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He said there was confusion at the heart of Government because of splits between Mr Blair and Mr Brown and he mocked the Prime Minister’s national consultation exercise, launched yesterday.Mr Howard said: “We all know the real conversation that the Prime Minister needs to have. After six and a half years, this is a Prime Minister who has lost his grip and a Government which has lost its way. And what has happened? In the words of Paul Daniels: not a lot!” Mr Howard said: “They approach every problem with an open wallet and an empty mind They are taxing and spending and failing. It had the world at its feet and a vast parliamentary army ready to carry forward whatever measures it proposed. How utterly humiliating and how very damaging for our country.”He added: “This Government was elected with great promise and a sweeping mandate.

He said: “Never in recent history has a Prime Minister been so weak, so feeble, so utterly unable to do what he wants And all this with a huge majority in this House. He called the Government’s programme “a tired Queen’s Speech from a tired Government”.Mr Howard lambasted Mr Blair as beholden to the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, and unable to control his party. Michael Howard condemned Tony Blair as “simply unequal to the task” of governing Britain when he used the first big clash between them to unleash a withering tirade against the Prime Minister and his Government.
But Mr Blair opened fire on the new Tory leader’s record in government, insisting that “on almost every occasion when there was a serious crime against this country the Right Honourable Gentleman was on the scene”.The two men traded bitterly personal attacks as they confronted each other at the start of the Queen’s Speech debate. There have been concerns about plans to enable people with severe personality disorders to be detained, even if they have committed no crime. The Mental Health Alliance, backed by a campaign in The Independent on Sunday, said the Bill was flawed and unethical, and its powers of compulsion “draconian”..

The Lords had thrown out MPs’ calls for a ban on hunting with dogs. A Bill was, in effect, killed off last month after peers ran out of time to debate it. However, the Queen’s Speech included, as always, the phrase “other measures will be laid before you”, giving such legislation another chance in the coming session.Fox huntingSix years after a private member’s Bill to outlaw the practice came before the Commons, there was no inclusion of legislation which has been blocked repeatedly by the House of Lords. Ministers also failed to publish a Bill on corporate killing, or a revised version of the draft Mental Health Bill.