Why Should The Queen Apologise?

From the pen of Richard Kay, the Daily Mail's gossip columnist, on March 2:

"The Queen is set to come close to apologising for the fatal shooting of electrician Jean Charles de Menezes during next week's state visit of the Brazilian president to London.

I understand the move is expected to come in a speech at a Buckingham Palace banquet to welcome Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to Britain...

It is not thought that the Queen will refer to Mr. de Menezes directly by name, but that she will make general remarks about the tragedies which rocked Britain last July. "The key word officials have been talking about including is 'innocent''', I am told. "The speechwriters want her remarks to convey the idea that good relations between two countries can be forgesd as a result of common tragic circumstances"...

Th state visit comes at a critical time in relations between London and Brazil after months of tense diplomacy over the de Menezes shooting. The Crown Prosecution Service will have to decide whther to prosecute officers involved in the killing of the 27-year-old Brazilian...

Buckingham Palace said: "The Queen's speeches on these occasions are the responsibility of the Foreign Office"'.

Proclamations of the innocence of Jean Charles de Menezes by the 'Daily Mail' are now tediously predictable; but hopefully at least a fraction of the 'tense diplomacy' focussed on the Brazilian government's aggressive posture over this shooting, when that country's subject was deliberately breaking the law by his very presence here.

Did they even know where he was when he died?

And if they did, did they inform us that they believed one of their citizens was breaking our law?

And seeing as Her Majesty seems to be getting into the apologies business, one would have thought that those of her own subjects who were falsely imprisoned for years by her realm's apparatus, such as Gerry Conlon, Annie Maguire and Paddy Hill, would be more fitting beneficiaries of her good grace.

Even if they do have Irish accents.