Blair "rattled" in PMQs
Blair "rattled" in PMQs
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Wednesday, 17, May 2006 04:57
Tony Blair battled his way through a testing prime minister's questions in parliament this afternoon as Conservative leader David Cameron attacked his "rattled" stance on Home Office policies.
Immigration, human rights laws and the foreign prisoner furore were all tackled by an aggressive Mr Cameron, who accused the prime minister of leading a "government in paralysis".
Amid loud heckling and jeers from the opposition benches, Mr Blair explained that "by its very nature illegal immigration is very difficult to measure" before emphasising overall improvements in crime levels.
He said that automatic deportations of foreign prisoners would take place in the future, even if the criminals claimed that the countries they were being deported to were unsafe.
"You can sum up the prime minister's performance in one word – rattled," was Mr Cameron's response to this and the other Home Office issues he had raised.
"Why, after four home secretaries, 43 pieces of legislation and nine years would anyone believe he is the man who can sort it out?"
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell had to try, try and try again before finally succeeding in asking international affairs questions about British troops in Iraq and the US' continued detention of terror suspects in its Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
The Commons chamber was in raucous mood when Tony Blair entered, for his deputy John Prescott had just received an equally difficult grilling from playful MPs.
References to his "hands-on approach" and other innuendo-ridden references to recent revelations of his affair with a civil service associate were seized upon in equal measure to more serious attacks on his newly-announced portfolio of chairing cabinet committees, revealed just prior to his appearance in parliament.