On the eve of his mercy mission to Africa, Tony Blair waxed grandiloquent. "The reason I'm so passionate about this is that I think we have got the best chance in a generation to make a difference," he announced.
While all of us wish Blair well in his outreach work, there might be more confidence in his potential to cure the ills of that continent if he could first control a domestic outbreak of measles. How does the prime minister, a man who seems incapable of reassuring a relatively small number of parents of 14-month-old British toddlers, propose to alleviate the impact of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa where, as he says, "a child dies every three seconds from disease or deprivation"?
Contrasted with suffering on that scale, the current national convulsion of anxiety about the safety of the MMR vaccination looks somewhat eccentric. To the majority of people, the vaccination dilemma can be of little interest. And even those of us who are, or have been, obsessed by MMR's safety record would have to concede that the controversy scarcely deserves its current media pre-eminence. Much coverage now verges on the hysterical, with more space allocated to the anecdotal bletherings of doting homeopathy enthusiasts than to any cool evaluation of the available research.
Yet even with this determination, in some quarters, to extract maximum political damage from popular uncertainty, the current panic might not have come about had the government acquired the ability occasionally to descend from the airy heights of global policy making, and focus on the humbler, more concrete concerns that are apt to preoccupy voters.
Plainly, Blair learned nothing from the last election's one telling moment: when he was ambushed in a car park by Sharron Storer, and could only goggle and gabble in the face of her eloquent denunciation of her partner's shoddy hospital treatment. Never happier than when droning on about his mission, his vision or his duty, Blair signally - and now near-catastrophically - lacks the ability to take the short view.
The current MMR frenzy comes only six weeks after the last explosion of anxiety, which was prompted, if you recall, by widespread suspicion that Leo Blair had been exempted from this particular aspect of national health policy. After a succession of hints and leaks to the effect that the child probably has been done, albeit months late, the injection having been delayed by a cold (and a number of unavoidable diplomatic tours), his precise state of immunity is still unclear.
But even if he was adamant in his refusal to discuss Baby Blair's intimate health preferences, the prime minister could still have restored calm by identifying with the concerns of troubled parents and announcing a review of current policy. What would it have hurt him to invite a group of prominent individuals to discuss the subject at Downing Street? Just a little prick. Any show of sympathetic respect would have helped. Maybe Cherie could have dressed up as a nurse? Instead, Blair issued a rebuke that was comical in its blustering indignation, even by his own exacting standards of petulance. "The suggestion that the government is advising parents to have the MMR jab whilst we are deliberately refraining from giving our child the treatment because we know it is dangerous, is offensive beyond belief," he declared.
Offensive beyond belief? Really? More offensive, say, than the current arrangement, whereby the affluent can choose single injections, while less prosperous doubters must be chivvied into compliance or leave their children unprotected? More offensive, too, than the prospect of yet more measles epidemics, and inevitably, measles damage, because of the government's dogged refusal to adapt to reality?
However irrational the basis for parental fears about MMR and autism may be, and however absurd the current panic-inducing campaigns, the whole thing is too advanced, now, to be subdued by a combination of Blairite flailing and Yvette Cooper's robotic repetition of "all the scientific advice". For one thing, interested parents know that MMR sceptics include a substantial number of allegedly rational doctors, as well as parents of allegedly afflicted children.
Moreover, as the scale of the current panic suggests, this issue is no longer restricted to worried parents and questions of safety; since the government's decision, when doubts were first raised about MMR, to meet reluctance with enforcement, it has developed into a more nebulous debate about fairness as opposed to privilege, respect as opposed to bullying, the ills of the NHS as opposed to the scars of Africa. It is not going to go away.
If Blair can afford a complete about-turn on juries and a total reversal on asylum seekers' vouchers, why should he not effect a temporary, moderate adjustment to MMR policy, allowing parents a second-best option of free, NHS-supervised single jabs while further government research is undertaken into any conceivable MMR link with autism?
More likely than this being interpreted, as one minister has insisted, as an acknowledgment that MMR is flawed, it would probably be hailed as a rare and welcome indication of human feeling. In fact, the result of this paradoxical injunction - "go on, have six jabs then" - could be a sudden increase in MMR uptake, as well as an instant extension of immunity to measles. Once they no longer feel pushed around, and once they face the prospect of six separate bouts of waiting, stress, pain and tears, many parents may find themselves suddenly preferring MMR.
But perhaps the government has another, more economical plan up its sleeve. Perhaps it is waiting for the first serious casualties to emerge from the measles outbreaks that are now following the collapse of herd immunity in middle-class afflicted areas. No sooner has a child been left deaf or blind or comatose by measles, it may be reasoning, than all these whingeing MMR refusers will be banging on the surgery doors, begging for jabs. Or is that suggestion offensive beyond belief?
