APOLOGY OVERDUE

WHEN David Cameron saw the findings of the Saville Inquiry into the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings by the British Army he did not hesitate. He immediately accepted responsibility on behalf of the British government and apologised unreservedly. He should do the same, and soon, over the revelations that are emerging about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the early 1950s.

Documents secretly shipped out of Kenya at the time of independence have been kept out of sight until three frail elderly Kenyans brought their case for compensation and apology to Britain's High Court. What has long been suspected can now be proven -- that the British colonial government, probably with the knowledge of ministers in London, tortured and ill-treated perhaps 20'000 Mau Mau in concentration camps in an attempt to suppress their fight for land that had been taken from them. The Mau Mau brutally murdered sixty-eight white farmers and the security services lost 167 men.

Mr Cameron should do one other thing. He should instruct the Foreign Office not to allow its lawyers to plead that responsibility for the outrage passed to the Kenyan government at the time of independence. Legally that may be arguable but from any other perspective it would be obscene, and to attempt to evade responsibility or score a point in that way would be hugely counter-productive to Britain's contemporary reputation also.