The Sketch: Beckett deploys Blairite crumple zone in rural crash to protect the guilty

Margaret Beckett faced the Commons to quote from the latest foot-and-mouth report. "As Dr Anderson notes: 'A rare set of circumstances had already determined that this would be one of the worst epidemics of FMD that the world had ever seen'."

How true, how very true. The rare circumstance was that Nick Brown was in charge of it. And when Nick Brown showed he was incapable, Tony Blair put himself in charge and was no better.

How we've forgotten. It's all been lost in the pyres of the shires. How Mr Blair sacrificed a tourist industry worth £8bn a year for a beef industry worth £500 million. How they closed the countryside and tried to reopen it days later. How the prime minister made a fashion breakthrough in his confidence-building photo-op. He appeared in a day-glo radiation suit with a lead-lined helmet.

"Come to sunny Britain!" he croaked through a voice synthesizer as a green sun disappeared behind a pall of choking, grease-heavy, inflammable animal smoke.

Tory spokesman David Liddington didn't really stick it to them or up them. The material they squander is incredible. Where was the "catalogue of mismanagement" identified by Dr Anderson? He made at least one good point: Mrs Beckett claimed to have set in hand a wide-ranging programme of action against illegal imports of meat.

Mr Liddington pointed out that 10 months after the disease had been eliminated and three months after the action plan for the "wide-ranging programme" had been finalised, no more than three spot checks had been carried out, owing to arguments about whose responsibility it was. At which point Mrs B descended into bluster.

Her prepared statement, by contrast, was so good it must have been written by Number Ten. It has the stylistic footprint of the Government's new exculpation strategy. This evolved recently when it became clear the "investment" being made in the public services was going to produce far lower dividends than might be expected. Mr Blair is a master of this style. It has the same crumple-zone you get in modern cars. It absorbs the impact, protects the passengers and allows the car to potter off slowly from the wreck scene.

She said she accepted the criticisms. Accepted the blame. Accepted the fault. But it was all so easy in hindsight. Their one unavoidable fault.

They didn't have the information at the time. The information systems. If only they'd been better. William Hague, how nice to see him back, took up the point: "Many of us called repeatedly for the Army to be brought in because we were relying on the time-honoured information system of walking round talking to our constituents."

Mrs Beckett is a very New Labour minister of agriculture and has learnt the key difference in animal husbandry: how tell the sheep from the goats. Sheep = ministers. Goats = the guilty. Farmers are goats. To show that Nick Brown wasn't really a goat he was given a new ministry. He remains as ever in the cabinet. Perhaps he will do to our sheeps' pensions what he did to the whole rural economy.