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Revealed: Hutton Report
that never saw the light of day
Magnus Linklater
Scotland on Sunday 1st February 2004
Reproduced with kind permission
Filed 03 Feb 04
www.land-care.org.uk
DELVING into Lord Hutton’s in-tray the other
day, I came across an intriguing document which suggests that his
lordship was in two minds about the conclusions he would come to
in the Kelly affair.*
I present it here, in the hope that this will
contribute to the debate about where, in the end, responsibility
lies. It rests entirely on evidence presented to the inquiry, and
indicates that, if the judge had been feeling more charitable towards
the media, and less forgiving to the politicians, we might today
be counting resignations in Downing Street rather than Portland
Place.
It goes as follows:
"I have today delivered to Lord Falconer
of Thoroton a further report into the circumstances surrounding
the death of Dr David Kelly CMG. I have chosen this time to look
at those circumstances from a rather different perspective than
my previous attempt. My terms of reference remain the same, namely
to conduct an investigation into the events leading up to Dr Kelly’s
death. However, I have chosen to scrutinise more carefully the information
that was passed by Dr Kelly to the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan,
because that was what exercised this distinguished scientist at
the time; I have looked at the remarkable procedures adopted by
Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence once it was broadcast;
and I have examined the nature of the relationship between the Prime
Minister’s advisers and the intelligence boffins who cobbled
together the Iraq dossier.
"I stick to the view that Mr Gilligan’s
initial broadcast on 29 May, 2003, made from his bedroom, without
an agreed transcript, was a model of irresponsible reporting. In
particular, the suggestion that the government knew that the 45
minute claim was wrong but included it in the dossier anyway is
a gross distortion of the truth. I can see why Alastair Campbell
went ballistic. However, Mr Gilligan has accepted that this claim,
which was later modified, was an error. What remains to be tested
is whether the thrust of the information was accurate.
"Given that, as we have learnt from evidence
given by the head of MI6, the 45 minute claim related to battlefield
weapons rather than long-range missiles, it does seem clear to me
that the dossier was over-pitched - hence Dr Kelly’s concern.
Another expert, Dr Brian Jones, told us he wanted the language toned
down. That does not seem to have been done. Instead, every suggestion
made by Mr Campbell, the Director of Communications, and by Jonathan
Powell, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, was aimed at hardening
up the document, making the threat appear more real and more immediate
than we now know it to have been.
"John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence
Committee, assured us that nothing was included in the dossier unless
it had been approved, and that Mr Campbell’s proposals were
purely ‘presentational’. Looking through the list of changes,
however, one cannot avoid the impression that what was presentational
to one man was ‘sexing up’ to another - an unlovely phrase,
I concede, but you know what is meant by it. At the very least,
Mr Scarlett should have been more circumspect in dealing with the
men from Downing Street. At the most, he should have told them to
stuff it. If we can’t trust our intelligence agencies to steer
clear of the spin-doctors who can we trust?
"We now turn to the way that Dr Kelly was
dealt with, once he had admitted that he was probably the source
for Mr Gilligan’s story. It is clear from Mr Campbell’s
diary, a colourful document, liberally spattered with asterisks,
that to him this was a heaven-sent opportunity to dish the BBC.
Indeed, his first instincts were to leak the name right away, and
only the restraining hand of the Prime Minister stopped him doing
so. Judging by the blizzard of e-mails and memos emanating from
Downing Street around this time it looks as if no one had time for
anything other than the battle against the BBC. One wonders who
was running the country. As for the many meetings that were clearly
taking place, we have only patchy evidence. Whatever happened to
the old-fashioned custom of minute-taking?
"We must now consider the role and character
of Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary. I found Mr Hoon a rum sort
of a cove. For someone running his own department, he seemed to
have only the haziest notion of what was going on. He had no knowledge
of key documents, he never read what was put out by his own press
office, he did not attend key strategy meetings, he allowed Downing
Street to draft MoD statements. He claimed to have been concerned
for Dr Kelly’s welfare, but he was instrumental in putting
in hand the very process which exposed him. If we believe Mr Campbell,
he was far closer to events than he is willing to admit.
"At one stage I asked him why he had not
protected Dr Kelly by telling the press that it was not MoD practice
to reveal the names of civil servants. He said that he would have
been accused of a ‘cover-up’. Has it come to this, that
ministers are so petrified of the media that they are willing to
sacrifice their employees to protect their own reputations? I find
it extraordinary that Mr Hoon took no steps to inform himself about
Dr Kelly’s personal circumstances or to interest himself in
the procedure by which his name was revealed. I would define this
as the very opposite of ministerial responsibility.
"And so we come to the Prime Minister himself.
He is a shadowy figure in all this, and yet he is central. He argues
that he did not interfere in intelligence documents, and yet the
statement he read out to the House of Commons to justify war with
Iraq, was infinitely more helpful to his cause than it would have
been, if left untouched by his advisers. He says that he had nothing
to do with the exposure of Dr Kelly, yet he presided over the very
meetings at which the decision was taken to allow the press to guess
his identity. He says that he wanted to play things ‘by the
book’, but in the end he simply by-passed it.
"In reaching these conclusions, I am not
absolving the BBC of blame. Indeed, the failure of their Director-General
to inform himself about Mr Gilligan’s evidence, or even to
understand why it was open to criticism, was a dereliction of his
duty as editor-in-chief of the BBC.
"However, I am convinced that the principal
lesson to be taken from this whole sorry affair is that the behaviour
of ministers and their advisers fell below the standards which one
is entitled to expect from a British government, that ethics became
subverted to an undignified squabble with the BBC, and that the
British people were given an inaccurate, exaggerated, and possibly
duplicitous account of the status of our intelligence in the run-up
to war.
"These are, in my view, serious matters. Somebody somewhere
should be prepared to take the rap."
*Since it is a golden rule that irony does not work in journalism,
I should make it clear that the above document is a figment of
my imagination, invented to suit the argument - something newspapers
normally never do...
Magnus Linklater
Scotland on Sunday 1st Feb 04
Further Reading recommended by Land-Care
 Comment
( 2004). Hutton Report: was it balanced or a whitewash? Jonathan
Dimbleby, ITV 1, Sunday 1st Feb
See SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage, filed 01 Feb 04,
www.land-care.prg.uk Click
Here to View
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