BRITAIN: Tony Blair has defended troubled ministers Charles Clarke, Patricia Hewitt and John Prescott and dismissed "black Wednesday" comparisons between his government and the last days of John Major's Conservative administration. Frank Millar, London Editor, reports.
However, some Labour MPs are urging Mr Blair to prepare to "freshen" his cabinet with an early reshuffle amid renewed fears that bad results in next week's local elections will revive "Brownite" pressure on the prime minister to hasten his own departure from Downing Street.
The Conservatives again called for home secretary Charles Clarke's resignation after it emerged there are some 1,500 more foreign prisoners in British jails than first thought. But Mr Blair insisted Mr Clarke was right to stay in his post and "sort out" the "systemic failures" which had seen the original 1,023 foreign prisoners - including murderers, rapists and paedophiles - released, without supervision, when they should have been considered for deportation.
Mr Blair told the BBC that health secretary Patricia Hewitt had "certainly not" offered to resign, and "nor should she", after twice being booed and jeered by nurses and health care workers alarmed by budget deficits and job losses in the NHS.
And Mr Blair repeated that deputy prime minister John Prescott's affair with a secretary was "a private matter" which he would not further discuss.
As the cabinet combined a "business as usual" message with one of support for Mr Clarke, Mr Blair told the BBC: "You know me well enough to know there's a resilience that will see through the next day's headlines."
Insisting those "headlines" bore little relationship to his government's achievements, Mr Blair continued: "In the media culture we have today, where there's no problem that isn't a crisis, no difficulty that isn't a catastrophe, no week that isn't going to end up being the most terrible thing that's ever happened, you get on with doing the job.
"You can either decide this according to whatever is the latest scandal, controversy rolling around the news, or you can say this is what it's about, this happened as a result of a decision taken by government, that's why we are in politics and that's just the way it is." Nervous Labour MPs, however, are speculating as to how "it" will be for Mr Blair next Friday if Labour election losses are not confined largely to London.
Reading West MP Martin Salter, while hoping for an eventual "smooth transition" from Mr Blair to chancellor Gordon Brown, said the government needed "to be refreshed", possibly by way of the reshuffle expected since last autumn.
Meanwhile, fellow MP Lindsay Hoyle repeated that the public would expect Mr Clarke to "consider his position", amid a consensus view at Westminster that the discovery of one of the released prisoners re-offending would now be enough to force the home secretary from office.
Conservative shadow home secretary David Davis seized on the admission that 900 prisoners had no nationality recorded for them on its database. Mr Davis suggested they too could presumably be released without consideration for deportation, and insisted: "This combination of ignorance and incompetence on the part of the Home Office compounds even further Mr Clarke's inability to carry out his first duty of protecting public safety."