Andrew Gilligan

In these frightening days, we must seek our consolations where we can; and one of mine, over the last month, has been running a private contest to log the most idiotic remark made by one of the battalions of ‘security experts’ on standby at times like this to provide vitally needed, life-sustaining, 24-hour fatuous commentary on all major broadcast news outlets. There was the lady from the prestigious think-tank on Sky News who said, quite late on 7 July, that the bombings were ‘clearly a major incident’. There was the ‘risk management consultant’ on The World Tonight who said that shooting people in the head, à la Jean Charles de Menezes, was not necessarily intended to kill them.

Watching the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw this week, as he denied any link whatever between the London bombings and the war in Iraq, I must confess that I felt the tiniest prickle of sympathy. How undignified it must be, endlessly having to pretend that black is white, the sun sets in the east and the Pope’s religion is really not quite as simple an issue as some irresponsible commentators make out. It is of course true, as Mr Straw says, that al-Qa’eda wanted to attack us long before the Iraq war, and did attack several of our allies. But London was something quite new: the first al-Qa’eda attack against a Western country carried out by its own citizens.

Andrew Gilligan on what the army stands to lose by adopting ‘Starbucks’ regiments W est Belfast in the autumn of 1982 was a bad place to be a British soldier. Booby-traps, like the one which destroyed Corporal Leon Bush, aged 22, of the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment, were routine, decidedly not news. Corporal Bush’s death, like most soldiers’, was quickly forgotten by everyone except his family. It was, therefore, an enormous consolation to Corporal Bush’s blood relatives when they discovered that he had two families who wanted to keep his memory alive: themselves, and the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters.

It is curious sometimes how life comes full circle. Exactly a year ago I was sitting in an office at the BBC, listening to government ministers denying all wrongdoing. As I write this, I am sitting in an office at the BBC, waiting to be interviewed, listening to government ministers denying all wrongdoing. Their task is rather harder than it was before. Lord Butler’s committee has pronounced on the great question — did the government mislead us all over the reasons for war? To the vast majority of the public, this is an issue about as opaque and mysterious as the religion of the Pope or the sanitary habits of bears in woods; but successive official inquiries, and a stubborn minority of the media, have been unable to bring themselves to say that Tony Blair committed deceit.