The former Conservative cabinet minister Peter Brooke, who has died aged 89, ought to be remembered as the Northern Ireland secretary who inaugurated the province’s delicate peace process, or even as the founding minister for the National Lottery. But he will probably be recalled for briefly singing a song on an Irish TV chat show the night when seven Protestant construction workers were killed by an IRA bomb.
The singing of My Darling Clementine in Dublin on Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show shortly after the atrocity, in January 1992, was a mistake for which Brooke apologised and offered his resignation, but he had an understandable excuse. Brooke had had a hard week working in Belfast and had barely heard about the attack in County Tyrone. However, he was chiefly disconcerted by being asked unexpectedly about the traumatic death of his first wife, with his new wife sitting in the studio audience – and was then cajoled by Byrne into singing the only song he knew. “My defences were down … it was patently an error,” he said later.
