Guess which PM called virus a ‘panpanic’?

TONY BLAIR dismissed fears of a global contagion as a “panpanic” when he was prime minister and admitted he would try to “do the minimum” with “the minimum expenditure” to prepare.

The former Labour leader, who now runs a series of not-for-profit bodies, has won plaudits for the way his ideas have become government policy in tackling the Covid-19 crisis. He was the first to call for a 12-week gap between first and second vaccine jabs, and for the introduction of vaccine passports.

It reportedly led to Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, deciding to stop giving private briefings to Mr Blair and his team about government plans.

Now it has emerged that when he was at No10, Mr Blair was much less keen to take measures to prepare for a pandemic, even calling it a “panpanic”.

He recalled in his 2011 autobiography: “During the run-up to the election we nearly had a vast panic over the approaching ‘flu pandemic’. There is a whole PhD thesis to be written about the ‘pandemics’ that never arise. In this case the WHO had issued a report claiming there would be 500,000 – 700,000 deaths across the world.

“The old First World War flu statistics were rolled out, everyone went into general panic and particular cases drew astonishing headlines of impending doom.” He continued: “I am afraid I tried to do the minimum we could with the minimum expenditure. I understood the risk, but it just didn’t seem to me that the ‘panpanic’ was quite justified.”

And despite saying everyone was so risk-averse that a fortune could be spent “to thwart a crisis that never actually materialises”, he added: “The first time you don’t bother is the time when the wolf is actually in the village, so you have to steer a path, taking precautions… but oh, the endless meetings and hype of it all!”

Sir Charles Walker, the Tory MP, said: “Tony Blair’s comments show that governing always becomes easier once you have left office.”

A spokesman for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change said the remarks referred to flu – “a pandemic that actually didn’t materialise – so had the government spent a lot of money it would have been utterly wasted”. He added: “He would never dismiss expert opinion, as evidenced most recently in the Institute’s work on Covid.”