by RAY FLEMING
THERE will be general sympathy for David Blunkett. He finds himself in the midst of a messy affair gone sour at a time that he is the government's lead minister on a raft of controversial security legislation . Ministers need enormous mental and physical resilience to do their jobs well and in Mr Blunkett's case he also has to overcome the handicap of blindness.
The distractions of a paternity test, which he seems determined to pursue, and of accusations that he misused his position by helping his former lover to fast-track her nanny's visa application must make it very difficult indeed for him to keep on top of his job. However, that is a judgement the Prime Minister has to make and yesterday he insisted that he had every confidence in the Home Secretary, an expression often heard in situations of this kind but not always, in the end, sustained.
Mr Blunkett acted correctly and promptly by calling for an official investigation into the allegations. A former Treasury civil servant, Sir Alan Budd, has been appointed to conduct the inquiry which will centre on the question of whether Mr Blunkett did anything to indicate that the visa application for his lover's nanny should be given special treatment; he insists that he did no more than check that it was correctly made out. Sir Alan Budd will have the difficult task of assessing whether the fact that the application had been handled in the Home Secretary's office would be enough for staff down the line to assume that it had some kind of priority. Mr Blunkett should have remembered that Peter Mandelson and a minister in his own department, Beverley Hughes, both had to resign over the handling of visa applications.