Matthew Norman: A prime minister who just can't be bovvered

If anyone should be searching for a parable of modern Britain on the day we mark the death of the greatest parable-teller of them all, the story of Dumisani Lungu might fit the bill. You may have read about Dumisani in Wednesday's Independent, and seen the picture of this beautiful little boy grinning happily from beneath a bobble hat while sitting in a toy car. But for those who didn't, let me reprise the facts of his case.

Dumisani, now seven, came to Britain from Malawi two years ago with his parents, Brian and Caroline, both of whom are HIV positive. Caroline also has tuberculosis, and such severe epilepsy that without drugs she would die within months. Tests on Dumisani have proved inconclusive, but there is said to be a 30-40 per cent chance that he too is HIV positive.

By now, there is every likelihood that this family of failed asylum seekers has been returned to Malawi to die. Immigration officers raided their flat in Stockport early last Friday, and took them - still in their pyjamas - to the Yarl's Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire. Whether they chose that moment because Brian was due to start expensive antiretroviral treatment that same day, we can only guess. In the spirit of Christian charity, let's say it may have been coincidence.

There are 20 children with diagnosed or suspected HIV in Britain, of whom Damisani was first in line, due to be deported by the nation to which we refer so often as the fourth richest on earth that the phrase has become a cliché. Martin Narey, who now heads Barnado's, used it when speaking of Dumisani's future in Malawi: a future guaranteed to consist of watching first his mother and then his father die, and then - with no living relative to care for him - of dying himself, through hunger and neglect if not of Aids.

When Mr Narey met Tony Blair in January, he told that devout follower of Christ's teachings about these children, showing him a picture of another grinning Malawian in her British school uniform. Mr Blair seemed "genuinely sympathetic", he reports, and told him to raise the matter with the relevant authority. He did so, and heard nothing back from the Home Office.

He shouldn't be too surprised about this. Many people over the years have left the Prime Minister convinced that he agreed with every word they said, only to be informed by the passage of time that the great chameleon had been adopting their colours for the duration of the chat. But this case is obviously different from others such as electoral reform, about which he hoodwinked even such a canny old political operator as the late Roy Jenkins.

This is a moral issue so straightforward that it brooks no debate. Whether you, like Mr Blair, are a follower of Jesus, of another deity, or of none, you cannot believe it is anything but an act of simple wickedness knowingly to send children to their deaths.

The parable that comes to mind here is the Good Samaritan. Doubtless Mr Blair has heard many sermons on the matter, and if you asked him about it he might tell you, with the ritual appearance of sincerity that bemused Mr Narey, that it's one of the guiding principles of his moral and political life. He might even look you in the eye, and insist that hearing it first, at about the age Dumisani is today, made such an impression that from that day forth he resolved to devote his life to helping the needy.

Nowhere has his Messiah complex been more evident that in his self-alleged obsession with rescuing the citizens of Aids-plagued, poverty-stricken countries such as Malawi. He has returned to Africa again and again, both in person and in oratory. In January 2005 he spoke of African Aids in an address to the economic forum in Davos, concluding that speech by pointing out that it was the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

He was drawing a parable himself, well knowing that African Aids is a holocaust of sorts, albeit one induced by poverty and ignorance rather than evil. And yet gifted the chance to mark his final days in office by rescuing a few children from that holocaust, he preferred to transport them into the heart of it, albeit on planes rather than in trains.

Not that it would have taken any effort to save them. All Mr Blair needed do was pick up the phone. A quick call to John Reid, the Home Secretary, would have done it. Alternatively, if he shares the instinctive repugnance so many of us feel towards the sound of "Dr" Reid's voice, he could have told an adviser to sort it out. It would have taken him 30 seconds, a minute at most. He chose not to.

There are only two possible reasons for this. One is plain indifference. The other, perhaps marginally the favourite, is the habitual fear of the red-top reaction. Stuck on a motorway on Wednesday, I listened to a Radio 5 Live phone-in on which a large majority of callers echoed the sentiments of The Sun, parroting the usual stuff about the NHS not having enough drugs for "our own people", and dismissing the humanitarian case with something close to relish. A 12-year-old girl who rang in to say it made her feel ashamed to be British was almost a lone voice in this cacophony of hateful callousness.

Something strange and disgusting has happened to a country, you couldn't help thinking, that gives tens of millions to Comic Relief and just two weeks later echoes Mr Blair's "am I bovvered?" about the easily avoidable deaths of innocents; a country in which the liberal centre has become so cowed by 25 years of brutal right-wingery that no senior politician from either Labour or the Liberal Democrats will risk the wrath of the right-wing press by venting their outrage that sick asylum seekers ("economic tourists", in Geoffrey Howe's deathless phrase) are treated like criminals, seized at dawn and moved to holding pens in their nightwear - in Caroline's case, not even being allowed to fetch her epilepsy pills - for obeying Norman Tebbit's diktat about getting on their bikes in search of a better life.

In his own defence, Mr Blair would point out that decisions about removing failed asylum seekers are taken not by him but by the courts and the Home Office, and that in this area his government is merely following the will of the populace, as expressed on Radio 5 Live.

This is Good Friday, and there is a precedent for a political leader being swayed by the crowd into washing his hands of the chance to show mercy. How chillingly ironic that the man who spent his long premiership playing Jesus should end it in the role of Pontius Pilate.

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