I HAVE been inside Downing Street during a war crisis, an even bigger political crisis than the Government has faced over Iraq. I know what the mood is like, indeed what it is bound to be like. It is very confused, but very intense. Everyone involved is required to help to make the case for the Government’s policy, or may be marked down as a coward or a traitor. The whole machinery of state is drawn into the propaganda battle, which has various fronts, the House of Commons, the press, the BBC and television.
In such circumstances, the most stable people suffer from the contagion of hysteria, though some remain calmer than others. The most honest people are drawn into exaggerations, or even downright lies. The nation outside is divided into pro-war and anti-war groups. The arguments clash in the press and Parliament, but they also clash painfully inside the minds of individuals.
My own experience was now nearly 50 years ago, when I was a very junior assistant speechwriter to Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister at the time of the Suez crisis. I wrote the economic bits. That was in 1956. Ten years later I was to experience much the same atmosphere, as a journalist not an insider, when I visited the Vietnam war room in Lyndon Johnson’s White House. The evidence given to Lord Hutton showed that the atmosphere of Tony Blair’s Downing Street last year had the same characteristics. Indeed Mr Blair rather reminds me of Eden in charm, youthfulness, courage and vulnerability.
I’ve also experienced only too many crises from the point of view of a journalist. I was working for The Sunday Times during the Cuba missile crisis and the Kennedy assassination. During the Falklands war I was vice-chairman of the BBC. The Government thought that our coverage was unfair and unpatriotic; the BBC blamed the Government for improper pressure. I found that I sympathised with the views of both sides.
Again, the relationship of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street to Alasdair Milne, then the Director-General of the BBC, was very similar to Mr Blair’s relationship with Greg Dyke. Mr Milne also lost his job, but that occurred over other issues after I had left. Winston Churchill had the same wartime quarrel with the BBC which he is said to have described as behaving “like one of the major neutrals”. One of the wartime DGs also lost his job.
I found Lord Hutton’s report a defective document, surprisingly so after his firm handling of the stage of evidence. The terms of reference were ambiguous; Lord Hutton’s redefinition of them left out the central issue of the Iraq intelligence itself; he decided not to adjudicate between the parties but then did so; he gave too little weight to crucial parts of the evidence, including David Kelly’s interview with Susan Watts and the colourful extracts from Alastair Campbell’s diary; the conclusions, particularly on the outing of Dr Kelly, did not follow from the evidence; the Prime Minister should have been cross-examined; the whole report was one-sided.
I had expected that Lord Hutton would have a better understanding of the mood of crisis. He has, after all, lived through 30 years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; he has showed great courage; his life was under constant threat. Some of the witnesses who appeared before him showed the signs of the stress they had experienced. Mr Campbell himself finds it impossible to conceal his extreme hostility to the BBC, and to Andrew Gilligan in particular. One would have expected Lord Hutton to recognise the shellshock of the propaganda battlefield.
Personal experience of this sort of crisis makes one both more cynical and more sympathetic. One becomes more cynical because one comes to realise that, in a big enough crisis, hardly anyone continues to tell the truth. Eden was an honest man, probably more careful with the truth than most prime ministers, and certainly less devious than Harold Macmillan, his immediate successor. Yet Eden’s whole policy at Suez was based on a lie.
As a young speechwriter, I did not know about the secret treaty with France and Israel. I was not party to the central lie. But, of course, I drafted speeches which were solely designed to support Eden’s Suez policy. They were speeches of an advocate not a historian. If there was a strong argument the other way, I would disregard it or seek to disprove it. In extreme circumstances, presidents lie, prime ministers lie, Downing Street officials lie. No doubt they prefer to tell the truth, if only for reasons of prudence, but at such moments they are not in the business of telling the truth, but of persuasion and presentation.
That should have made Lord Hutton much more sceptical about the Downing Street evidence, in particular about the outing of Dr Kelly, which was one presumable cause for his suicide. The truth, as is shown by Mr Campbell’s diary, is that Downing Street wanted to get Dr Kelly’s name out, but did not want to take responsibility for doing so. The strange game of guesswork with the press was designed to achieve that end. This conduct, though morally questionable, was typical of the conduct of politicians or officials under war stress. Yet Lord Hutton did not see that. He concluded that “there was no such strategy on the part of the Government”.
An understanding of this atmosphere of stress does make one more cynical about the likely conduct of all the participants, but it also gives sympathy. If one takes the position of Tony Blair, one can see that he shows an ambiguity about the truth on each occasion, but that the ambiguities also arise from genuine concern for national and international security.
Did he lie about the 45-minute weapon? I think he did not, but I suspect that he welcomed a clinching proof of the need for action, without tapping its teeth to see if they were sound. His attitude was like that of an editor who has a brilliant scoop, and does not want to be told that it might not be accurate. We all believe things that we want to believe.
Does Mr Blair now believe that the September dossier was reliable? Almost certainly not, but he has never corrected it. Is it a lie to persist in a statement which you thought was true when you made it, although you now suspect it to be false? I suppose it is, but it is the sort of lie which we all risk falling into.
Did the Prime Minister lie when he told journalists on the aircraft that he had no responsibility for outing Dr Kelly? I still think that he did, as an initial, almost panic, response to the news of Dr Kelly’s death. We can sympathise, but he ought to have been cross-examined on that. Lord Hutton did not get anywhere near the truth of that question.
It is the same with the BBC. Its contacts with the intelligence community will have told it by the beginning of last May that a number of intelligence officers, not just Dr Kelly, were unhappy about the linking of intelligence with propaganda.
Mr Gilligan’s interview with Dr Kelly provided a news peg for this story. The intelligence on weapons of mass destruction has, after all, turned out to have been mistaken. We now know that parts of Mr Gilligan’s story were themselves also mistaken, but his main thrust, that the Government’s case had been sub-edited by Mr Campbell, was not wrong. I regard “sexed up” as a fair description of what happened; Lord Hutton does not.
Lord Hutton failed to understand the impact of the Iraq crisis on the Government or on the BBC. As a result he was too kind to one and too harsh on the other. He has left far too much wreckage. He has damaged his own reputation. He is likely to be remembered for what many people already regard as a “whitewash”; his career deserves better than that. He has done very serious damage to the BBC, which cannot be repaired until there is a new chairman and a new director-general. He has caused some collateral damage to the Conservative Opposition, but that is probably not significant. He has accelerated the decline of trust in Mr Blair’s Government by seeming to be biased in its favour.
Judges should not take on these political inquiries; they are outside their competence. Lord Hutton’s report is not a finding in law; it is no more than a series of opinions, no more and no less compelling than other opinions on political issues. It deserves no special status. Fortunately there is a supreme court. As Alexander Pope wrote: The people’s voice is odd,/It is, and it is not, the voice of God. Public opinion has overturned Lord Hutton on appeal.
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