Tony Blair dismissed pandemic fears as 'panpanics' and did 'minimum' to prepare for flu crisis

Tony Blair dismissed fears of a coronavirus crisis as a “panpanic” when he was prime minister and admitted that he would try to “do the minimum we could with the minimum expenditure” to prepare.

The former Labour prime minister, who now runs a series of not-for-profit bodies, has won plaudits for the way his ideas have become government policy in tackling the Covid-19 crisis.

Mr Blair was the first to call for a 12-week gap between first and second vaccine jabs, and for the introduction of vaccine passports before ministers announced them.

The praise for Mr Blair reportedly led to Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, stopping giving private briefings about the Government's plans to Mr Blair and his team.

Now it has emerged that when he was in 10 Downing Street, Mr Blair was much less keen to take measures to prepare for a pandemic, even calling it a "panpanic".

Mr Blair was asked to address concerns that a flu pandemic could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths across the world before the 2005 general election.

He recalled in his 2011 autobiography: “During the run-up to the election we nearly had a vast panic over the approaching ‘flu pandemic’. There is a whole PhD thesis to be written about the ‘pandemics’ that never arise.

“In this case the WHO [World Health Organisation] had issued a report claiming there would be 500,000-700,000 deaths across the world.

“The old First World War flu statistics were rolled out, everyone went into general panic and particular cases drew astonishing headlines of impending doom. Anyone who caught a cold thought they were part of a worldwide disaster.”

Mr Blair continued: “I am afraid I tried to do the minimum we could with the minimum expenditure. I understood the risk, but it just didn’t seem to me that the ‘panpanic’ was quite justified.

“And in those situations, everyone is so risk-averse that, unless you take care, you end up spending a fortune to thwart a crisis that never actually materialises.

“However, the reaction of the system is perfectly understandable. The first time you don’t bother is the time when the wolf is actually in the village, so you have to steer a path, taking precautions, and be ready to ramp it up if it looks like this time it’s really happening. But oh, the endless meetings and hype of it all!”

Conservative MP Sir Charles Walker said: "The older we are, the more we have said, the more we have forgotten. Tony Blair's comments show that governing always becomes easier once you have left office.

"The greatest demand of office is that you always have to deal with the most complex of competing priorities."

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, said the remarks showed that Mr Blair had gone from being "Captain Hubris to Captain Hindsight," echoing Boris Johnson's remarks about Sir Keir Starmer.

Andrew Murrison, a former government minister and Conservative MP, said Mr Blair's remarks show how hard it can be to manage risk at the top of government when faced with competing demands for time and resources.

He said: “Mr Blair puts his finger on the balancing risk dilemma ministers face all the time. His remarks contradict those using the outcome of the 2016 Cygnus pandemic flu exercise to criticize government preparedness for the current crisis.“

A spokesman for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change said the "panpanic" remark was "in reference to a flu pandemic, a pandemic that actually didn’t materialise so had the Government spent a lot of money it would have been utterly wasted".

The spokesman added: “He has not portrayed himself as anything, he has simply been contributing to the debate around the handling of the pandemic. Regurgitating third hand and tired old gossip relating to Matt Hancock still does not make it true."

“Mr Blair left office more than a decade ago, but over the last few years there have been some near misses with possible pandemics, that should have been a wake up call for governments world-wide to co-ordinate and prepare.

“He would never dismiss expert opinion, as evidenced most recently in the Institute’s work on Covid, but as ever in politics you listen to a wide range of opinions, from experts and others, and you make a judgement.

“If you want to know what could have been done differently, you can look at the work we have produced ranging from strategies for exiting lockdown, to mass testing, to vaccine roll out.”