered for deportation. What would we not give to hear Mr Clarke receiving the original telephone call from officials? ‘Paedophiles, murderers and rapists? Aha, apart from the kidnappers and robbers obviously. And how did we manage to lose them exactly?’
Oh, and the Deputy PM John Prescott has been having an office affair, which is not an image the mind wants to linger upon.
Next week sees the first electoral test of Blair’s third term and roughly coincides with its first year in office. Short of a plague of frogs in Downing Street, the government could not be entering an electoral test against a popular new Tory leader at a less propitious time.
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