One Morning in March: Dunblane and the Shooting that Changed Britain, by Stephen McGinty review: 'impressive'

But the rest of us? What should we remember about Dunblane? Shouldn’t we just, while of course sympathising with its victims, leave it alone, a black hole of senseless tragedy?

That, I must admit, was my first reaction. If I wasn’t reviewing this book, I wouldn’t have sought it out. Having read it, I realise this would be a mistake. One Morning in March is a truly impressive piece of journalism.

What makes it so is the strong narrative line Stephen McGinty follows through a story that ranges from ominous rumours about a disciplinarian running a camp for boys on an island in Loch Lomond through to the mass killings at Dunblane Primary eight years later, then on to the inside story of the Snowdrop campaign, “one of the most successful single issue political campaigns in modern British history”.

It is easy to see where such a narrative could be derailed. Writing about the families of Gwen Mayor and the 16 murdered children demands empathy without sliding into sentimentality or intrusiveness. The achievements of the Snowdrop campaign – whose story is told with reference to Cabinet-level discussions about the handgun ban – are real enough, but so too were the resentments that occasionally surfaced both within it and within Dunblane itself. Getting the balance right is just as important as telling the story of how suspicions about Thomas Hamilton gradually hardened despite the police never charging him with anything. McGinty (full disclosure: a former Scotsman colleague) has a skill set wide enough to clear all of these hurdles.

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The first section of his book fleshes out all the lost chances of stopping the tragedy. So here is PC George Gunn, on 20 July 1988, taking a boat to the camp Hamilton ran on Inchmoan island to check out parental allegations of cruelty. Here is Doreen Hagger, Linlithgow mother of one of those boys in his charge, who actually went over to the island the following week to see the camp for herself, and whose testimony deserved far more attention than it got. Here is the story about Hamilton’s obsessive photographs of young boys – six rolls of film, 36 exposures on each, handed in every two or three days to a Stirling chemist.

There are so many more examples, and at almost every one of them we see how Hamilton fights back against the claims, says he is the victim of a whispering campaign, complains to the council, local politicians, the media, the ombudsman, the police, even the Queen. He is paranoid, vengeful, his interest in guns (“my friends”, he calls them) growing. Even though we know what is coming, the book is so involvingly written that we can almost forget. Almost.

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The massacre itself is described in spare, stripped-back prose. Those who witnessed its aftermath knew what needed to be done – a complete ban on handguns – even when, as in Michael Forsyth’s case, this went far beyond what the prime minister and home secretary thought necessary at the time. There are no happy endings to the story of 13 March 1996 in Dunblane, but at least the parents’ campaign – which as McGinty reveals, was warmly but unofficially supported by Princess Diana - meant that, with the world’s strictest gun laws, Britain hasn’t seen anything similar since.

One Morning in March: Dunblane and the shooting that changed Britain, by Stephen McGinty, Swift, £20

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