Dust settles on whitewash
In the end, it was never likely to end the debate. The dust appears to have settled - for now at least - on the Hutton report, yet public opinion regarding the Iraq war remains as polarised and as passionate as ever. For the Government, Hutton was a vindication - conclusive proof, via one of the finest legal minds the country has to offer, that it acted in complete good faith prior to last year's invasion. For opponents of the war, the report was a whitewash - a nail in the coffin of press freedom, delivered by a traditionalist, "third-rate law lord" (to quote Darcus Howe), out of touch with the way politics and the media work in this day and age.
Few minds have been changed by Hutton - the question has simply moved on (as is evident from tonight's debate at the Union) from "Did the government act improperly?" to "Did Lord Hutton get it wrong?" Perhaps it is time to take a step back, and assess where things stand at present.
On balance, it seems that Hutton probably did get some things wrong. In particular, the criticism levelled at the BBC for not verifying the claims of government impropriety, put forward via Andrew Gilligan by Dr David Kelly, was unjust criticism.
Britain's press laws do not forbid the indirect reporting of claims that transpire to be false, as long as such reports make it clear - as the BBC's did - that any allegations being made are merely the opinion of a source, and should not be treated as gospel. Provided those against whom the allegations are being made are given ample opportunity to respond to them on air - again, as was certainly the case with regards to the Gilligan report - no legal offence can be said to have been committed. As Greg Dyke has been at pains to point out in recent weeks, it does look like the law lord got the law wrong in this respect.
Nor is it simply with regards to legal technicalities that Lord Hutton appears to have fallen wide of the mark - some of his analysis of the available evidence does seem questionable at best. In particular, the report appears to brush over much of the available internal government communications regarding the production of the now infamous September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, ignoring the fact that many changes were made to the dossier that were specifically requested by the Government's press office. By ignoring them, Lord Hutton seems to be effectively asking us to believe that such changes occurred as a matter of pure coincidence, independently of the Downing Street requests. This does not seem a credible interpretation of the facts.
There are other problems too - Lord Hutton's notion, for example, that John Scarlett (the chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee) only had a "subconscious" desire for the dossiers to back up the government's case for war seems both naïve and extremely generous to the government.
The pressure on Scarlett to "deliver the goods" certainly seems to have been very real. The Government will respond to these and other such quibbles, however, by telling us that it is petty and ungracious not to accept the findings of an experienced and intelligent Law Lord, who has, after all, spent months studying in great detail the circumstances surrounding Dr Kelly's death. They have a point - the contrast between the anti-war media's portrayal of Hutton prior to his report, as an honourable model of objectivity and reason in the face of such heated debate, and the same media's portrayal of him now, as an establishment crony who - it suddenly transpires - acted as a QC for British soldiers at the first Bloody Sunday inquiry, is simply embarrassing. Measured, justified criticisms of Hutton's findings represent the healthy functioning of democratic debate; character assassinations do not.
It is difficult, though, to escape the notion that the Government has come to see Hutton as something of a debating "get-out clause". Any criticism of its pre-war handling of intelligence is now faced down with the assertion that Lord Hutton found no impropriety in this respect. Any criticism of Lord Hutton's findings is dismissed by means of the simple question "Have you read the entire Hutton report?" - the answer to which is of course invariably "no". Naturally, this line of argument - based on the notion that only those who have read the report are entitled to comment on its findings - is highly misleading. It implies that tucked away somewhere in the reams of evidence lies some "killer fact" that will permanently alleviate any concerns we may have had regarding the government's pre-war actions.
Of course, were such a killer fact to truly exist, you can bet your bottom dollar it would not remain hidden for long. That the Government has resorted to quoting Hutton's conclusions rather than the evidence used to justify them appears to be a sign of weakness on its behalf.
It is worth noting too that - contrary to apparent public opinion - Lord Hutton did not in fact completely exonerate the Government of all impropriety in its pre-war handling of intelligence. True, he famously deemed the first Andrew Gilligan report (broadcast at 6.07am on 29th May last year) to have been "unfounded", but there was not a great deal of dispute about this. Most had accepted prior to Hutton that the government had not inserted intelligence into the dossiers whilst knowing it to be "wrong" - Gilligan's initial claim. However, Hutton crucially did not deem the less strongly-worded Susan Watts and Gavin Hewitt BBC reports worthy of criticism, implying a belief that the government did play some part in at least exaggerating the threat from Iraq. Yet we now have a situation whereby cabinet ministers are blurring the facts - with Jack Straw recently quoted as saying that: "The question of whether intelligence was mishandled in terms of propriety and dishonesty - that's been dealt with comprehensively by Lord Hutton."
Predictably enough, it seems the Government is trying to generate the misconception that Hutton has cleared it of all wrongdoing, rather than just the isolated allegations initially forwarded by Gilligan.
The Kelly affair was a sorry saga, with an apparently decent man caught up in a vicious tug of war between government and BBC. What is probably the most depressing aspect of it all, however, is that the culture that killed him - the notion that arguments must be won at all costs, with little regard for the people at the centre of them - appears still to be thriving at government level. The gleeful calls from Alastair Campbell for heads to roll at the BBC, subsequent to the publishing of Hutton, were particularly petty and ungracious. It seems few lessons have truly been learned.
This strategy appears to have worked - but rather too well. People believe that Hutton completely cleared the Government, as intended by Downing Street, but quite rightly do not believe that such a conclusion - were it to have been made - would represent a plausible assessment of the facts. Thus the notion that Hutton was a "whitewash" - damaging as it has been for the Government - is in fact partly a misconception of the Government's own making. Had Tony Blair been prepared to present Hutton's findings at face-value to the public, he could have emerged slightly better from the whole affair than he has. As it is, Labour's apparently insatiable appetite for spin seems once more to have backfired on them.
19th Feb 2004