Angus
01-05-2010, 08:37 PM
Lol at this article from the Daily Telegraph today:
"General Election 2010 sketch: Tony Blair tries to resurrect Gordon Brown
A miracle worker appeared in north-west London and tried to bring Gordon Brown back from the dead.
By Andrew Gimson
Published: 8:30AM BST 01 May 2010
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair during a visit to Alexandra Avenue Health and Social Care Centre in Harrow, north London, which he visited as part of the Labour party's General Election campaign Photo: PA Tony Blair descended from the skies – one of his disciples said he had come in “from the far east, I think” – and was spotted entering the Alexandra Avenue polyclinic in Harrow.
Once inside the brand new building, which offers everything from minor surgery to midwifery, Mr Blair went about his usual ministry of healing the sick and preaching the good news of New Labour.
Dr David Lloyd, senior partner in the practice, said afterwards: “It was fantastic for us meeting such a charismatic man.”
When Dr Lloyd asked some patients who were having heart tests whether they wanted to meet Mr Blair, the patients even “leapt off their beds” in their eagerness to see the great man.
We realise that readers of a sceptical turn of mind will wish to know whether we actually saw Mr Blair perform any miracles. The truth, we admit, is that we were standing in the small crowd outside the building, so had to rely on other people’s accounts of the way Mr Blair was transforming people’s lives.
One of Mr Blair’s disciples kindly kept us up to date with his movements: “He’s gone to a minor treatment room where one of the nurses will be taking his blood pressure, I think.”
We discovered later that Mr Blair’s blood pressure is high. We hope we have not just committed an unpardonable breach of patient confidentiality, but we consider it important to get to the root cause of this high blood pressure.
Our provisional diagnosis is that it shot up when he was channel-hopping in his hotel room during his holiday, or peace mission, or whatever it was, in the far east, and happened to see some television coverage of Gordon Brown’s election campaign.
For while Mr Blair practised “big tent” politics, Mr Brown has become a reluctant pioneer of “bigoted” politics, in which you alienate the people who used to support you.
No wonder Mr Blair rushed home to see what he could do to get his successor out of this terrible mess. The polyclinic must have seemed just the place to deal with Mr Brown’s problems: it was planned when Mr Blair was Prime Minister and in its first year it treated 23,000 patients, who had an average waiting time of only 13 minutes and 96 per cent of whom said their treatment was either excellent or good.
But we still question whether a polyclinic specialising in minor ailments is the right place to try to resuscitate Mr Brown. Two brilliant if sometimes controversial spin doctors, Lord Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, have been pumping him full of sound-bites for the last three weeks, and he just seems to get worse.
Suddenly Mr Blair was among us: cometh the hour, cometh the tan. His face was the colour of a manila envelope, but he waved his outstretched fingers and smiled his messianic smile as he made his way to his waiting limousine.
Mr Blair still has star appeal. People leant out of windows to see him and a buzz of excitement ran through the small group of devotees and journalists which had managed to track him down.
“Has Gordon blown it?” someone shouted, but Mr Blair just kept on going. He at least is going to commit no breach of patient confidentiality by revealing details of the epidemic of unpopularity which is eating away at Mr Brown and the Labour campaign. According to Mr Blair, Mr Brown has not failed and the party is not doomed to come third: “I believe Labour has every chance of succeeding.”
But we cannot help feeling that only a miracle can save Mr Brown now"
"General Election 2010 sketch: Tony Blair tries to resurrect Gordon Brown
A miracle worker appeared in north-west London and tried to bring Gordon Brown back from the dead.
By Andrew Gimson
Published: 8:30AM BST 01 May 2010
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair during a visit to Alexandra Avenue Health and Social Care Centre in Harrow, north London, which he visited as part of the Labour party's General Election campaign Photo: PA Tony Blair descended from the skies – one of his disciples said he had come in “from the far east, I think” – and was spotted entering the Alexandra Avenue polyclinic in Harrow.
Once inside the brand new building, which offers everything from minor surgery to midwifery, Mr Blair went about his usual ministry of healing the sick and preaching the good news of New Labour.
Dr David Lloyd, senior partner in the practice, said afterwards: “It was fantastic for us meeting such a charismatic man.”
When Dr Lloyd asked some patients who were having heart tests whether they wanted to meet Mr Blair, the patients even “leapt off their beds” in their eagerness to see the great man.
We realise that readers of a sceptical turn of mind will wish to know whether we actually saw Mr Blair perform any miracles. The truth, we admit, is that we were standing in the small crowd outside the building, so had to rely on other people’s accounts of the way Mr Blair was transforming people’s lives.
One of Mr Blair’s disciples kindly kept us up to date with his movements: “He’s gone to a minor treatment room where one of the nurses will be taking his blood pressure, I think.”
We discovered later that Mr Blair’s blood pressure is high. We hope we have not just committed an unpardonable breach of patient confidentiality, but we consider it important to get to the root cause of this high blood pressure.
Our provisional diagnosis is that it shot up when he was channel-hopping in his hotel room during his holiday, or peace mission, or whatever it was, in the far east, and happened to see some television coverage of Gordon Brown’s election campaign.
For while Mr Blair practised “big tent” politics, Mr Brown has become a reluctant pioneer of “bigoted” politics, in which you alienate the people who used to support you.
No wonder Mr Blair rushed home to see what he could do to get his successor out of this terrible mess. The polyclinic must have seemed just the place to deal with Mr Brown’s problems: it was planned when Mr Blair was Prime Minister and in its first year it treated 23,000 patients, who had an average waiting time of only 13 minutes and 96 per cent of whom said their treatment was either excellent or good.
But we still question whether a polyclinic specialising in minor ailments is the right place to try to resuscitate Mr Brown. Two brilliant if sometimes controversial spin doctors, Lord Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, have been pumping him full of sound-bites for the last three weeks, and he just seems to get worse.
Suddenly Mr Blair was among us: cometh the hour, cometh the tan. His face was the colour of a manila envelope, but he waved his outstretched fingers and smiled his messianic smile as he made his way to his waiting limousine.
Mr Blair still has star appeal. People leant out of windows to see him and a buzz of excitement ran through the small group of devotees and journalists which had managed to track him down.
“Has Gordon blown it?” someone shouted, but Mr Blair just kept on going. He at least is going to commit no breach of patient confidentiality by revealing details of the epidemic of unpopularity which is eating away at Mr Brown and the Labour campaign. According to Mr Blair, Mr Brown has not failed and the party is not doomed to come third: “I believe Labour has every chance of succeeding.”
But we cannot help feeling that only a miracle can save Mr Brown now"