Mum of tragic Iraq hero hits out over 'sorry' Blair

9:45am Thursday 2nd September 2010

By Will Kilner

The mother of a Bradford soldier who died in Iraq has rejected Tony Blair’s sorrow for those killed in the war and has urged people to shun his newly-published memoirs.

Pauline Hickey’s 30-year-old son, Sergeant Christian Hickey, was killed by a roadside bomb when he was on patrol with the Coldstream Guards in Basra in 2005.

Now, she has accused Mr Blair of attempting to ease his own conscience in his memoirs, A Journey, which was published yesterday.

Mrs Hickey, of East Bierley, Bradford, said Mr Blair’s £4.6 million donation to the Royal British Legion, an advanced payment for his memoirs, was “blood money” and should not have been accepted by the legion.

She said: “I would urge people to shun his book rather than giving him any more attention.

“The donation to the British Legion is blood money. We know that they are strapped for cash, but this money is to salve his own conscience.

“He should be facing crimes against humanity. The situation in Iraq is still not stable.”

Mrs Hickey said Mr Blair was “just paying lip service” to the concept of being sorry.

She said: “It’s really about scoring points with Gordon Brown, who will no doubt come out with a response in the coming days. It’s pathetic.

“Let’s hope that New Labour is gone and buried forever, because I don’t think it has been good for the country.”

In his memoirs, Mr Blair said he was “sorry for the lives cut short” but did not regret the decision to go to war.

He said: “I feel desperately sorry for them, sorry for the lives cut short, sorry for the families whose bereavement is made worse by the controversy over why their loved ones died, sorry for the utterly unfair selection that the loss should be theirs.”

But he insisted that leaving Saddam Hussein in power would have been a “bigger risk” to security than removing him.

The former prime minister said he was angry at the way he was questioned at the Iraq Inquiry, claiming that Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry “had inevitably turned into a trial of judgment and even good faith” rather than being about learning the lessons of the conflict.

Giving evidence in front of some of the relatives of service personnel killed in Iraq, Mr Blair said he “wanted to reach out” to them “but knew if I did so, the embrace would be immediately misused and misconstrued”.

Mrs Hickey, who attended the Chilcot inquiry, said: “I have been in the same building as Tony Blair twice, along with other relatives of soldiers, and he has not had the courage to face us.

“I was at the Chilcot inquiry and he was asked if he had any regrets and he had the brass neck to say no.”

Mrs Hickey also revealed the extent of the continuing instability in Iraq was laid bare in a recent letter she received from Prime Minister David Cameron.

She said: “I wrote to David Cameron to say I would like some kind of closure and would like to be able to go to Iraq. He wrote back to say it was still too dangerous.”