Why Blair agreed to hold the Bloody Sunday inquiry
Why did the government concede the Bloody Sunday inquiry? It was on the nationalist and republican agenda for a very long time – effectively some sort of public admission was wanted from the moment Widgery was published.
The Irish government lobbied for it for years. Tony Blair was told in 1997/8 that it was a vital part of the “mood music” of the talks, proving that Britain was no longer the old establishment, there was a new approach to Northern Ireland.
The progress towards what became the Good Friday Agreement was going through a rocky patch in January 1998. London and Dublin had just published the Heads of Agreement, which would become the template for much of the final deal, but Sinn Fein wasn’t having it and said it wasn’t the way ahead.
You might think that the Bloody Sunday inquiry was used to break a deadlock, avoid a republican walk-out. Unionists and Tories have told me just that. Someone who was a very senior British official at the time tells me it was nothing of the sort. It was, he says, very much a separate, parallel debate within Whitehall.
The demands kept coming from outside and kept being batted away by senior officials and by Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell. People talked of issuing an apology instead of going down the route of full inquiry. Mo Mowlam sent a handwritten lengthy note pleading for them to look at it all again and told Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell he should read the Widgery report for himself to get a flavour of why a full inquiry was wanted. He did and it did. Things soon started to shift.
There was real scepticism in the Tory opposition that an inquiry was a good idea. William Hague responded to Tony Blair in the Commons when the inquiry was launched: “… we are naturally sceptical about reopening an inquiry which was conducted 25 years ago, especially since previous governments have already carefully examined new evidence submitted to them…”
On that occasion, Tony Blair repeated the words of John Major, saying that the victims of Bloody Sunday were innocent people. How much further will David Cameron go today? We find out at 3.30pm.