On the night of July 17th 2003 Dr. David Kelly, a respected British biochemist and former weapons inspector and hardliner on Iraqi WMD following a period of intense pressure after being caught in the middle of a row between the British State and the BBC took his own life in the Oxford countryside whilst Blair basked in 17 standing ovations from Congress. From these two points grew an axis a crisis of Watergate proportions began to spin with the Government panicked into calling a public inquiry chaired by the “supreme court” judge Lord Hutton. On Wednesday he delivered his imaginative report into the events surrounding the death of Kelly, where he almost completely cleared the Government whilst trashing the BBC. The following article is an account and analysis of the events that lead up to Kelly’s death and that act’s continuing fall out.
The row had begun with a radio report on May 29th when BBC radio reporter Andrew Gilligan delivered a report that claimed that the Government had “sexed up” the September 2002 dossier on Iraqi WMD with particular concern being focused on a claim that Iraq had WMD that could be deplored in 45mins. The concerns ranged from it having dubious providence to the dossier not placing it in the correct battlefield context. He claimed that these claims had come from a meeting he recently had with a senior intelligence source, when in fact they had came from a May 22nd meeting with Kelly. These claims were supported by reports carried in other papers including the pro-Government Times where other intelligence sources express dissatisfaction with the dossier. This report and the direct implication of Tony Blair chief confident and propagandist Alastair Campbell (think a mixture between Karl Rove and the White House’s chief press spokesman) in a article by Andrew Gilligan in the Mail on Sunday (June 1) caused a row between the two with Campbell making an extraordinary appearance at a The House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) on June 25th where he accused the BBC of having an anti-war bias and that the story was false. He repeats the claims in a frankly barmy performance on June 26th’s Channel Four news.
At this point three important points must be made; firstly Campbell and Gilligan had history with Campbell having forcibly complained about a BBC radio report he had made on the proposed (and now screwed) European Constitution and Campbell has a reputation as never forgiving a slight. Secondly, there is the question of the rogue broadcast of 6.07 where in an unscripted interview with the presenter Gilligan had claimed that the Government probably knew that the 45-minute claim was false. This false and unwittingly said allegation was never repeated and didn’t form the context for the insuring row yet it is using this report that Hutton clears the Government of “sexing up” the dossier by claming this report led people to see “sexing up” as the “embellishment with intelligence known or believed to be false or unreliable”i as opposed to hardening up the language of the dossier, which is what I and the general consensus of opinion saw “sexing up” to mean at the time.
Thirdly despite that qualification there were important flaws not only with the report but also with the internal review of the report when it was subjected to an official complaint from Alastair Campbell. The first flaw was the lack of substantive notes from Gilligan to prove what his source had said, with their being two versions on his electronic personal organiser with only the second including the direct implication of Campbell, although this link is confirmed by fellow BBC reported Susan Watts, who Hutton regards as “accurate and reliable” ii who had also met Kelly. Thirdly Gilligan failed to conform to proper practice and give the Government adequate opportunity to respond with an imprecise phone call to the MOD press office the day before his report the only attempt at contact. The real problems however start when we look at the BBC’s handling of the report with their handling of the rogue 6.07 report mystifying as they refuse to disown that report despite the fact that it wasn’t repeated with Gilligan changing his report when later repeated on the same program. Indeed, such an important allegation should not have been transmitted by the journalist in an unscripted interview from his home, a format that made any editing virtually impossible, especially when Gilligan’s editor Kevin Marsh had concerns over his “loose use of language”iii. In addition when Campbell made his complaint on June 5th there was a failure to thoroughly investigate the report with the head of BBC news Richard Sambrook failing to look at Gilligan’s notes before telling his superiors to back him. In addition, Campbell was right the BBC’s coverage of the war had been horrendously biased against it as especially shown by the exaggeration of any setback the Coalition faced during the war and the sympathetic coverage of anti-war protestors.
A new element came into the row when Kelly admitted to his bosses that he might have been Gilligan’s source. His being the source undermined the Gilligan report in two key ways; firstly he was an MOD scientist not an intelligence officer as Gilligan had claimed his source was (although Dr. Kelly had been involved in the formation of the dossier). Secondly he did not agree with all that Gilligan said, indeed he did not originally see how he could have been source. According to Campbell’s own diary his and Hoon’s (Defence Secretary) reaction was that this would “f*ck Gilligan” and that “the biggest thing needed was to get the source out”. These two were present in a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Tony Blair that decided a course of action that led to the naming of Kelly. This meeting decided to issue a statement on July 8th that gave an outline description of the character and position of Kelly, it was also decided that if a journalist guessed the name right then the Government would confirm it. In addition on July 9th the MOD created a Q&A sheet that would be used for dealing with any journalistic inquires.
Hutton accepted the Government’s justification for this course of action being motivated by the their being caught between a desire not to push Kelly’s name into the public domain and fear that if they act to hide it they will be accused of a cover up. However, that story does not bear scrutiny with reference not only to the aforementioned diaries but also by the fact that both Hoon and Blair sought to minimize their part in this episode with Hoon at first denying all knowledge of the Q&A sheet and Blair saying that he had nothing to do with the naming of Kelly, a position that he stuck until the MOD’s highest official Sir Kevin Tebbit said that Blair had chaired the meeting that decided the “naming strategy”. In addition the fact that The Times had to take 21 guesses to get the right name shows that Kelly’s name was hardly on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
On July 9th The Times identified Kelly as the BBC’s source. This act is the only one of the Government to be criticised by Hutton with him saying that the Government should have forewarned Kelly that he would be identified if put forward as a possible source and that the Government took insufficient time in warning him that he had been outed. Indeed it was a Times’ journalist that told him before the Government’s 2 and a half minute telephone call for the Kellys to leave their home before the press arrived. The pressure intensified on Kelly with the Government using his outing to pressurise the BBC in revealing who their source was, something that they in line with usual journalistic conventions refused. On July 15th he was forced to give evidence to our preposterous FAC. Without a lawyer or a Civil Service handler Kelly was subjected to the ham-fisted, “I’m an MP…Get me on TV” questioning of the likes of Andrew Mackinlay (who to be fair is one of the few people involved in the affair to have fully apologised) and their Government apologist of a Chairman Donald Anderson. The strain of the affair on Kelly obviously showed with him cutting a forlorn figure with a barely audible voice, a stark contrast to a recently released interview with him from September 2002 where he came across as a self-confident and relaxed figure. The strain was made all the worse by Kelly most probably lying to MPs over his contacts with journalists after being startled by one of the MP’s questioning of his links with Susan Watts (the MP had been tipped off by Gilligan). Two days later on July 17th he committed suicide (Not that I’m blaming the FAC for Kelly’s suicide).
This threw the Government into a horrendous crisis; the suicide of any Government official after being caught in row involving the Government would have been harmful but for the suicide to have links to the controversial Iraqi War and happen at a time to allow the wicked juxtaposition with it and Blair’s American speech was catastrophic. The news reached Blair on the plane to Hong Kong and he was forced to issue denials to the journalists including a slip of the tongue when he denied part in “naming” as opposed to “leaking” Kelly’s name (the difference being that the first term would include what he had done on July 8th/9th whilst the second wouldn’t). To stop the crisis becoming fatal he announced an independent (not a judicial) public inquiry on July 19th. However, the crisis did ease for the Government when on July 20th the BBC admitted that Kelly was their source, a revelation that ran counter to the general consensus that he wasn’t. This not only ensured that come the inquiry the Government would not be the only organisation to put under scrutiny but it also undermine the BBC and Kelly due to the difference between his evidence to the FAC on July 15th and this revelation.
The inquiry itself was a fascinating insight into the workings of the Government and the BBC. In regards to the BBC we saw a culture of sloppiness with Gilligan having failed to check or phrase his story properly and then his superiors (right to the very top) failing to check before issuing robust defence after robust defence, indeed when the Head of News finally checked Gilligan’s notes he knew they were in trouble. This sloppiness was caused by the BBC’s anti-war/Bush bias (which Gilligan in numerous newspaper articles personified) and its hunger for the big story and therefore the big ratings that follow, both of which caused it to want to believe and then presume that the story was true. This sloppiness was compounded by the monolithic nature of the BBC with no clear line of commands something that left the managers unsure as to who should check Gilligan’s story and a lack of self-evaluation bordering on arrogance that made any check half-hearted and superficial. In addition we learnt of more flaws with the report including Gilligan admitting to having inserted his own conclusions in addition to what Kelly had said. These and the other failings mentioned in this column form the basis for the rightly damning criticism of the BBC from Hutton in regards to their preparation of the Gilligan story, their handling of Campbell’s complaint and their refusal to admit that the 6.07 report’s claim that Blair lied to the British people was wrong.
Whilst the inquiry was sitting most of the attention of the press was focused on the opening up of the entails of the Government. A lot of the focus went to how the Government acted during the “war” with the BBC, a focus that developed an unattractive picture of a chaotic world full of almost amoral people with complete tunnel vision due to their obsession to get the BBC. However, the really interesting information came with the investigation into the September 2002 dossier on Iraqi WMD. This dossier was a public report from the Joint Intelligence Committee (J.I.C), something that had never happened before. What we saw was the complete immersion of the heads of British intelligence into political world with Campbell, a former Labour employee chairing meetings of the J.I.C and J.I.C accepting 15 changes to the wording of the report from 10 Downing Street. These changes including changing the title so that instead of referring Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs it referred to Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, the removal of passage that qualified Saddam’s willingness to use WMD to defence, the changing of Iraq “may be able to deploy…(WMDs) within 45 minutes”iv to “the Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes”v. Strangely these changes all had the effect of making the dossier a more strident and forceful argument in favour of war.
While the inquiry evidence into the formation of the dossier did not support Gilligan’s original report and confirmed that the Government was not aware of the unhappiness over the inclusion of the 45minute as it was of a lower level in the MOD not the J.I.C it surely did not justify Hutton’s conclusion that the Government did not “sex up” the dossier. Whilst it is fair to say that the Government did not influence the evidence presented, the way that evidence was presented in the dossier was heavily influenced by the Government with the wording of the dossier being altered to the effect of strengthening the case for war. However, Hutton blithely dismisses this saying that all the changes to the report were justified by the intelligence and that the Government did not “sex up” the dossier. This would seem to be giving the Government an extraordinary benefit of the doubt which would run counter to what the Government deserves when you consider such incidences as the February 2003 “dodgy dossier” that plagiarised a 12 year old PhD thesis (spelling mistakes and all) and a 6 year old magazine article whilst purporting to be intelligence.
Such giving of the benefit of the doubt to Government seems to run through the whole of the conclusions that Hutton reaches as presented to the public in his 90-minute summary of the report. He has showed himself to be alien to the nature of a Government that simply does not deserve any presumption of honour or truthfulness with his conclusions on their conduct in the naming of Kelly simply breathtaking. In contrast his conclusions in regards to the BBC are devastating and whilst rightly so, the BBC screwed up not only in the report but also in its investigation of Campbell’s complaint it cannot but be noticed that he has been less generous to the BBC than to the Government. The immediate effect of this imbalance was to rout the Government’s critics with Leader of Opposition Michael Howard (Tory) facing a torrid Wednesday trying to make a response to Hutton after rejecting either completely accepting the report and its clearing of Blair (and therefore have to apologise to Blair for earlier comments) as too embarrassing or rejecting the report as one-sided as too risky. He therefore fell between two stools and was easily trounced by a sneering Blair, although on a positive note the response by neither fully affirming nor rejecting Hutton meant that it wasn’t newsworthy and so allowed Howard to slip out of Blair’s victory parade by the side door marked obscurity.
The BBC however was not so lucky with the bombshell of Hutton quickly followed by a media attack from Alastair Campbell (who had left the Government following the giving of evidence to the Hutton Inquiry) keen to press the advantage. What followed was a spectacular period of bloodletting with the Chairmen of the BBC resigning merely three and half hours after the publishing of the report, followed by the sacking of the “chief executive” Greg Dyke the next day by the board and then on Friday Andrew Gilligan, the reporter who had started it all resigned. To be honest despite my dislike of the Hutton Report it is right they have all gone, indeed they should be joined by the leaving of the editor of the program that published the report Kevin Marsh and the Head of BBC News Richard Sambrook. The BBC must face up to the fact that despite the one-sided nature of the Hutton Report what he said about them was largely correct, the BBC’s conduct in June/July had not been brave it had been stupid, reckless and arrogant. There are serious structural and cultural problems in the BBC that has for the past 20 odd years has displayed a left-liberal bias and since the arrival of Greg Dyke to the corporation a relentless pursuit for the “big story” that has caused it to go from a straight news reporting style to a news-making style, a style that allows bias to creep in more readily.
The BBC must put its house in order by first making major structural changes such as streamlining chains of command and adopting more constructive approach to handling complaints. It then must finally challenge the culture of the BBC including riding it of its left-liberal bias (advertising in papers other than the left-liberal Guardian would be a start) and realise that while getting the exclusive is of the highest importance for commercial news organisations who need to justify their existence with high ratings/readership that is not true of the tax funded BBC. For the BBC to justify its £106 annual tax then the overall accuracy and reliability of its reporting is more important than getting a good headline and if it means being a step behind other news organisations then so be it. My fear is by being so one-sided Hutton has not created the environment for this to happen with many BBC employees still maintaining the righteousness of their position as shown by their sympathy strike in support of Greg Dyke. Hopefully BBC lifer Mark Byford will as acting-chief executive heal the wounds and so create the environment for the new chief executive (with all due respect to the guy the BBC needs someone with some outside experience to usher in reform) to address these problems. In the interim, the BBC would be fair better to play dead as they did for the first few days post-Hutton and so invite the sympathy of all those distrustful of Blair than to actually mount a counteract as the three who have fallen on their swords are threatening.
As for Blair and the Government the report has proven to be a boomerang laden with explosives. While Hutton does clear the Government almost entirely, with even the previously lame-duck Defence Secretary left unharmed he has done so in such an exaggerated why that as everyone recovers from their shock they are beginning to attack the report as a whitewash as shown by a poll carried out the following day finding nearly half believing the report to be a whitewash. It would certainly have been better for Blair if the report for Hutton to have heavily criticised the MOD but then cleared the Prime Minister and his close advisors as it would have given creditability to Hutton’s vindication of Blair. It would also by forcing the resignation of Geoff Hoon satisfy the bloodlust of the public for a ministerial scalp, something that (in my opinion) may still lead to Hoon going in the near future in all probability citing “the need to spend more time with my family”. In addition it does not settle the growing question of the lack of Iraqi WMD and storm that was increasing the same day that Hutton delivered his report with the giving of evidence of David Key to a senate committee where the former head of the Iraqi Survey Group and hardliner on Iraqi WMD claim that the intelligence was wrong and that we have found 85% of all we’re going to found, something that it seems has forced him into announcing yet another inquiry. It seems that just as Tony Blair escapes a domestic crisis that had begun on the same day as a transatlantic triumph he is too be plunged into a transatlantic crisis on the same day as a domestic triumph.
All feedback appreciated.
Bibliography
Obviously with a live news story its impossible to do a full Bibliography as they’ll be so many papers and TV reports that have over the course of the story informed your opinions however this represents the sources that I seen nearest to before or had in front of me whilst writing this article:
The Times, January 29 (Tabloid Edition)
Daily Mail, January 29, 30, 31
The Daily Telegraph January 30
Too many hours of BBC News 24 and Sky News coverage on January 28, 29, 30
Lord Hutton’s oral summary of his report
i Televised Summary of the Hutton Report, by Lord Hutton as quoted in 29th January The Times Pg 44 (Tabloid Edition)
ii Lord Hutton as quoted by Dominic Kenndy in the 29th January Times Pg 35 (Tabloid Edition)
iii Email to Stephen Mitchell from Kevin Marsh dated Jun 27th, presented as evidence in the Hutton Inquiry quoted from 29th January Times Pg 44 (Tabloid Edition)
iv Draft of September 2002 JIC dossier, presented as evidence to the Hutton Inquiry, quoted in the 29th January Daily Mail
v September 2002 JIC dossier, presented as evidence to the Hutton Inquiry, quoted in the 29th January Daily Mail
