Who on earth should conduct the Great Inquisition into our Intelligence Failures? After the replacement of the wig on Lord Hutton’s head by a steaming heap of ordure, placed there by The Daily Mail’s editor, Greg Dyke, Robin Cook, Uncle Max Hastings and all, there appears to be little appetite for appointing a judge.

Poor old Hutton succumbed to the now discredited pattern of his whole profession: following due process, weighing evidence, assuming individuals were innocent until proven otherwise and judging in accord with the facts. How drearily establishment can you get?

For all those now damning Hutton as a whitewash, there’s only one person who will ever be a suitable candidate for the new government inquiry. And that is the Ancient Greek inn-keeper Procrustes.

Procrustes, you may remember, was a nasty creature of myth who promised that the bed in his inn would fit any guest to perfection. The old chancer was as good as his word, but that wasn’t due to any special gift for hospitality. He simply stretched his guests on a rack if they were too short or chopped off their legs if they were too tall. And, sure enough, he could get the guest to fit the bed, if not exactly vice-versa. Procrustes is a creature of myth, though I suspect he may now be a consultant to the Scottish Tourist Board, but his spirit seems to live on in Fleet Street and Westminster, certainly if reactions to Hutton are anything to go by.

Most commentators, and many MPs, had already decided what result they wanted from the Hutton inquiry before the first word of evidence had been taken. They wanted to squeeze the Government into a box marked “mendacious purveyors of a fraudulent prospectus for a war on Iraq”, and were ready to twist or chop the facts in order to get things to fit their prearranged view.

Even now they cling to certain myths which only someone who has butchered the truth, or stretched it out of all recognition, could subscribe to. Let’s take just two, because I could fill the whole page with them. The first is that Andrew Gilligan’s original allegation of sexing-up was “mostly true”. Now, if I said that Greg Dyke was a charming, original, talented tax-dodger that would be mostly true. But it would still be an outrageous libel, because the most important claim there, the false allegation of criminality, would entirely efface the impact of everything else said.

So it is with Gilligan. Whatever reservations certain middle-ranking figures in one branch of intelligence may have had with one aspect of the September 2002 dossier, it was not at all true that the “45-minute claim” was inserted by No 10, overruling the spymasters, even though they knew it to be false. Gilligan’s report was a gross libel, its central claim, the imputation of mendacity to the Prime Minister, a lie, based on speculation from one man who was not an intelligence source and was far from being centrally involved in the dossier’s preparation.

Which brings me to the second myth, the belief that because no stockpiles of WMD have been found in Iraq the war was somehow unjustified. Anyone who takes the trouble to read what David Kay, the recently retired head of the Iraq Survey Group has actually been saying, cannot but conclude that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat worth removing. That’s what he told the Senate last week: “I think the world is far safer with the disappearance and the removal of Saddam Hussein. Iraq was even more dangerous than we thought.” But most people prefer to put Kay’s testimony on a Procrustean bed, chopping off all the facts about Saddam’s ballistic missile programme, his continuing work on biological agents and nuclear technology, and the growing threat of proliferation which existed in his Baroque, decaying, tyranny.

The truth about pre-emption, which should hardly need restating, is that you deal with the bad guys before they get their hands on the finished weapons they’ve spent their life straining to acquire. That’s why nuclear-armed North Korea is such a knotty problem. And that’s why we were better off tackling Iraq before France and Russia succeeded in their aim of getting sanctions lifted so Saddam could accelerate his mass murder business.

Of course, our intelligence assessments of Saddam’s stockpiles, though not his intentions, were wrong. And that definitely merits investigation. But already most of those calling for an inquiry want a Procrustean one. They only call for an investigation now because they want someone, anyone, to be punished when we dare to go to war, and having failed to get the Prime Minister, they are gunning for the spooks. They never call for an investigation when intelligence agencies neglect to recognise a threat that wise and timely action might mitigate or prevent. Where were the calls for an inquiry when the intelligence services underestimated the danger, as with Iraq in 1990 and 1995 and both Libya and Iran more recently?

Now that Bush and Blair have been comprehensively acquitted of doctoring intelligence for political reasons, let’s ask some questions which will really help to make us safer, rather than simply confirming shallow prejudices. Why have the nuclear inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency consistently underestimated rogue states’ progress in arms development? Given that tyrannies and terrorist organisations are by definition difficult to penetrate, don’t we need to spend more on intelligence, language training for agents, surveillance and support for democratic transformation in rogue states? And shouldn’t the press and politicians in democracies pay a little more attention to the threats we face in a dangerous world so that we can have a mature debate on policy, rather than playing petty little games of character assassination? Or is that asking too much of some people’s intelligence?

michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk

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