WATSON BACKS HOON OVER BODY ARMOUR KILLING

19-12-2006

West Bromwich MP Tom Watson has offered his support to former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, after a coroner blamed the death of a British soldier in Iraq on an “unforgiveable and inexcusable” failure to provide body armour.

Sergeant Steve Roberts was accidentally killed by one of his own colleaguesduring a flare-up at a checkpoint in the town of Al Zubayr in March 2003 at the start of the war.

Oxfordshire's deputy coroner Andrew Walker said Roberts' life would have been saved if he'd been wearing the enhanced combat body armour he'd been issued with - butthe tank commander had been forced to hand it over to a colleague three days earlier because they were in such short supply.

The simple piece of protective gear that would have savedthis brave soldier's life cost just £167, and the coroner said it was a “breach of trust” to allow troops into battle without them.

It emerged at the hearing that Hoon as Defence Secretary was asked to supply an extra 37,000 of the protective vests the previous September, but took eight weeks to authorise the request.

An MOD official - standing in for Hoon whose presence had been requested by the Coroner - explained that the order was delayed so that Saddam wouldn't believe an attack wasn't imminent.

But it also meant that by the time the war started, the Army were still more than 2,000 pieces of body armour short.

Hoon who is now Europe Minister, would appear to be the most obvious political fall guy for this deadly error of judgement, but he's got an ally in Tom Watson, himself a former junior Defence Minister but now on the backbenches representing West Bromwich East.

Watson told The Stirrer: “The one thing anyone at the Ministry of Defence would tell you about Geoff Hoon is that he absolutely stood up for soldiers in the front line. Nobody could question his commitment to his troops.”

Whether that will be enough to save his political skin in the light of such a fatal misjudgement remains to be seen.