Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | This one-sided judgment will not win voters round
The Guardian (London), January 29, 2004, Guardian Leader Pages, Pg. 30, 1190 words

This one-sided judgment will not win voters round

Hutton takes Campbell's view, but only on the narrowest of issues

Jackie Ashley
Thursday January 29, 2004
The Guardian

It is indeed, as Margaret Thatcher famously remarked at the time of her decapitation, a funny old world. The country is taken to war on the basis of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that almost everyone now acknowledges never existed. There, thousands are killed. Here, a scientist kills himself after raising legitimate doubts about the government's intelligence. And a six-month inquiry by an eminent judge concludes that the only people who have done anything wrong at all work for the BBC.

Lord Hutton's report could not have been more favourable to No 10. Whitewash? Great barrels of the gloopy stuff are sloshing around Whitehall. This was not the even-handed sprinkling of blame that many at Westminster had been expecting. It provided scant pickings for Michael Howard, hoping to demonstrate his legal-eagle skills in parliament. It was a devastating indictment of the BBC at almost every level.

Certainly, to this commentator, Lord Hutton's report lacks any sense of proportion. Yes, errors were made at the BBC, as the corporation has itself acknowledged. But in the megaphone battle between the BBC and No 10, exaggerated claims were made on both sides. While Andrew Gilligan wrongly impugned Tony Blair's integrity, Alastair Campbell, remember, impugned that of many BBC journalists, describing them as having "an anti-war agenda".

This is not to say the Hutton report can be dismissed. Tony Blair's integrity, I fully concede, has been proved, in the sense that he clearly believed the intelligence he was putting before the British people. But the report is, as Hutton himself said when introducing it, limited by its terms of reference to the specific events leading up to the death of David Kelly. Important and tragic though that death is, there is a much wider agenda here.

On the face of it, this "make or break" week now looks like a fantastic triumph for Tony Blair. Not only have Hutton's conclusions been far more favourable to the government than he could ever have dreamed, but Blair also managed to pull off that vote on university tuition fees as well. He has won everywhere ... except perhaps among the only group not extensively interviewed, profiled or discussed lately, the electorate. It has been a narrow Westminster story, not a broad British one.

In that Westminster sense, Alastair Campbell's strategy of trying to narrow down everything dodgy about the Iraq war to the single question of what Andrew Gilligan said in a few seconds one early morning was brilliantly successful. It left the Hutton inquiry, which is supposed to bring "closure" to the row over the Iraqi war, with nothing to say on the broader questions. (Nevertheless it's curious that Hutton didn't feel quite so constrained about straying beyond his remit when it came to the BBC.) The narrowing of the issue produced what it was always intended to - a blizzard of headlines and verdicts in which the words "cleared" and "exonerated" appear beside the names Blair and Campbell. Bingo! What more could you ask for?

But this is the fundamental problem with the political ecosystem whose workings have been so closely observed this week. What seems clever at Westminster, and even heroic in the narrative of insiders, does not work with the public at large. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the very one-sided nature of Lord Hutton's criticisms, voters will be left perplexed. The truth is that people in the intelligence world were dubious about the Iraqi weapons dossier; that no WMD have turned up; that much of what Gilligan reported was both accurate and new. These things mysteriously dwindled as the laser-like focus encouraged by Campbell on Gilligan's weak spot took effect. So, when it comes to the public generally, the narrowly-focused Hutton inquiry does not help the government a jot. It does not touch the bigger questions, so it cannot exonerate or clear anyone on the bigger questions.

And what of the BBC? Senior managers there were aghast as it became clear that the apparently heavily-spun Hutton conclusions leaked to the Sun newspaper were not spun at all: the actual report was even more pro-government and anti-BBC than the Sun had suggested. One head, that of the chairman, Gavyn Davies, has already rolled. And it's unlikely to be the only one. But if the government uses Lord Hutton's report to try to neuter the corporation it will find no sympathy among the voters. Warts and all, the BBC remains a much loved and trusted British institution.

The gloating "we stuffed you" tone of some of the government's supporters in the immediate aftermath of Hutton risks backfiring badly. For while the BBC must improve procedures for editorial control and investigating complaints, no one would seriously argue that a cowed BBC should stop asking awkward questions of ministers.

And let's not forget the main beneficiary of any diminution of the BBC's role in British life: Tony Blair's old pal Rupert Murdoch, who not only runs Sky Televison, but also the Sun newspaper, which mysteriously secured a leak of Lord Hutton's report. Surely something fishy there.

Also in narrow Westminster terms, the tuition fees vote was a close and thrilling victory for a prime minister who bet his instincts and will power against a great swathe of the Labour party. The No 10 line is that Blair didn't blink and, confronted by his heroic determination, everyone else, including the Brownites, was forced back into line. And so, in the last sentence of the last paragraph of the thriller, our hero escapes again, with a nonchalant shrug and a grin for the cameras. We can hardly wait for the next in the series: Tony and the Hospital Fees Vote.

But again, what about the voters? The tuition fee rebels' best argument was always that they were honestly trying to save the government from itself. These fees are going to be hugely unpopular, especially among modestly-salaried middle-class voters who miss the special help for people at the bottom.

This was the week when Tony Blair might have had to go. That was so very close. Had a handful of relatively obscure MPs not changed their minds on Tuesday, he would have been politically finished, despite Lord Hutton's warm endorsement. Now the prime minister hopes to start afresh. Having won through his traumatic week, he's plunging right into a big speech on public service reform.

So, after the thrills and spills of the last 72 hours. British politics returns to a familiar-seeming equilibrium. There will be storms ahead, not least in the committee stages of the tuition fees bill, and when the Iraq Survey Group eventually issues its final report. There will be increasingly bitter battles over the future of the BBC. But overall it will be calm-down time, a period of healing and preparation.

Yet things have changed. They haven't changed in a coup at Westminster. They haven't changed after a damning indictment from a judicial inquiry. But across the country, millions have been watching the events of this past week. And I cannot believe that they have much liked what they saw.

jackie.ashley@guardian.co.uk