Posted 5:44 PM by Dil
Hutton will leave no one smelling of roses
By Max Hastings
(Filed: 17/08/2003)


It was suggested before the Iraq War that the allies were deceitful about their motives. George Bush claimed to be troubled by a tyrant, al-Qa'eda, and weapons of mass destruction, when he simply wanted to punish somebody for September 11. Tony Blair asserted that the British people were imminently threatened by WMD, while in truth he was driven by moral zeal to free the Iraqi people.

Whether or not this is correct, divisions between professed issues and real ones were apparent during the first week's hearings of the Hutton Inquiry. Tony Blair leads a Government which has institutionalised leaks, yet which sought retribution against Dr David Kelly, for leaking off-message. The BBC professes to be defending its independence. Instead, it finds itself justifying journalism which pursued a valid thesis, but in a shoddy fashion.

Alastair Campbell hopes that Hutton's findings will enable him to retire from Downing Street with an untarnished reputation. This seems as implausible as the notion that when rape charges against John Leslie were dropped he was left without a stain on his character.

The British public is, I suspect, largely indifferent to abstruse wrangling between Downing Street and the media. The saloon bar wisdom that "they all deserve each other" is not far wide of the mark. But amid the banquet of allegation and counter-allegation offered to Hutton, it already seems possible to fix some points.

The military and intelligence worlds believed before the war that Saddam had WMD, and would probably use them. Right or wrong, this was what Blair was told. Second, some people in Whitehall felt uneasy that the Prime Minister publicly overstated the immediacy of the WMD threat. We need to hear more, before we can be sure how high that unease went.

If David Kelly had indeed been the innocent some people have suggested, he would never have hobnobbed with the likes of Andrew Gilligan and Susan Watts, who sounded a convincing witness. She confirms that Dr Kelly believed the Government to have overstated the WMD evidence. But she disputes the detail on which Gilligan based his Today report, especially the naming of Alastair Campbell.

I suggested on this page six weeks ago, before David Kelly's death, that Campbell might win his narrow point against the BBC, while the Government remained vulnerable on the wider one - that somebody, somewhere in Downing Street, pushed the WMD case further than the intelligence community would have wished. Once Campbell launched his assault on the BBC over Gilligan's report, the hunt was on in Whitehall, to discover whom the reporter had talked to. This is normal.

Every journalist who has ever broken a story that embarrassed a government is familiar with the search for scapegoats that follows. As editor of The Daily Telegraph eight years ago, I was telephoned by the then Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Peter Harding, and warned that if a story we were running next day about Balkan policy went in the newspaper, it would damage the career of the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Peter Inge. Everybody knew, said Harding, that I had lunch with the CGS that day. I felt obliged to write to both Harding and the Defence Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, declaring explicitly that Inge had nothing to do with our story.

It is hard today to sympathise with Downing Street's rage about unauthorised leaking. Since 1997, no Government policy or announcement has been formally unveiled in Parliament until it has been selectively leaked to whichever newspaper is Alastair Campbell's favourite of the moment. Those who live by leaks deserve no pity when they are leaked against.

The Ministry of Defence, furious with Kelly about his contacts with the press on such a sensitive issue, released his name. We seem likely to be told that this was done at Downing Street's behest. One of the most difficult issues for Lord Hutton is that of how Kelly was treated by his employers once he was fingered as the source. Almost certainly the Government view was that, whatever the detail of Kelly's conversation with Gilligan, the scientist had precipitated a damaging row merely by talking to the reporter. The outcome may not have been Kelly's intention, but it was the consequence. It seems doubtful whether Kelly would have kept his job. Lord Hutton will have to determine whether his employers' behaviour was extravagant.

It seems fair to guess that Kelly was appalled to find himself in desperate trouble, after a conversation with a journalist which he had probably regarded as routine. All reporters talk privately to Whitehall officials. If we, as journalists, were solely dependent upon the pronouncements of ministers, the public would learn precious little about anything. Our sources depend on us not to "drop them in it".

Dr Kelly's misfortune was that he chatted to a journalist about a matter that had assumed vital importance for Tony Blair. Amid his embarrassment about the absence of visible WMD in Iraq, any suggestion of deliberate Government deceit was immensely damaging. Dr Kelly, digging his potato patch, had put his fork into a mine.

The balance of probability remains that the Government pushed too far its claims about the Iraqi threat. For Blair to get out of this one unscathed, he needs firm evidence about WMD. This may still be forthcoming. In some form, they certainly existed.

Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence will probably be chastised for heavy-handedness in their handling of Dr Kelly, but Lord Hutton might well conclude that no one could have been expected to guess that he might kill himself in consequence. Geoff Hoon made himself look crass by going motor-racing at Silverstone before the body was cold, but lack of taste may not be enough to cost the Defence Secretary his head, such as it is.

The BBC's journalistic procedures and editorial supervision seem certain to receive a mauling. This story started out as a not unusual wrangle between Government and the media, which became translated into a major scandal by Dr Kelly's death. All those who started this fight must wish that they had not.

Posted 5:56 PM by Dil
August 15, 2003

What happens when two bureaucracies go to war
Peter Riddell
Rather than stark colours, the Hutton inquiry is dealing with shades of grey



We are in the world of John Le Carré, not Ian Fleming. The Hutton inquiry is a story of bureaucracy not conspiracy, of harassed officials worried about their pensions, not plots. The first four days of hearings have been depicted in stark primary colours, with clashing claims and counter-claims. The reality is more of greys or dirty browns, the colours of bureaucracy.
What we are hearing about is not a British Watergate, a conspiracy directed by Tony Blair and his inner circle. Rather, it is a tale of fallible and self-serving politicians, civil servants, advisers and journalists, who make mistakes and seek to defend themselves.

The inquiry will be a marathon lasting at least three months. Yet the hearings have come over as a series of sprints with daily winners and losers. This is partly unavoidable since the story has to be reported as it develops day by day. So far, we have merely a corner of a very large canvas. Add in the partisan stance of much of the press and many broadcasters — looking for anything that will blacken/boost either the Government or the BBC — and a misleading impression is being given.

The process is low key. As Lord Hutton said on August 1, he is carrying out an investigation, not presiding over a trial between interested parties with conflicting cases. Lord Hutton and James Dingemans, QC, counsel to the inquiry, have avoided the stagey court-room antics that occasionally marked the Scott inquiry into the “arms for Iraq” affair in the mid-1990s.

The Hutton/Dingemans approach is a precise, but relentless, attempt to build up a picture of what drove David Kelly to his death. What is so fascinating, riveting to close observers of the British Establishment at work, is how the inquiry is lifting the veil on the workings of not only Whitehall but also the media. This is not just through oral evidence but, as revealingly, through the publication of e-mails, memos, notes and letters. We are in a world of Byzantine bureaucracies — with the BBC rivalling the Ministry of Defence in its complexity and buck-passing — and mysterious acronyms. If you get a letter from Box 850, you will know it is the Secret Intelligence Service, more popularly known as MI6.

At the centre there is the sad story of Dr Kelly. Since his body was found four weeks ago, he has been depicted by the Government’s enemies as a saintly, heroic figure driven to his death by the Whitehall spin machine. The picture revealed this week is less clearcut, and more tragic. He was not an innocent destroyed by the powerful. Rather, he was a frustrated, well-intentioned man who blundered into what became an increasingly impossible situation for him.

Dr Kelly was widely respected and had long experience of biological weapons and Iraq, as recognised by the award of the CMG in 1996. But that did not make him senior in the bureaucracy. That was one of his complaints. In April 2001, he protested that he had been working at a level higher than his Grade 5. These issues, he said, are important since they affect “such things as pensions”. In later letters, he was even more aggrieved about a lack of recognition, prompting one official to comment, “the poor chap has not had a pay rise for three years”.

Dr Kelly was allowed to have regular media contacts, giving “unattributable briefings” to a dozen organisations. So he was familiar with the media world. He was not alone in his worries about some of the September 24 dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Two officials on the Defence Intelligence Staff had also raised concerns. So the journalist Andrew Gilligan was on to something in his original May 29 report.

Dr Kelly talked freely both to Mr Gilligan and to Susan Watts of the BBC’s Newsnight programme, going beyond “the scope of his discretion”, according to the later view of the MoD. But the question is not just whether Dr Kelly mentioned Alastair Campbell as hardening up the dossier, but whether he was in a position to know. As Ms Watts’s tape of her talk with Dr Kelly shows, he speculated beyond his own admitted knowledge. Mr Gilligan went much further in making charges about Mr Campbell and the dossier, while Ms Watts was more cautious. Julian Miller, head of the Cabinet Office assessment staff, denied any involvement by No 10 or Mr Campbell.

There are clear inconsistencies about what Dr Kelly said to the BBC journalists and, later, to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Commons. His Ministry of Defence bosses became increasingly unhappy with his behaviour, as was clear from yesterday’s evidence. John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was demanding a “proper, security-style interview”. Dr Kelly had every reason to be worried.

The hearings have revealed defensive and protective bureaucracies in the MoD and the BBC. Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s head of news and current affairs, was determined to defend Mr Gilligan despite the doubts of Kevin Marsh, his editor on the Today programme, about “his loose use of language and lack of judgment in some of his phraseology”. Ms Watts refused to endorse the Gilligan version.

We have still to hear from senior politicians and officials in the Cabinet Office and Downing Street. Yet, while the Hutton inquiry is the only show in town during August, it is still a sideshow. The central question — outside Hutton’s remit — is whether Mr Blair exaggerated the urgency of the threat from Saddam to justify military action last March. The report of the Intelligence and Security Committee of MPs next month will provide part of the answer. The rest will depend on whether any evidence is found in Iraq by the Survey Group, and whether a stable country is created. The death of Dr Kelly is essentially still a story about him, rather than why we went to war five months ago.