As a would-be historian (engaged on the biography of Margaret Thatcher), I feel envious of Lord Saville. I could do with having all my hotel bills paid for 12 years, a full legal team to assist, the right to demand the presence of witnesses and £191 million. His 5,000 pages are the most expensive history book ever written. But however judicious Lord Saville has tried to be, his report cannot escape its ultimate political purpose — to please Sinn Fein. In that sense, its author is not Lord Saville, but Tony Blair, who set up the inquiry as part of a political deal. As people call for the soldiers who shot people on that day 38 years ago to be prosecuted, a running commentary is kept up by Martin McGuinness. He is now the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, but he was the IRA’s chief of staff through its bloodiest period and, says Saville, ‘probably’ carried a sub-machine gun on Bloody Sunday and may have fired it. He will not be prosecuted for anything. This is what Mr Blair intended. Perhaps the strongest single element in the New Labour mindset — born of its determination to shed its own party’s past — was the idea that nothing good ever happened in Britain before 1997. So it was a matter of doctrine for Mr Blair to tell the story of Britain’s past unfavourably. He completely lacked the sense, always present in previous prime ministers, that it was dangerous for the nation’s authorities to trash the actions of their predecessors or of the armed forces. As his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, has put it, ‘Northern Ireland was not our war.’ The notion that Bloody Sunday started the Troubles and Tony Blair ended them is just fine for him. But it is fiction, not history.
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