The NIO’s most senior official — who would go on to head up the inquiry in the Iraq War — referred to “the nationalist community’s inability to come to terms with the events of Bloody Sunday and the findings of the Widgery tribunal about them”, a declassified government file has revealed. In a hand-written note beside the May 1997 comment from Sir John Chilcot, who died last year, another official wrote by hand that this was “curious phrasing” in light of what was by then known about the circumstances in which 13 innocent people at a civil rights demonstration were...