Bozza’s attempt to goad Keir with the Commons ghost of Blair misses its mark

LABOUR’S lawyerly knight did not mince his words.

He noted how six weeks ago, when the sages from Sage called for a “circuit-breaker” to stem the tide of coronavirus, deaths numbered 11 but on Monday they totalled 397; a “staggering 35-fold increase”.

Keir sniffed: “Does the PM understand the human cost of his delay in acting?”

Bozza gulped and told himself: “Here we go again.” He insisted no government would decide lightly to impose a lockdown and defended his initial decision to go for a tiered approach because it “was showing signs of working. And still is”.

But, he explained, the country was facing a Covid surge, which Parliament must tackle with severer measures, which, he stressed, would end on

December 2.

Miffed, the PM pointed out how the chief comrade had supported the tiered approach for a while, “as long as it was useful to him”, and underlined how the so-called “moonshot” testing was about to begin with a city-wide programme in Liverpool. Keir puffed out his chest. Denouncing the PM’S failure to act swiftly as a huge failure of leadership, he insisted his judgment had been rather better than the Tory head boy’s. “I looked at the evidence and made a decision three weeks ago that the right thing was a circuit-break. I don’t buy the argument, I don’t think anybody does, that the facts suddenly changed this weekend. The direction of travel… had been clear for weeks,” he declared.

Expelling frustration, the chief comrade insisted all he wanted was “some basic honesty” and argued it would be “madness” to end the lockdown on December 2 if the R rate was going up beyond one.

Hailing the expansion of tests from 3,000 to 500,000 a day – the “biggest diagnostic exercise this country has ever carried out” – the PM told the top socialist to stop his point-scoring and help people “come together as a nation”.

Yet after accusing his opposite number of using the crisis to make political capital, Bozza couldn’t help himself and did the same.

He raised the parliamentary spectre of one Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, former premier of the parish, who, he noted, was “not as fashionable on those [opposition] benches as he once was or should be”. How times change.

Noting how TB had penned a piece “broadly supporting” the Government’s strategy, the PM told the Labour chief: “What he should do is take a leaf out the Blair book,” adding: “And by the way I would tell him Tony Blair would not have spent four years in the same shadow cabinet as Jeremy Corbyn and standing shoulder to shoulder with him.”

Keir looked up and grinned. The low blow had missed its mark.