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He spent an hour and 17 minutes with Mrs Roberts, Sgt Roberts’ brother, Tristan Tancock, and his mother, Marion Chapman, yesterday afternoon. Mrs Roberts, who had made public an oral diary kept by her late husband complaining about the lack of body armour, had accused Mr Hoon of having “blood on his hands”.Sgt Roberts, 33, a member of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment, was shot in the chest by rioters in Basra on 24 March last year. He had been asked to give up his body armour to an infantryman, who was deemed more in need of the extra protection.. He could say who is responsible for Steve’s death and apologise for the fact that Steve did not have the enhanced body armour. He has said he is sorry about the way we were told about his death, but he has not said he was sorry about the way he was killed.”The Defence Secretary is under immense pressure to resign over the issue of British soldiers killed and maimed in Iraq because of a lack of supplies. But she was prepared to give him “one last chance to explain what happened and make sure things like this [do] not happen again”.Mrs Roberts, 32, from Shipley, West Yorkshire, made it clear that unless Mr Hoon provided a satisfactory account of what went wrong, he should go.”He is the Secretary of State in charge of the armed forces, and he bears the responsibility if something goes wrong, just like a manager of a company,” she said “Mr Hoon should really consider his position.

Although there were many able staff, “the Civil Service as a whole has not grasped the potential of modern communications as a service provided for citizens”.. The widow of a British soldier killed in the Iraq war due to a shortage of body armour called for Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, to “consider his position’” yesterday after meeting him in London. It read: “The plan was therefore not totally coherent and comprehensive and the order of arrival of equipment was not always optimised … additional combat body armour arrived on the last of the ships.”The MoD stated the reason for the problems was the necessity to switch deployment from Turkey to Kuwait once the Ankara government had refused permission for coalition forces to use Turkey as a launchpad for the invasion.Mrs Roberts, whose husband Steven was shot dead after being ordered to hand back his flak jacket, also bitterly attacked the Government for failing to provide adequate protection for troops.Mr Hoon has still failed to apologise for the death of her husband, said Mrs Roberts, and she was “not much happier” than after a previous meeting with him. It called for “a clearer separation of fact from news, comment and entertainment”.The inquiry was critical of Whitehall press officers and it called for the Government Information and Communications Service to be disbanded because “structural and systems weaknesses” made it “no longer fit for [its] purpose”.

The Phillis committee, set up following the controversy over the spin doctor Jo Moore saying that 11 September 2001, was a “good day to bury bad news”, called for new rules to govern the conduct of special advisers such as Ms Moore.It said the “more aggressive approach” of spin doctors after Labour won power in 1997 and their use of selective media briefings “led to a reaction from the media that has produced a far more adversarial relationship with government”.The committee said the media had to bear part of the responsibility for the “deep distrust” among the public of much of what it was told by the Government. Tony Blair’s official spokesman suggested that the Government would see how the new Act worked in practice before considering the Phillis team’s proposals.The Phillis committee recommended that daily lobby briefings for Westminster journalists be televised, saying the system was not working for the Government or the media.The Government stopped short of saying Mr Blair’s official spokesmen, Godric Smith and Tom Kelly, who are civil servants, should give White House-style press briefings after objections from ministers.Douglas Alexander, the Cabinet Office Minister, said the Government “agrees that more ministers should host lobby briefings and that these should be open and televised”. It called for clearer rules on the release of statistics to stop the “selective release of information”.But hopes of a new era of openness were dashed only hours after the committee reported. It said ministers should implement the new Act liberally to bring in “a culture of openness”.While admitting some people in the Government feared greater freedom of information would give the press more ammunition with which to attack it, the Phillis group argued that the best antidote to partisan reporting was openness.The report said that ministers should waive their right to veto the release of information before the Act took effect, and replace the system of “class exemptions” on disclosing information with a “harm test”. A Government-ordered inquiry urged ministers yesterday to use the Freedom of Information Act, which takes effect next January, to end the “culture of secrecy” and “era of spin”.
A review of the Whitehall communications machine called for sweeping changes to tackle a “three-way breakdown of trust between government and politicians, the media and the general public”.The group, chaired by Bob Phillis, the chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, said Lord Hutton’s inquiry had demonstrated the speed and thoroughness with which information could be made available through the imaginative use of its website.

times change.”Earlier, Charles Clarke, the Secretary of State for Education, offered a fresh concession to rebel MPs as he published detailed proposals to pay grants of £2,700 to the poorest third of students.. He said: “It either comes exclusively from the taxpayer, from families or by graduates paying something after they graduate I’m not embarrassed by that because… I can’t remember the last week that was the most difficult week. I think it was the week before last; they come around pretty regularly as you know. But that is part of the job and I have got to do what I think is right.