The Escape Artist

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It was Boris Johnson — one of those rumpled British prodigies who manages to be both a journalist and a Conservative Member of Parliament — who best captured the disbelief of the Tory party last week. "It is just flipping unbelievable," Johnson wrote in the Daily Telegraph. His party's nemesis, he added, "is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness."

The escape artist, of course, was Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had managed to slip out of a political bind — make that two of them — that could have forced him from office. On Tuesday, Blair squeezed a scant five-vote victory — despite Labour's 161-vote majority in the House of Commons — to clear the path of a bill to charge students more to attend university. (He'd staked his premiership on the outcome, and a loss could have led to a vote of confidence against him.) The very next day, Blair and the rest of his government were comprehensively cleared by Lord Hutton's inquiry into the death of government weapons-expert David Kelly, who killed himself last year after being named as a source for a BBC report that Blair's government had "sexed up" the case for war against Iraq. Hutton's verdict confounded widespread expectations that some blame, perhaps enough to unseat him, would attach to the Prime Minister. Instead, Hutton poured virtually all his acid on the BBC — for making "unfounded" charges about the integrity of Blair and his aides and then not correcting them or even properly investigating the government's repeated complaints.

"We expect we can get back on the front foot pretty quickly," says a senior Blair aide, with ministers planning to uncork what they hope will be popular initiatives on crime and health care. But Blair will not be able to change the subject or make a case for re-election next year

	Some of my story was wrong ... [but] the government did sex up the dossier — ANDREW GILLIGAN, former BBC journalist

until he deals with the issue Hutton skirted: that while the British government might not have lied about its intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, that intelligence was still dead wrong. Blair, even more than George W. Bush, based the argument for war on the absolute certainty that Iraq had such weapons. The White House is now backing away from those claims; Blair has not. He outsmarted the executioner, but still has some explaining to do.

Give him time. For now, Blair was grinning widely as he sped away unscathed from his near-death experience. He could see plenty of roadkill in the rearview mirror. The Conservatives' new leader, Michael Howard, had been widely praised for restoring some discipline and purpose to a party that hasn't managed to mount an effective opposition since Labour came to power in 1997. Trying to capitalize on polls showing rising distrust of Blair, Howard spent weeks suggesting the Prime Minister lied about his role in "outing" Kelly's name to journalists — only to find that Hutton's judgment wholly undercut him. He seemed so stunned that he couldn't revise his line of attack last week, and ended up looking churlish and maladroit. The Tory comeback hit a speed bump.

The BBC faced the worst crisis in its 80–year history. Its chairman, Gavyn Davies, resigned the day Hutton issued his brutal criticisms of the Beeb's journalistic practices and governing-board oversight, but offered an apology so tepid that Downing Street sought more. The next day the Director General, Greg Dyke, also resigned, but he too felt angry and denounced Hutton's conclusions, which many commentators were already calling a whitewash. The acting chairman, Richard Ryder, declared he had "no hesitation in apologizing unreservedly for our errors and to the individuals whose reputations were affected by them."

Blair quickly accepted the apology and said he planned to "move on." But spontaneous walkouts of BBC staff chanting "We Want Greg" — and unexpected support for him from Conservatives who normally denounce the BBC as a leftist hotbed — reflected widespread fears that the government will use Hutton to hobble the BBC's independence. It has ample opportunity: the BBC's charter is due for a government review that will determine its organization and funding for another 10 years.