LONDON, 16 August 2003 — When the main counsel to the Hutton inquiry concludes his examination of a witness he asks: “Is there anything else that you know of the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. Kelly that you can assist his lordship with?” It’s a useful reminder of Lord Hutton’s restricted terms of reference.
Those in Court 73 this week may have been distracted by the bitter relations between the British government and the BBC; diverted by the internal disagreement at the corporation; and absorbed by the performance of witnesses — but the subject under scrutiny remains, simply, those circumstances which led Dr. Kelly to cut his wrist.
In one respect, it is a refreshingly uncluttered mission, and Lord Hutton and his counsel, James Dingemans QC, are doing an impressive job. But it is difficult to sit in court for very long without feeling that, as a nation, we are aiming off the main issue.
Dr. Kelly’s professional expertise was the assessment of weapons of mass destruction and, in particular, Iraq’s capability. He was intricately involved in weighing some of the intelligence which was included in last year’s WMD dossier and which subsequently informed Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to go to war. As each day goes by without hard evidence of WMD being produced in Iraq, that decision looks increasingly reckless and bizarre. And yet instead of publicly examining the intelligence, we seem to have settled for the Hutton inquiry.
One can’t deny that Hutton is ventilating important issues about the standards and behavior of the media and the bitterness between the government and the BBC, but these are beside the point. What we need is an undisputed account of the assessment that formed Blair’s decision, and an examination not simply of what Kelly said to the media — but why he said it. That is a very different question.
As things stand, one experiences a strange disconnect in Court 73. This has as much to do with the lack of consensus in British newspapers as to the purpose of the project. The Murdoch press, which includes the Times and the Sun, is unabashedly backing the government in its war against the BBC, partly because Murdoch loathes the obstruction that the corporation represents to his commercial plans, but mostly because he is a hawk on Iraq.
On the other side of the argument, the Mail group, the Independent and the Daily Telegraph line up to project any evidence that appears damaging to Alastair Campbell and the government.
There is never agreement about where to attach blame and credibility, or even what the evidence actually means. These two camps are cancelling themselves out and failing to give the public a balanced representation of the discoveries being made. You need an awful lot of concentration to distil the important advances each day, especially when so much of the evidence thus far has revolved around journalists and their sources.
The process which goes to make up a report on BBC radio or TV is hardly exact and it is not easy to explain why, when Andrew Gilligan was so certain about Dr. Kelly’s information that he went on air without finding a back-up source, his colleague at Newsnight, Susan Watts, who was in possession of exactly the same material, decided to ignore it. If this seemed odd to journalists in court, it is mystifying to the public, which tends to lump such incongruities in a box named media self-obsession and switch off. It is worth looking at the transcripts and documentary evidence (www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk) at the end of each day. The exchanges between Campbell and Richard Sambrook, one of the most important newsmen in the country, give a compelling view of the way the government conducts itself on the media frontline.
Logging on each day also provides an insight into the way things work at the top — how Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the BBC board of governors, has a word with No. 10 to see if things can’t be calmed down a bit; how Geoff Hoon writes to Davies to seek confirmation that the BBC source was Dr. Kelly (which he doesn’t get); and how Sambrook returns from a meeting with Hoon where Gilligan’s reporting was disparaged and sits down to write an account of what has passed, to be used in an eventuality he could never possibly guess. In the proceedings of the Hutton inquiry, you find more laudable aspects of human nature on show — a straightforward pursuit of the truth about David Kelly’s death being one — but the trouble is that it is not the only truth we need to concern ourselves with.
