Argument
The Independent (London)
January 29, 2004, Thursday
SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 12
LENGTH: 984 words
HEADLINE: LEADING ARTICLE: Mr Blair's triumphalism is mistaken: this unbalanced report does not vindicate his decision to go to war

BODY:
LORD HUTTON'S report is a curiously unbalanced document. He opens by saying that no one could have contemplated that David Kelly would take his own life as a result of the pressures he felt, at which point he could have stopped. Several hundred pages later, blame has, by implication, been apportioned. What is extraordinary about the report is that it has all been allocated to one institution, the British Broadcasting Corporation. Even if it is accepted that the BBC's reporting and its failure to clarify it contributed to the atmosphere that made Dr Kelly feel the pressures on him were intolerable, this one-sidedness seems perverse.

At every point, Lord Hutton seems to give the Government, the Prime Minister and Alastair Campbell the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps there was no harm in that, given that the man is dead and that most people made up their own minds long ago about the way the Government made the case for war. Yet then to conclude with such a ferocious condemnation of the journalism and management systems of one organisation is unfair.

The BBC
The judge also seems to share some of the naivete of those in positions of authority about the nature and values of journalism in a free society. It is possible to argue for days - or months, as has been seen - over the precise extent to which Andrew Gilligan's reports on 29 May last year fell short of the Platonic ideal of truth.

But it is not for a judge, however eminent, to declare that the editorial systems of the BBC were "defective" in allowing Mr Gilligan to make his now-notorious 6.07am broadcast "without editors having seen a script of what he was going to say". It is only a small step from here to the demand for pre-publication censorship that Authority has made since the invention of the printing press and that Freedom has resisted.

What happened after Mr Gilligan's broadcast, on the other hand, is a different matter, and Lord Hutton was justified in criticising the BBC for its failure to find out more about what Mr Gilligan's source had actually said and whether it had been accurately related to the public. It had not been. It was not just the unscripted 6.07am broadcast, but Mr Gilligan's later report that "most people in intelligence weren't happy with the dossier", and that the 45-minute point had been included "against our wishes" - although it was not clear who "we" were.

Resignations
The BBC should have accepted quickly that its source was not alleging that the Prime Minister or his staff had deliberately inserted material knowing it to be wrong. That was Mr Gilligan's extrapolation from Dr Kelly's obvious distaste for the 45-minute scare story, but it was - as the BBC accepted yesterday - a bridge too far.

The BBC's failings were, however, insufficient to warrant the resignation of Gavyn Davies, the chairman of its governors. Honourable though Mr Davies' decision may be, it means that the immediate outcome of the Hutton report is as unfair as its conclusions.

They ignore the contribution from Alastair Campbell to the firestorm that raged around Dr Kelly. If his integrity had been impugned as outrageously as he suggested in his unwise statement yesterday he was surprisingly slow to take offence. It was not until his evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that his defence of Mr Blair's honesty caught fire.

Campbell's role
It was not for Lord Hutton to comment on Mr Campbell's motivation or tactics. But, given his harsh judgments on the BBC, it was strange that he did not give more weight to the possibility that Mr Campbell's fruitily- expressed determination to secure the BBC's unconditional surrender, and his desire to have Dr Kelly's name in the public domain, might have driven some of the Government's actions.

It should have been hard to escape the suspicion that Mr Campbell calculated that seizing on one loosely-worded BBC report might give him and his boss the chance to turn the tide of scepticism about the real reasons for going to war. That suspicion was strengthened by Mr Blair and Mr Campbell's triumphalism yesterday.

The advantage of Mr Gilligan's report, from the Prime Minister's point of view, was that it made mistakes on the specifics which were wrapped around a general truth - that he had exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the whole furore about the dossier has been overwhelmed by the larger issue since the ending of the war. It turns out that Dr Kelly's doubts about the dossier merely scratched the surface. He thought it was over-egged, but now we know there was barely any substance to it at all. The 45-minute story was not simply "questionable" on account of being single-sourced, it was rubbish.

Narrow remit
The criticism of the Hutton report that matters is not, therefore, that it is one-sided, but that it focuses arbitrarily on one side-issue to the detriment not just of media freedom but of good government. The danger is that Lord Hutton's conclusions - as opposed to his hearings, which were a remarkable contribution to open government - will have a chilling effect on public-service journalism in Britain. His findings may undermine the confidence of the BBC, without casting any useful light on the critical issue that lay behind the Kelly affair: the decision to go to war.

The extent to which Mr Blair strained at the bounds of the intelligence to make the case for war was obvious from the evidence to Lord Hutton. The Prime Minister, to adopt the vogue phrase, "bet the farm" on the credibility of the intelligence services. Lord Hutton interpreted his remit too narrowly to investigate further - fair enough, but it was wrong then to single out the BBC for criticism. This unbalanced and partial report has strengthened the case for an independent inquiry into the intelligence failures that took this country to an unjustifiable war.