THE BBC is in the right. Lord Hutton cannot possibly do what Tony Blair wants him to do and nail the corporation’s hide to Downing Street’s door. He has been asked “to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly”. But that is a job for a coroner, not a judge. The coroner on Monday indicated that the “circumstance” was plainly suicide. As for its surroundings, coroners and judges sensibly avoid them. They are a wild and unpredictable terrain filled with dragons.

Lord Hutton’s political remit is to seek out one such dragon, namely the BBC. The hope is to widen the public gaze just enough to embrace the misbehaviour of journalists but not of ministers. The fate of Alastair Campbell and his network may be within range, but not the intelligence dossiers that were the cause of all this mayhem.

I do not see how any of this falls within the ambit of a judge. Whatever the finger-pointers may claim, the person who killed Dr Kelly was Dr Kelly. To attribute a man’s suicide to other individuals, be they Mr Blair, Mr Campbell, Geoff Hoon, MPs or BBC journalists is mere gibe. Dr Kelly volunteered to leak secret information and then volunteered to take the heat. The pressure on him was bound to be severe. That it proved intolerable was not to be expected. Who needs a judge?

Many British and American soldiers and thousands of Iraqis have died as a result of the “circumstances surrounding” Dr Kelly’s death. They are not blessed with an inquiry because they are victims of politics. A judge might examine the preparation of the intelligence dossiers, but Downing Street will not permit this. Lord Hutton has no power to summon papers. There is no desperate matter of fact needing investigation. There is just an embattled Downing Street.

I can see nothing here to undermine the BBC. The corporation acted throughout the Kelly affair in accordance with established rules. Its news staff were justifiably inquisitorial of the Government. A BBC reporter, indeed three reporters, encountered an insider eager to plug his view of how the September dossier was prepared, on condition of anonymity. The BBC rightly ran the story, authorising and protecting the source. It protected that source throughout, even when the Government outrageously broke Dr Kelly’s confidence and disclosed his identity.

Certainly the reporter in question, Andrew Gilligan, committed various transgressions, but against the magnitude of the story they were minor. The description of the source as in, rather than close to, the intelligence community was wrong. The precise role of Mr Campbell in editing the September dossier appears to have been misreported, though this has yet to be proved conclusively. Mr Gilligan and the Today programme unwisely used sensational language for what was a serious allegation. Dr Kelly implied to the select committee that he did not use words attributed to him, but the interpretation put on them by all his media contacts at the time seems to have been what he intended. Those who anonymously leak secrets, whatever their motives, must expect reporters to read between the lines.

The BBC would have been shrewd to honour the letter of its integrity by conceding and apologising for the minor transgressions from the first. It would have done well to stop its reporters from infringing their impartiality by writing columns for newspapers. Turning reporters into personalities impeded the message of this important story: that a weapons scientist and his colleagues were deeply worried by government abuse of intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. No amount of subsequent spin can hide that fact.

The editorial independence of British public service broadcasting is vital. This is the more so when the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee can be as suborned by No 10 as it seemed in the “kangaroo” hearing of evidence from Mr Gilligan. This was a frightened Government for the first time in history publishing “edited” intelligence material to save its face. If Parliament cannot bring itself to call the executive to account, then in this case thank God for the BBC.

BBC WRONG

SO FAR, so good. The BBC has defended its journalists and their story, and defied the crudest government pressure. But public service broadcasting operates in a political context. When it stands up to any government, with £3 billion of protected revenue on call, it needs friends other than in-house “governors”. Today the BBC makes only enemies.

One of the promotional videos that now clutter every corner of the BBC output depicts an unpleasant man throwing a telephone off his desk. He then ignores a weeping colleague, turns his back on a pleading child and rushes home to catch some new and completely forgettable “digital” offering. This is the BBC image in a nutshell, boorish and self-obsessed, interrupting every programme to plead for us to “visit the website”. The BBC annual report is of such cloying auto-congratulation as to be unreadable.

I normally regard this as an ironic strength of the corporation. Beneath an apparently thin skin hides a cadre of executives so gorged on public money as to defy the most outrageous external pressure. I would rather its chairman, Gavyn Davies, “go native” at Broadcasting House than go native with new Labour.

Times Recommends

• Britain doesn’t need a dose of shock therapy
• Why the sea eagle has no right to land here
• Let older women have a voice at the BBC