Intelligence

At the end of Hutton, all we have found is truth

Simon Jenkins



The Hutton inquiry ended its hearings yesterday. It has proved the biggest self-inflicted wound in modern politics. The nation has been engrossed. Witnesses and lawyers have wallowed in a giant vat of hindsight. But the fact is that Tony Blair the politician has been mortified by Tony Blair the lawyer. Asked for truth, Lord Hutton has given the Prime Minister what he cannot have expected, the truth.
An inquest into the suicide of the scientist David Kelly has laid bare the tangled web that politicians weave when first they practise to deceive. It has been conducted in public. The public is the jury. We have been given the evidence. We are entitled to deliver a verdict.

My verdict is simple. Dr Kelly was a shy, sensitive man who vented his professional frustration to the media. He played with fire, was burnt and proved unable to handle the consequences. As the Prime Minister knew well, his death was suicide.

What can Lord Hutton add? He has become a political Jerry Springer. He has set members of the British Establishment tearing at each other’s faces in public. We have watched boggle-eyed as his lordship has shown us into the most private rooms of state, into its bedrooms, beneath its sheets, into its most obscene diaries. No e-mail, phone-call or snatched office remark has escaped his prurient lens. Inquiry “in camera” has become inquiry on camera.

To Mr Blair, Lord Hutton’s job was to pin Dr Kelly’s death on a journalist, the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan, to appease the rage of his over-mighty press aide, Alastair Campbell. This was always a squalid manoeuvre. Mr Campbell pleaded that his boss was seeking to restrain him. Mr Blair’s failure to do so shows him as putty in his assistant’s hands.

I do not see how any reasonable person can find Mr Gilligan guilty. While he admitted errors in his original story, as did the BBC in handling him, they in no way damaged the story’s essence or the validity of broadcasting it. Every item of evidence presented to Lord Hutton has vindicated the claim that the September dossier was originally unhelpful to Mr Blair and had to be altered, or desperately “over-egged”, to prove Iraq’s aggressive intent.

Objections to this process from within the intelligence community were suppressed.

The more the inquiry burrowed into the story’s foundations, the more secure they came to seem, despite being called “100 per cent wrong” by Mr Campbell. They were confirmed in evidence from the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, and from Brian Jones, of defence intelligence. The story was clearly more or less as Dr Kelly intended and clearly in the public interest. It may have impugned Downing Street’s integrity — something Mr Campbell used to do with abandon when he was a journalist. So do most stories critical of government. But it was Mr Campbell’s paranoid response that drove everyone to the barricades.

Who should now resign? Who should be eviscerated in Old Palace Yard for the delectation of the Westminster village? The answer is nobody. This inquiry has been ludicrously disproportionate. An open-and-shut inquest has been conducted like an Agatha Christie whodunnit with a dozen suspects in the courtroom. A personal tragedy has become a weapon in a public brawl between ministers and the BBC. We should have had an inquest into the reasons for the Iraq invasion. Instead we had to use a private inquest as proxy.

From the moment sometime in 2002 that Mr Blair knew he was going to join George Bush in a reckless military adventure in the Middle East, some crisis like this was inevitable. He was a lawyer and he needed legal justification for what he suspected was illegal. This, he felt, had to come from intelligence of an “imminent threat”. Colleagues and officials struggled to give him support, legal, political and military. Critics rightly subjected that support to scrutiny. There was a clash of government and media, few holds barred.

The Hutton inquiry has revealed nothing beyond the normal, often flawed, responses of people who work under intense pressure. They do not enjoy the luxury of legal hindsight. We learnt as much from the other-worldly Scott Report into arms for Iraq in 1996. No human institution, no company, Whitehall department or newspaper office can behave as lawyers believe they should. Their internal relations could not for a moment withstand Lord Hutton’s forensic scrutiny.

We talk, argue and e-mail each other without expecting lawyers to wave transcripts before the world and shout: “Ooh, look, what they’ve said!” If that were the case, the business of Britain which, even in government, depends on a measure of privacy, would become less not more open. Without confidentiality there is no proper debate. We all cut occasional corners and swap gallows humour. We try to predict outcomes.

None of those involved with Dr Kelly knew he might commit suicide. Jeremy Gompertz, QC, in his passionate tribute, appeared to think that they should. The reality is that hundreds of citizens every day are treated by the Government and the media in as cavalier, and possibly cruel, a fashion as was Dr Kelly. They do not commit suicide. We cannot deal with them as if they might. Lawyers may present the world as being on the brink of breakdown, accident or a juicy suit for negligence. It is not.

I would rather apply a ruthless test of reasonableness to the Hutton saga. The Prime Minister had decided to go to war. It was not unreasonable for his staff to do everything to help him. It was not unreasonable for them to put together a public dossier on Saddam Hussein’s “aggressive intent”. It was not unreasonable, when the first draft failed to do this, to ask the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) to try again, with extra spice. Their boss was fighting for his political life.

Nor was it unreasonable for some in the wider intelligence community to get upset when their material was “over-egged”. It was not unreasonable, though perhaps unwise, for the JIC to disregard these doubts. It was not unreasonable to expect some doubters to use their contacts with the press to hint at their disquiet. It was not unreasonable for Dr Kelly’s bosses to take a dim view of this.

Nor was it unreasonable for Andrew Gilligan, and other journalists, to search out the doubters and put them under pressure. It was not unreasonable for the Today programme to take some pride in a scoop. It was not unreasonable, though as it turned out unwise, for Mr Gilligan to make hay with it while the sun shone. Nor was it unreasonable, though also unwise, for Mr Campbell to protest as strongly as he did.

The formal status of the BBC governors as both the corporation’s regulator and its defender may be out of date and absurd, but everyone knows that they are little more than cheer-leaders. It was therefore not unreasonable for them to leap to the defence of the BBC managers when under blatant political pressure. They had been told the story was sound and were not a broadcasting complaints authority.

It was not unreasonable, indeed it was essential, for the BBC to protect its source. But I cannot see it as unreasonable for the Government to try to discover and reveal the source. When he duly revealed himself, it was neither illegal nor unreasonable for ministers to try to publicise the fact, as Jonathan Sumption, QC, said yesterday. Geoff Hoon may have dissembled on this to the inquiry — to be accused by Mr Gompertz of bare-faced hypocrisy. But most witnesses dissembled in some respect. Not a day passes at the Dispatch Box or in a Commons committee but Old Mother Truth is not tortured horribly. Had Dr Kelly not died and Mr Campbell not wanted to “open a flank” against the BBC, this would have blown over.

Lawyers use cold facts to defend their clients and attack their foes. The law is institutionally disproportionate. I believe that the Kelly/Gilligan affair was never suitable for such handling. It was a political sideshow, one of feints, nuances, dodges and glancing blows, on the fringe of something far more important, an issue of peace and war. The affair began with Mr Blair’s controversial decision to invade Iraq and was compounded by Mr Campbell’s paranoia.

Iraq has now been invaded. Mr Campbell has now resigned. A man has died by his own hand. No one was to blame. Surely the matter is closed.

September 28, 2003 at 10:28 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home