GOOD apologies are not easy to come by in Westminster. It's a bit like trying to buy strawberries in the winter, you can find them but they tend to be shrivelled and sour.

So to buck a trend, I will begin this week by apologising for my column last week in which I heavily criticised the Government over its handling of the nuclear test veterans.

The veterans are suffering from all sorts of cancers and conditions caused, they say, by radiation when they took part in the UK's nuclear weapons tests.

The Government is refusing to compensate them, and so I pulled out my verbal shotgun and let them have it with both barrels.

How could ministers possibly fail to understand the need to compensate veterans who, in doing their duty, had been unwittingly exposed to radiation that would ruin their lives.

Well, it turns out there has been no such failure – as we discovered this week in the Derby Telegraph. The Government did appreciate the necessity to compensate veterans.

Back in 1993 it saw fit to put up £20 million to help settle their claims. The problem is none of the veterans it was prepared to compensate were British.

The money was given to the Australian Government, in part to cover the cost of cleaning up test sites where A-bombs had been detonated, but crucially it was also paid to settle Australian claims.

There is possibly only one thing the British Government could have done worse than failing to recognise the need to compensate its own veterans – that is recognising the need to compensate someone else's, while refusing to compensate its own.

So, I say to Ministers and Ministry of Defence officials: If I offended anyone or if I was harsh, I apologise.

I should have been far harsher.

I realised earlier this week that the paper's campaign was having a real effect, not only in Whitehall, but also in the real world.

Over the past couple of days we've had e-mails from test veterans or their families living in the UK, Canada and New Zealand all supporting the campaign.

One Derbyshire test veteran's wife, weary of the battle she and her now deceased husband had been fighting, told me that running the campaign would be like hitting one's head against a brick wall.

So it is. But heads are the heaviest part of the human body and, if enough of them keep bopping away, the brick wall will eventually crack.

Anyway, journalists have form for banging their heads against brick walls – they do it every time they try to get a clear answer from a Government department.

In fact, that is how I knew that the campaign was having an effect. Usually getting comments out of the Ministry of Defence press office is awfully tiresome and requires endless follow up calls.

But to my joy this week press officers and officials started calling me up out of the blue to explain the Government's position on test veterans and plead clemency for members of the ministerial team.

Other Whitehall officials please take note – I should next like to receive a call from the Department for Education with an explanation as to why Derby's schools are not getting rebuilt.

I digress. The campaign will roll on and, given that I have taken the first step and apologised today, I think the MoD should follow suit and apologise to the British nuclear test veterans.