Tebbit wants Brighton Bombing inquiry

Writing on his Telegraph blog in the hours after the publication of the Saville report into Bloody Sunday, Lord Tebbit has demanded an inquiry into the Brighton bombing which saw his wife, Margaret, paralysed:

"For my part, I hope that Mr Cameron’s unwillingness to contemplate any more costly open-ended inquiries will not exclude a public inquiry into the Brighton murders at the Conservative Party Conference in 1984. Just as the families of the victims at Londonderry had a right to know whether people in high places had plotted the killings, so the surviving victims and the families of the dead of Brighton deserve to know if the killer Magee acted on his own, or whether the murders were plotted by people in IRA/Sinn Fein – and, if so, who those plotters were. The victims of Brighton are no less important than those of Londonderry. They should not be treated as second-class victims."

One of the reasons why David Cameron does not want more inquiries is the cost.

In yesterday's Daily Mail, General Sir Michael Rose spoke for many in the military about the extraordinary cost of Savile; "The £190million expense of this inquiry is nothing less than obscene when British soldiers have been dying in Iraq and Afghanistan daily for want of vital equipment and cuts in the defence budget." For Rose the Bloody Sunday inquiry was always a political device; "By the time Blair offered this inquiry as a sop to Republicans, the IRA had already been militarily defeated by the very soldiers whose reputation he knew it would undermine."

Throughout today's newspapers David Cameron is praised for his statement on the inquiry. Max Hastings - who describes Saville as a grossly mistaken excavation of the past - is typical in stating that the Prime Minister's statement (review here) was "statesmanlike". The Guardian leader-writers conclude that Mr Cameron's reaction to Saville did him "great credit".

Tim Montgomerie