THE UK: London's Whittington Hospital backed-down last night and apologised to the patients at the centre of this week's political storm over the state of Britain's NHS.
The move came as the Prime Minister, Mr Blair, sought to regain the initiative in the raging health debate, casting himself as the champion of public service workers, and accusing the Conservatives of a deliberate campaign of "denigration" in an attempt to convince voters the country's public services were not worth saving.
The Tory leader, Mr Iain Duncan Smith, hit back, angrily telling Mr Blair to stop using doctors and nurses as "a human shield" and to "start to account for his own failure to reform public services after five years of promises". The Liberal Democrat leader, Mr Charles Kennedy, dismissed Mr Blair's admiration for front-line workers as "false praise" from a prime minister who had "repeatedly denigrated them since he came to office."
While trade union leaders welcomed "a significant change in tone" from Mr Blair's famous complaint of "scars on my back" resulting from the effort to reform the public services, it was accompanied by clear hope they might hear less emphasis on government plans to involve the private sector in running failing schools and hospitals.
Unison's general secretary, Mr Dave Prentis, said: "I hope the fact that he has downplayed the role of the private sector, which is more concerned with profit than service, means the love affair is over."
Moving to close down the controversy sparked by the alleged mistreatment of Mrs Rose Addis (94) - forced to wait 72 hours in Whittington's Accident and Emergency wing for treatment - Mr Blair insisted the debate about the public services could not and should not be about any one case, "no matter how hotly contested".
Accusing the Conservatives of exploiting individual cases to undermine confidence in the entire system, Mr Blair told an audience in Newcastle: "At present they confine themselves to denigrating everything about the public services - running them down, saying the services are lousy - so that people feel it's all hopeless, nothing works, that any investment is just wasted money. Each individual case of actual or perceived service failure, accepted or disputed, true or false, is luridly headlined in order to demoralise us all."