LONDON, 18 August 2003 — Chaired by the well-regarded British Judge Lord Hutton, the official inquiry into the apparent suicide of the British scientist David Kelly has revived memories of the Profumo affair of the early 1960s. Likewise to do with the hidden machinations of the British establishment, likewise featuring suicide, likewise the subject of an official enquiry, the Profumo affair led to the downfall of the then Conservative government. Whether the Kelly affair has the potential to undermine the government of Tony Blair remains to be seen, but it has already done it irreparable damage.
Opposition politicians have been pressing for a full public inquiry into the issue of why Britain went to war on what is now felt by many to be a false premise. Convinced that he has no case to answer on that score, Tony Blair had no intention of instituting any such inquiry. But the sheer gravity of the Kelly affair left him with no choice but to set up a comparatively limited inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the scientist’s death.
Was the late Dr. Kelly accurately reported by the BBC Defense Correspondent Andrew Gilligan as having claimed that the British government doctored its September 2002 dossier on Iraq, thereby giving the impression that the threat posed to Britain by Saddam Hussein was greater than it really was? Or did Gilligan distort and sensationalize Dr. Kelly’s views? Moreover, was Kelly a sufficiently authoritative source to justify Gilligan’s basing his report on a conversation with him alone? These are key questions in an increasingly convoluted controversy, with ramifications that are likely to proliferate as the Hutton inquiry proceeds. But there are many other matters that the enquiry is bound to consider — not least the issue of whether Dr. Kelly’s employer, the Ministry of Defense, following Kelly’s anonymous briefing of Gilligan and other BBC journalists, deliberately set out to turn him into a scapegoat. And lurking in the background is the question of how far Tony Blair himself — who could also be called as a witness — was implicated in the chain of events that led to Kelly’s death.
Lord Hutton has insisted that the object of his investigation is simply to establish the facts — not to adjudicate between “interested parties” with a view to finding in favor of one or the other. Yet the truth is that the government of Tony Blair and the BBC are parties with the greatest possible interest in the outcome of Lord Hutton’s deliberations. For all his protestations to the contrary, when — many weeks hence — Lord Hutton publishes his findings, he will for all practical purposes be adjudicating between the credibility of Blair’s government and that of the British Broadcasting Corporation. In the meantime, much of the rest of the British media is already treating the inquiry as a sort of blood sport, with the newspapers owned by Blair’s powerful “friend”, the pro-free market, vehemently anti-BBC media baron Rupert Murdoch, missing no opportunity to charge the corporation with betraying the British public’s trust and covering itself in ignominy.
As things stand, both the Blair government and the BBC (according to at least one opinion poll) are less trusted than they were. A large number of people suspect that, if the government has been duplicitous, the BBC is guilty of overcolored reporting and of abandoning its remit as a public-service broadcaster. But there are perhaps just as many who simply have a confused impression of murky goings-on in high places. The sudden, mysterious death of Dr. Kelly — widely felt outside Britain to be the result of foul play by the British security services — has diffused the sense of a sinister imbroglio that reflects poorly on all concerned.
Yet if the Kelly affair has served to deepen the cynicism of the British public, it is also being widely savored as a media event: For weeks to come journalists will be caught up in a media feeding frenzy, gorging themselves on a daily diet of fresh revelations. Few can be indifferent to the piquant fact that, as the pre-eminent British news organization, the BBC is in effect feeding on itself. For the BBC is now in the bizarre position of covering a story in which the corporation itself is one of the chief protagonists. BBC reporters have the tricky task of reporting an inquiry involving their own paymaster in the same balanced spirit they are expected to bring to the reporting of everything else. With the Hutton enquiry getting under way, some have been acknowledging that the reputation of the BBC — and thus of its staff — could be permanently blighted should Lord Hutton rule that Gilligan and the BBC editors and governors who gave him their unconditional support behaved improperly. The BBC’s correspondents are in danger of resembling the man who saws off the very branch that he is sitting on.
Though all the indications are that the BBC is trusted rather more than the present British government, the future of the corporation is now less certain than it was a year ago. Not a few observers anticipate that the government will move to clip the BBC’s wings when its Charter falls due for renewal in 2 years’ time. Reliant on the license fee paid by owners of television sets, which the government authorizes it to enforce, the BBC’s survival as a state-sponsored yet autonomous organization is by no means guaranteed. The threat that this increasingly bloated, vastly lucrative, public body could be broken up and hived off to the private sector, with baleful implications for the much-vaunted independence of its journalism, is real.
Viewing the BBC as its deadly enemy, the present government is apt to insinuate that the corporation needs cutting down to size. Tony Blair clearly yearns for the days when the BBC’s political journalists were deferential fellows — like the legendary reporter of the 1940s who, after asking the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee if he had anything to impart to the British public and being told “No,” simply said: “Prime Minister, thank you so much for taking the trouble to speak to us.” Those days, however, are long gone. The fact is that in its current guise — merely by subjecting government policies to intelligent daily analysis — the BBC constitutes a more formidable opposition to Tony Blair than does the emasculated British Tory Party led by the ineffectual Iain Ducan Smith.
Still, there are grounds for feeling that the latter-day BBC really has overextended itself. Anxious to figure large in the furiously competitive globalized media culture of satellite and cable television, it has invested hugely in its news-gathering capacity, greatly expanding its infrastructure in the process; indeed, with a pan-continental audience of more than 160 million, the corporation has become a media behemoth, the biggest broadcasting operation in the world. At the same time, it has rushed to embrace the realities of the globalized market place, merchandising itself and its programs with a brashness and blatancy that would appall its founder, the stern Scottish Presbyterian Lord Reith. A God-fearing paternalist who belonged more to the Victorian age than to the twentieth century, Reith fathered the BBC in the 1920s as a high-minded, faintly ecclesiastical, institution which — if it undertook to entertain people — also felt duty-bound to instruct and edify them. Not for nothing was the corporation long known, with a mixture of affection and irritation, as “Aunty”. Several generations of Britons were brought up to think of the BBC as a kindly but strict matron who infallibly knew what was best for them.
It is the new market-orientation of the BBC that lies at the root of its present difficulties, of the mounting suspicion that the corporation is going in for a style of journalism that sits ill with its prescriptive public-service role. If the BBC sells itself hard, its journalists have taken to selling themselves hard too, ever-mindful of what a premium is nowadays set on attention-grabbing revelations, trenchant opinions and “personalities”. With his “news” that the British government had embellished raw intelligence data in order to promote its case for attacking Iraq, Andrew Gilligan was bound to feel that he had a tremendous scoop on his hands, one which, in addition to bringing kudos to his employer, could greatly enhance the prestige and saleability of his own byline.
It is a mark of how thoroughly the BBC has capitulated to the commercialized ethos of the times that Gilligan was free not just to report his story on BBC radio but also to publish it in the Daily Mail (a right-wing newspaper that is no friend of the corporation), where he named Tony Blair’s Director of Communications Alastair Campbell as the individual responsible for “spinning” the data in question. That — as Gilligan claimed — the British government talked up the threat posed by Iraq is now generally accepted. The trouble is that, in his determination to cause a stir, Gilligan oversold his material, making specific allegations which have proved unsustainable and which have come back to haunt both him and his BBC managers.
Admittedly, the cult of personality is by no means new at the BBC. BBC reporters and interviewers with flamboyant, self-dramatizing personalities have done much to enliven, and in some cases improve, British public life during the past half century. But in former times, when it came to calling politicians and governments to account, even the more provocative BBC figures, such as the bespectacled Grand Inquisitor the late Robin Day, confined themselves to forensic examination, to tough questioning. Nor were they given to publishing incendiary stories in commercial newspapers and of lending questionable weight to those stories by advertising their status as correspondents of the British Broadcasting Corporation; there was a time when such moonlighting activities by BBC journalists would have been quite unthinkable. It may be that in seeking to compete in today’s marketized broadcasting culture without injuring its public-service reputation, the BBC has embarked on a mission impossible.
None of this means that Andrew Gilligan was wrong to broadcast Dr. David Kelly’s misgivings about the British government’s presentation of the case for attacking Iraq. The irony is that this impetuous reporter has performed a genuine public service — even as his maverick methods have compromised the BBC’s fabled scrupulosity and precipitated what may be its worst-ever crisis.
