Fooling none of the people, all of the time

Got it in one, DT! Today's leader in the Telegraph hits the spot.

"Yet again, Tony Blair has made an error of taste by seeking to trivialise grave failings by his colleagues. "Nine days' headlines," he told a union conference yesterday, "should not obscure nine years of achievements." Today's headline - about the link between undeported dangerous criminals and the murder of Pc Sharon Beshenivsky - shows why he cannot play down these mistakes.

"Yesterday was, indeed, the ninth anniversary of his entry into Downing Street, immediately after a campaign in which he had pledged his administration would be "whiter than white, purer than pure" after years of "Tory sleaze". Enter Prescott, stage left: sic transit gloria mundi.

• The burden of taxation has increased on everybody since then.
• The public services for which this is paying have not markedly improved.
• Our schools continue to turn out school-leavers who are functionally innumerate and illiterate after 11 years of full-time education.
• Young people pass examinations at school - and even at some universities - only because the pass mark has been lowered to insulting levels.
• The NHS is laying off doctors and nurses, and hospitals are threatened with closure.
• Britain is in the grip of a crime wave.
• The prisons are overflowing.
• There are scant controls on immigration.
• The last two points are linked in the 1,000 or so serious criminals at large in this country who should be facing deportation.
• Devolution has broken up the United Kingdom, put new burdens on taxpayers, undermined the national identity and done nothing to improve government.
• Our foreign policy is incoherent and impotent.
• Our armed forces are underfunded and overstretched, and put in lethal danger in a war from which there is still no obvious exit.
• As well as more than 100 servicemen and women, at least one distinguished public servant - Dr David Kelly - has died as a result of the Government's shabby handling of this issue.
• Our farming industry is near to collapse, not least because the system of paying subsidies to our farmers is a shambles.
• Many months of parliamentary time were wasted abolishing foxhunting, which continues anyway.
• The House of Lords has suffered an incomplete reform, losing many of its best people, and is in the process of being turned into a rubber-stamp for the fiats of the executive.
• A police investigation is under way to establish whether places in the Upper House have in effect been sold to willing customers to benefit Labour Party funds.
• Attempts to reform local government have expensively failed.
• Several cabinet ministers have already departed because of sexual or financial improprieties: more seem certain to follow.

"Nine years of achievement? Unfair headlines? We think not, Prime Minister."