Blair blames Duncan Smith

Tony Blair today went on the attack over the Rose Addis affair, blaming Opposition leader Iain Duncan Smith for turning her case into a political football.

The Prime Minister denied his aides had leaked confidential details of her care and said the hospital was entitled to put its side of the story.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 2's Jimmy Young programme, Mr Blair said: "The leader of the Conservative Party raised it with me. He accused the nurses and doctors of this particular hospital of treating this woman worse than a dog."

Mr Duncan Smith had, in fact, quoted the words of Mrs Addis's daughter in the Commons yesterday. But Mr Blair said: "I am afraid we are not going to have a situation where doctors and nurses are abused in this way without the other side of the story being given." Sir Jimmy told the Prime Minister: "At the outset it was in a local London newspaper, but you chose to tell the world on a much wider scale and to go into graphic detail about it."

Mr Blair replied: "It was in the Evening Standard, which is a very, very big newspaper. It was raised with me by the leader of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons on national television.

"The details were not released by us. They were released, in response to the allegations of the relatives, by the doctors or nurses at the hospital." Mr Duncan Smith told the BBC's World At One Mrs Addis had been the victim of an "outrageous" suggestion that she was racist when she had two ethnic minority helpers "whom she adores".

He also said Mrs Addis's 72-yearold daughter Zena had been maligned by nods and winks from the hospital, suggesting she should have visited her mother sooner.

In his radio interview, Mr Blair complained the Tories were seizing on individual cases. He said: "These individual cases are being used or abused to say that everything about the NHS is wrong, that people are being treated very badly, that patients don't get proper care - and it simply isn't true."

Mr Blair dismissed a suggestion that he was operating double standards by discussing Mrs Addis while refusing to say whether his son Leo has had the MMR jab. He said the difference was that Mrs Addis's family had gone to the press with the story.