The Escape Artist

Sunday, Feb. 01, 2004 By J.F.O. MCALLISTER | LONDON

Illustration for TIME by C.F. Payne

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Hutton was certainly on solid ground in castigating BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan (who has also resigned) for making "very grave" and "unfounded" charges when he accused the government, in an unscripted, unedited broadcast he made from home, of "probably knowing" that a central claim in its dossier on Iraqi WMD — that some were deployable in 45 minutes — was false and inserted over the objections of the intelligence community, allegedly at the behest of Blair's powerful communications director, Alastair Campbell. The testimony to Hutton showed that top spies put it in, and believed it at the time. Hutton also condemned the BBC's haphazard investigation into Gilligan's claims. Davies and Dyke were so determined to assert the BBC's independence that they circled the wagons around Gilligan without establishing whether his work stood up — and Hutton concluded that Kelly did not say all the things Gilligan pinned on him.

But having extracted a simple morality tale from Gilligan's sloppy reporting, Hutton seemed determined to exclude complexity from the rest of his findings. He gave Blair's government the benefit of every doubt, the BBC none at all. He concluded that the government had no "dishonorable, underhand or duplicitous" plot to get Kelly's name to reporters once he confessed to his bosses that he had met Gilligan but denied saying all the things Gilligan was apparently attributing to him. Blair chaired a meeting at which the naming strategy was discussed; Campbell's diaries show the adviser was desperate to out Kelly, and sure this would "f___ Gilligan." Hutton took uncontradicted evidence showing that reporters on good terms with Campbell received off-the-record steers toward Kelly, but ignored this evidence in his report.

The final procedure adopted by the Ministry of Defense press office — giving out biographical snippets about Kelly and allowing journalists to play 20 Questions until they hit upon the right name — seemed to those familiar with Blairite press management a typical too-clever-by-half ploy, crafted to out Kelly without leaving fingerprints. Hutton was right that some officials around Blair legitimately worried they had to get Kelly's name out or be accused of misleading parliamentary investigations into the WMD dossier. But he couldn't bring himself to acknowledge that decent and malign motives could both have shaped the naming strategy.

Hutton also bent over backwards to downplay evidence that Blair aides had influenced John Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, to change the dossier to boost its public impact — as Gilligan in part had claimed. Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, worried in an e-mail that draft dossier language stating "Saddam is prepared to use chemical and biological weapons if he believes his regime is under threat" was "a bit of a problem" because "it backs up the � argument that there is no cbw threat and we will only create one if we attack him." Scarlett took out the offending language, but told Hutton it was because Powell's e-mails had caused his staff to check their source materials, to conclude that they were wrong in the first place to have limited the potential use of WMD to defending the regime. Hutton accepted this; others were skeptical. Paul Routledge, in the Daily Mirror, was typical of the critics: "Nothing shocks us anymore. Mr. Blair done nuffink. Alastair Campbell is a plaster saint � It beggars belief Lord Hutton could find these miscreants not guilty."

The risk for Blair now is that the very size of the victory awarded by Hutton will provoke a destabilizing backlash. An NOP poll taken the day Hutton issued his report found that 49% of the public considered it "a whitewash" — that percentage rose in subsequent surveys — and an ICM poll shows that three times more people trust the BBC (31%) to tell the truth than the government (10%), with 49% saying "neither." It would hurt Blair to be seen as continuing to kick the state broadcaster when it's down; as his predecessor Winston Churchill once said, "in victory, magnanimity."

But his lopsided victory in the Kelly affair looks like it may become a staple of public discourse. Dyke warmed to his role as the popular boss victimized by Hutton, complaining that the government had gotten to pick its own referee and that the report was legally peculiar. He promised a detailed rebuttal. Campbell is now a private citizen — he left Downing Street last fall as he realized his high-profile campaign to slam the BBC over Gilligan had drained his effectiveness. Last week he could not stay off the airwaves or resist trumpeting his sense of vindication. Any more turmoil or high-profile errors from BBC News — which showed its underlying strengths last week with admirably balanced reports on its own boardroom agonies, and announced a review of its editorial controls — will also keep the story churning.

But Blair's real vulnerability is not that the Kelly affair will keep getting rehashed but that no WMD have been found in Iraq. That has corroded public trust in his judgment. The admission last week by the U.S.'s chief WMD hunter, David Kay, that they probably didn't exist in the first place means that Britain went to war on a false premise, which Blair insisted was true. Even if he believed it at the time, he owes his people an accounting now. The Tories and Liberal Democrats have renewed their calls for an investigation into the roots of what appears to be a massive intelligence failure. But Blair has yet to endorse that idea, or to apologize for the errors of the government he heads. The BBC's bosses had to quit last week because they led it into battle based on information from subordinates that turned out to be wrong. Blair thought their resignations were appropriate. The Tories might call it "flipping unbelievable" if he manages to avoid being judged by the same standard over his march to war in Iraq.