For Margaret Thatcher, it was Hillsborough.
For Theresa May, Grenfell. Boris Johnson had Partygate, Rishi Sunak got Eat Out To Help Out, and Liz Truss was such a clusterfart of a Prime Minister she just got a 49-day-old lettuce.
Every Prime Minister has a legacy of scandal thrust upon them, sometimes due to their decisions but always as a result of public outrage. The names of those cover-ups hang around their necks forever, past peerages, past retirement, and even past death itself.
Starmer’s tombstone will not record gifts of eyewear or Arsenal tickets. One way or another, it is going to say NUKED BLOOD – and he must now decide whether he wants to clean it up.
(
POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
* You can donate to the nuclear veterans’ legal crowdfunder and help them to win justice HERE
During the nuclear veterans’ campaign for a medal, he said: “These servicemen were placed in huge danger, and many have suffered throughout their lives. The Prime Minister should personally intervene…. this is not just a political, but a moral test of his character.”
Three years ago, he became the first party leader to sit down with a nuclear veteran. He told John Morris: “I”m sorry for what you’ve been put through… not just the testing, but the absolute failure to support, recognise or address what came afterwards.” He made it clear that he thought a medal was not enough for what had happened to them.
“The country owes you a huge debt,” he said. “Your campaign is our campaign. It starts here.” And, when told how Tony Blair had supported the veterans in opposition but turned his back in power, and asked if he would do the same, he said firmly: “No.”
He never said, in Opposition, he’d never deprive wealthier pensioners of winter fuel payments. He never promised to make his wife endure 5 years’ of media scrutiny wearing whatever scuzzy sweatpants weren’t in the wash. He avoided promises he knew he couldn’t keep – but he did make firm commitments to the servicemen used in Britain’s Cold War radiation experiments.
I’ve been writing that phrase for the best part of 20 years, on the basis that the nuclear weapons trials were experiments and 22,000 troops were there. Some were ordered to walk, crawl, sail and fly through the fallout. But while they always said they were guinea pigs, there was never any documentary proof they were being studied.
They’d tell you they should have been. That seeing as Britain daily feared attack or invasion, and there were millions of civilians in need of protection, that if you had to use men to test the bombs you might as well keep an eye on them, and use the data to help keep Britain safe.
The only other information about what happened to humans when they were irradiated is from cancer patients, and a handful of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were much smaller weapons than the ones we developed. Seeing what happened to strapping lads of 18 would have been a scientific opportunity too good to pass up.
Successive governments were so determined to avoid compensation they insisted such checks never happened. They they were repeatedly sued for negligence, instead. MoD lawyers told the European Court of Human Rights, the High Court, the Court of Appeal, and Supreme Court they’d searched the files, and come up blank. They made the illogical argument that no checks were done, while claiming the limited checks they did admit to proved no-one was harmed.
(
PA)
And then we found the blood tests. In the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Which said it had no blood tests, oh THOSE blood tests, well there’s only one, I mean seven, no none at all, hang on, er, maybe 4,000 pages or so? But they don’t show anything. You don’t want to see those.
Yes we did, insisted the veterans. And Parliament. And so a minister reviewed them and ordered them declassified, but apparently he did so with his eyes closed because he insisted there was no medical information in them at all, and when they were published they were chock-full of it.
Blood test orders, discussions, memos. Analysis of urine tests on men sent into Ground Zero ‘with and without respirators’. Blood test results, medical record forms. And some of it, we now know, was never put in veterans’ main medical records. And this is just 0.5% of the files AWE holds on nuclear veterans. What’s in the rest?
I do not know how many Prime Ministers knew about this, nor how many had it hidden from them. But I do know that there is one man who knows about it now, because I’ve discussed it with him in person, I’ve discussed it with his Defence Secretary, and his Veterans Minister, it’s been published in a national newspaper and last night it was sent to his communications team: Keir Starmer knows, for definite.
He also knows about the crime of misconduct in public office, because as head of the Crown Prosecution Service he prosecuted prison officers, police officers and journalists for it. He knows that falsifying medical records was not a crime in the 1950s, although it was unlawful even then, and that if it is still going on it is a crime now.
When I showed Boris Johnson the first evidence of the Nuked Blood Scandal, he agreed it might be a crime then did nothing more about it. Quelle surprise. But when you tell a trained barrister, a former chief prosecutor, and a PM who really and genuinely is much better at this than Johnson ever was the same thing, only now with MORE evidence and MORE urgency, there are only three options open to him.
1: Call the police. 2: Order a public inquiry. 3: Both. There is no viable route for the PM to say there’s nothing to see here, that this all sounds FINE, that men he’s met and expressly said have been mistreated and abandoned for decades and who have just found, if not the smoking gun, then certainly some gunpowder residue, will just have to jog on.
Every time the Mirror publishes these stories, they land with a resounding clang of silence from other parts of the media. The same happened with infected blood, Windrush, Orgreave. Other journalists tell me it seems complicated, or it’s just too good, or blah blah blah. But there comes a point with every scandal where no-one gets to ignore it any more, and that point is imminent.
Starmer cannot head it off, but he can decide to be on the front foot or the back one. He can decide that he will turn his scandalous epitaph into a hymn of praise, or let it drift and have it clunk around his neck like the chains of Marley’s ghost.
These men are old, but their families are not, and this scandal has plenty of life in it. Mr Starmer, do what you promised: look them in the eye, and tell them you’ll take on their case.