The Sketch: Take that. And that. Blair gets a bruising from the Tory champ

Charles Clarke is said to be a bruiser; I can't see it myself. The big fear with Mr Clarke is that he might start telling you a joke, or get into your lift, or eat your lunch. These things don't leave very serious marks.

Very soon he's got to get top-up fees through the House and it's increasingly clear he doesn't have the power-to-weight ratio to do it (he's surprisingly slow for such a big man).

What does it take to bruise your opponents? A rare combination of virtues: seriousness, certainty, cleverness and clarity.

Very few people have all four (John Prescott, a contender, has no more than two). John Reid used all four (and a mysterious fifth) to get Foundation hospitals through the House. He used them yesterday to defend the hilarious up-rating of the Prime Minister's health trust (more of which later).

Alone on the Tory front bench, Michael Howard can summon the four painful virtues.

Thus, he was able to ask the Prime Minister the same question three times without sounding ridiculous.

It was also why the Prime Minister sat down three times with a strained expression and a yawning lack of support behind him. No recent leader of the Conservatives could have produced this effect.

The complicated question came across with a malignant simplicity. It went: "When asked, 'Did you authorise anyone to release the name of David Kelly', you replied, 'Emphatically not'. Do you stand by that?"

Each time, Mr Blair replied: "I stand by the totality of what I said." Ah, it has to be taken in context. It's the context that turns black to white.

Mr Howard concluded: "But the permanent secretary of the MoD told the enquiry that the decision to authorise the release of Dr Kelly's name was taken at a meeting chaired by the Prime Minister.

"It is clear that either the Prime Minister or the permanent secretary is not telling the truth."

Mr Blair said it was absurd. But he agreed that he would resign if it were demonstrated that he'd misled the House. I know, I know. I must have misheard.

To return to Mr Reid. He was defending the Government on another occasion that it had been caught bang to rights. The then Minister of Health had written to the body that rates health trusts and got them, at the last minute, to give the South Durham Trust an extra star. They had to leave out two of the indicators to get them the star, catering and information management.

As a result of taking this decision to alter the criteria, other Trusts went up or down, but it didn't matter because the desired effect came about. Officials advised against the manoeuvre as it would distort the whole process and reduce transparency and produce "unexpected results" but it didn't matter: the Prime Minister's health trust was to get on to the starting grid.

How shocking is that? Not at all, if you take it in context Mr Reid took it.

In this context, indicative changes in the iterative process verified requalified data right up to the moment of publication. The only way you knew it was piffle was that it was unintelligible. When Mr Reid believes what he is saying he is never hard to understand. Virtue is a dangerous thing in politics.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com