It fell to the junior Foreign Office minister, Tobias Ellwood, to tell the UK media that at least 15 British nationals had died in the Tunisia shooting and that the number was set to rise.
The subject is one with which Ellwood has an intensely personal connection. In 2002, his brother was among 202 people killed in the double bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali.
Jon Ellwood, a teacher who was in Bali for a conference, died in the second of two blasts that hit nightclubs on Kuta beach. It took three days for his family to learn that he had had been killed.
Tobias Ellwood, a former army officer who became the Conservative MP for Bournemouth East in 2005, flew to Bali with his sister to bring home Jon’s body. Ahead of the 10th anniversary of the attack in 2012, he told the BBC about the chaos they encountered.
“We just wanted to bring my brother’s body back to Britain, as simple as that. But it’s not that simple,” he said. “You need death certificates in both languages, embalming certificates, sealing certificates. All these processes require time and people to participate. None of that happened.
“I had to do many of those things myself to the point where I ended up screwing the lid down on the coffin myself. That can’t be right.”
Ellwood, now one of the parliamentary under-secretaries of state at the Foreign Office, said some of the additional staff the British embassy in Jakarta had brought in to help were unable to cope and had to be flown out. Overall, he said, the official British response was “horrific”.
Following his experiences, at the invitation of Jack Straw, the foreign secretary at the time, Ellwood contributed ideas as to how such emergency responses could be improved.
