But sources at Westminster said the final decision rested largely with Mr Blair.The Irish government will publish a 175-page dossier to coincide with the announcement, setting out its own analysis of the latest evidence on the killings, which it sent to the Government some weeks ago with its demand for the inquiry to be reopened.Mr Blair gave no hint of the decision yesterday in the Commons when he was pressed again by Labour MPs but there was intense speculation among the Ulster parties that a tribunal would be appointed.Ulster Unionists have warned they will demand inquiries into IRA atrocities. There were intense talks at Downing Street over the type of the inquiry but Westminster sources said last night that it was unlikely to include an international element.
The armed forces were deeply concerned that a fresh inquiry would leave former soldiers open to legal action, and ministers were also anxious to avoid destabilizing the multi-party peace talks on Northern Ireland by upsetting the Ulster Unionists with the announcement.The London stage of the multi-party talks ended yesterday on an up-beat note, enabling the statement to be given the go-ahead.Mo Mowlam, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, supported the inquiry following the demands by the victims’ relatives. Colin Brown, Chief Political Correspondent, says the devil will be in the detail. Tony Blair will today announce the decision to hold a fresh inquiry into the Bloody Sunday killing on 30 January 1972 of 13 Catholic civil rights protesters by members of the First Parachute Regiment in Londonderry’s Bogside. A fresh inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shooting 26 years ago is to be announced today by the Government. Stressing the Government’s determination to see the policy through, Mr Blair said last night that the arguments for it were not only based on common decency, but economics, too.. The redistribution scheme should be developed further and focus on the needs of students.Education Plus, The Eye.

Captains of industry are to be offered the chance to become the first Margaret Thatcher Professor of Enterprise Studies after Cambridge University announced plans for a chair to be funded by a pounds 2m grant from the Thatcher Foundation. The university wants people with business experience to apply as well as academics although the pounds 41,000 salary is unlikely to appeal to the cream of the private sector.
They would also have to get used to teaching and to researching the conditions which allow businesses to flourish, rather than practising their entrepreneurial skills.The new professor would form a permanent part of the university’s business school, the Judge Institute of Management Studies, and would help teach Masters of Business Administration degrees.Cambridge hopes the chair will establish the university as a leading centre for teaching and researching the subject, which has expanded during the last 15 years. struggling on levels of pay that no Member of Parliament would consider fit for a member of their own family.” Mr Blair’s attack on “sweatshop” economics was a calculated switch from Westminster and media obsession with the private lives of ministers like Robin Cook, and the Government’s hospitality, travel and accommodations bills, to what he calls the “big picture”.A government submission to the official Low Pay Commission is imminent, with a cash figure being put on the hourly pay ministers believe would form a sustainable start to the programme, thought to be about pounds 3,50 rather than the pounds 4 sought by the TUC.In an all-night session of a Commons committee that ended yesterday, the Government made progress on the line-by-line consideration of the National Minimum Wage Bill – the first time the new government had found it necessary to hold an all-night session since it won its landslide majority in May. In the second of his roadshows for Labour activists to sell the need for welfare reforms , he told a Luton meeting: “Believe me, this will be the first government in our history to implement a national minimum wage … Nobody will be prouder than I when the consultation is over, the laws are passed, and the people of Britain get that extra protection and security the minimum wage will provide.
“And I want to make sure the minimum wage makes a real difference to people …

“The minister without portfolio has continued to conduct the process of government in a way that I set up. It was at my suggestion that he played the role that he is now playing,” he said “The die is cast This festival is going to happen. In my view it has the capacity to attract dramatically large numbers of people.”Mr Mandelson responded in similar vein. The Tories had been courageous to take on such a “bold and complex” project, and should follow Mr Heseltine’s lead in giving it their support, he said.But Mr Maude said Mr Mandelson had presided over rows, resignations and dithering. “How is it that in a few short months, the Dome has become an object of ridicule, a laughing stock, a music hall joke? But the dream has turned sour, for you could not resist turning this great national project into a new Labour stunt,” he said..

The Prime Minister last night pledged that his government would be the first to bring in a national minimum wage, making a real difference to individuals and providing a foundation for welfare reform. The names of the designers would be unveiled, he said, giving new clues to how the finished product would look. Whatever the content, the dome would be bound to entertain and inspire, he said.
A new entente between Mr Mandelson and the Tory initiator of the dome, former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine, appeared to highlight a split in Conservative ranks. While the Tory culture spokesman, Francis Maude, accused the minister of secrecy and arrogance, Mr Heseltine made a rare Commons appearance to support his successor.Mr Heseltine, who launched the project, defended Mr Mandelson. The minister without portfolio made the revelation as he defended his record in a parliamentary debate on the project in south-east London.

The idea that the Conservatives should seek to exploit that is typical of them but it is beneath you.” He added: “Let me just nail another part of the lie that I used to go on about the private lives of Conservative ministers – rubbish.”Later, Mr Blair’s spokesman said that in the last year of Tory government, pounds 8m was spent on overseas ministerial visits, compared with pounds 5.2m in the first eight months or so of Labour; Tory spending on official residences averaged pounds 1.2m a year over the last five years, compared with pounds 1.1m forecast for Labour’s first year; and hospitality averaged pounds 2m a year, compared with pounds 1m since 1 May.. One of the abiding mysteries of Tony Blair’s period in office will come closer to being solved next month: Peter Mandelson has promised information on the contents of the Millennium Dome in Greenwich. You are Leader of the Opposition and today we have seen why you will stay so.”Mr Blair said the Government was spending less on entertainment, accommodation and travel than the last administration and admonished Sir Peter Emery, a senior Tory, for asking if there was not a conflict between policies for the family “and the private actions of your ministers at the Department for Foreign Affairs”.Mr Blair said that Conservative ministers’ marriages had broken up, and they had remarried “It will happen in our society today. They objected to money in brown envelopes for Conservatives who became ministers.