Bereaved, brushed off ... a dad’s quest for the truth over Iraq
When the Chilcot Inquiry finally publishes its report into the Iraq War next month, after years of dawdling, delay and obfuscation, Reg Keys and other parents of the 179 servicemen and women who died will receive a copy first.
A 150-page summary of the twomillion word document will be delivered to them at 8am in the Queen elizabeth II Conference Centre, Westminster. They will have three hours to inspect its findings and formulate any questions that they might feel it fails to answer. During that time, they will not be allowed to leave the building, nor may they use a telephone.
At 11am, Sir John Chilcot will make his statement to the media. he will then take questions. Sir John has spent seven years studying this material: the families will have been permitted 180 minutes.
even the most trusting soul, convinced of Tony Blair’s innate honesty and spiritual purity, might wonder whether the establishment is making one last-ditch attempt at a cover-up.
Of all the parents who lost sons and daughters in Iraq, Mr Keys has been Blair’s most dogged critic. his demands have never been unreasonable: he wants an apology from the former Prime Minister, and he wants to know the truth behind Britain’s reasons for the invasion.
Surely it would be hard to find an ordinary man or woman in this country who feels those requests deserve to be denied. But as Reg (BBC1) made painstakingly clear, the 63-year- old retired paramedic has been blocked at every step since the murder of his son Lance Corporal Tom Keys, a Royal Military Policeman, at the hands of an Iraqi mob in 2003.
This drama by firebrand screenwriter Jimmy McGovern laid so much emphasis on how english and normal were Tom Keys’s parents that sometimes the drama almost stumbled into comedy.
Tim Roth played Reg, with Anna Maxwell Martin as his wife Sally, and there was no agony they did not try to soothe with a nice couple of tea — when Tom’s bereft girlfriend visited, or when the Tory candidate pleaded with them to stop electioneering, the kettle went straight on.
This material was too raw for whimsy though. The first half-hour was a study of grief, not politics, culminating in a scene at an undertaker’s parlour where Mr Keys inspected the dozens of bullet wounds on his son’s body.
McGovern recounted the extraordinary lengths to which Mr Keys had to go to make Blair hear him. Brushed off at an official meet-andgreet, turned away from the door of 10 Downing Street, he became more determined with every rebuff — until he decided to challenge the PM in the 2005 General election, standing as an independent candidate in his Sedgefield constituency.
his mission to hold Blair to account was desperately hard on his wife, and sometimes this drama was too — from the start, Sally was never seen without a tumbler of Scotch, though what killed her five years ago was surely a broken heart, not just the booze.
In the end, McGovern couldn’t quite do justice to the story. no matter how powerful his drama, the reality was more shocking. The most effective scene was archive footage, of Blair addressing the United States Congress in 2003 — showboating for laughs, part stand-up comedian and part fairground huckster. It made the flesh crawl.
Whatever the failings of Heathrow: Britain’s Busiest Airport (ITV), no one could accuse the producers of prevaricating over it for seven years. It looked as though they had sent in a camera team for a single day, to cobble together a documentary about whatever they collected on camera.
In the loading bay, 64-year-old Mick the hat berated their bad timing. ‘If you’d come yesterday,’ he said, ‘you’d have seen the rabbits.’ What did he mean? A hutch with a couple of rabbits can’t be that exciting — were there hundreds, perhaps? A whole jumbo jet full of bunnies? We never found out: the crew weren’t there long enough.
elsewhere we saw a Sikh carpenter being deported, and a woman haggling over the excess baggage fee at the Pakistan International Airlines desk. But I’m still wondering about those rabbits.