“Efforts to solve the problem make it worse. The thing to do is to learn to live with it...”

Lord Norman Tebbit yesterday criticised the Blair administration over its handling of Northern Ireland and said that it was outrageous that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness had been allowed into the province's short-lived regional government. “These guys belong to a neo-fascist organisation, an armed terrorist organisation, and the British government puts them into office in the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland. If we are to talk about the disappearance of innocent people we should start at home,” he said, with a clear reference to the Pinochet case. Lord Tebbit, whose wife was paralysed by the 1984 Brighton bomb, also criticised the release of prisoners and said that more often than not efforts to resolve the problem in Northern Ireland only made things worse. Lord Tebbit, on holiday in Majorca, in an in-depth interview with the Bulletin which we will publish tomorrow, spoke about the Pinolchet affair and its repercussions, BMW's sale of Rover, British industry, the Balearic tourist tax and the state of the Conservative Party. He said that there were signs that the tide was starting to turn for the Tories and that Tony Blair had lost his shine. The top British politician said that the Conservatives were making important inroads into Labour. Read the Lord Tebbit interview in tomorrow's Bulletin.