by Paula Berrer

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is claiming that he never called President Bush and his foreign policy team “a garish gaggle of simpletons, or called former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney “a couple of wankers.” “I was missquoted. It all comes to context. What is being reported is hopelessly innaccurate. I never called anyone ‘wankers.’ I was referring to some skin problems, called ‘cankers,’ as in ‘canker sores.’”

“It is a dreadful thing when these tabloids run stories like these.” The London Mirror and the Guardian, for their part, are denying that they are tabloids, and say that the Prime Minister was not missquoted. “He said it on a videotaped interview show. Who does he think he’s kidding?”

This follows the recent controversy over an interview with David Frost, where the Prime Minister said he was missquoted when he described US President Bush as “an abject loser.”