HUTTON
‘Recoiling from open conflict, the British prefer to see people brought to book, and imagine that officialdom can resolve all problems in an orderly way. The culmination of that fantasy is that the Ulster Judge Lord Hutton will become an instrument of fair play.’ ‘Hutton’s fantasy politics’ The WEEK, 24 August 2003
Illusions in Lord Hutton’s enquiry were widespread as it sat to consider the circumstances surrounding government scientist David Kelly’s suicide in 2003. The swathe of middle class voters who could not understand how their one-time hero Tony Blair had dragooned them into President Bush’s war now dreamt that Lord Hutton could expose him as a ‘liar’.
'Hutton has helped to strip the last vestige of possible legal cover from the aggression and shift opinion against the war,' Seumas Milne wrote in the Guardian, September 25. Later Milne suggested the prime minister ‘faces a potentially job-threatening judgment on the conflict's aftermath from Lord Hutton,' October 23. But the day after Lord Hutton reported Milne considered that ‘The Hutton saga is a sideshow’ January 29.
'Public inquiries over the years have slapped on the whitewash,’ Nick Cohen did warn in the Observer, August 17, only to insist: ‘This time it's completely different’. But after the report Cohen could only mutter that Hutton’s ‘definition of his terms of reference is so narrow that only a tightrope walker couldn’t stand on it’ (New Statesman, 2 February).
Even Socialist Worker thought that ‘There are a series of specific lies, and a raft of much bigger and more important lies, which the report from the Hutton inquiry ought to expose in its report’. ‘If all the lies were laid bare then the report would be a nail in Tony Blair's political coffin,’ they dreamed, announcing ‘the Stop the War Coalition will be holding a lobby when the Hutton inquiry reports’ (10 January). But in a ‘Hutton Special’ Socialist Worker recalls that this was the same Brian Hutton who had represented the British Army at the Widgery Enquiry into Bloody Sunday (an infamous whitewash in northern Ireland in the 1972): ‘He has clearly learned to serve his masters well’. Such insight might have been more appropriate before the report. In fact, the only way to understand the howl of rage coming from Britain’s chattering classes after the Hutton report is that it is proportional to the illusions they held in the Lord’s good offices beforehand.
THE REPORT
Twitted for his ‘forgiving’ attitude to government by Lord Lester, Lord Hutton’s report is not so outrageous – within the terms of reference set. Principally, Hutton sought to examine the allegation that the government, and the Prime Minister in particular, had lied in the Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier, as Andrew Gilligan reported, using government scientist David Kelly as his source.
Gilligan’s original report, it should be said, was an excellent piece of journalism. He had evidence that the report had been ‘sexed up’ at the instigation of the Prime Minister’s press secretary Alastair Campbell, and that it caused disquiet in the intelligence community. But Hutton managed to side-step those issues by alighting on Gilligan’s allegation that the government introduced the claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had WMD warheads set for use in 45 minutes, knowing it to be probably false. It was this charge that the government had lied that Blair and Campbell fixed on, and that Hutton showed could not be substantiated.
This was, in fact, an issue that clouded all public debate over the war. The government and its critics alike were preoccupied with the personal integrity of the Prime Minister. Blair and Campbell objected to the impugning of their reputations. By reducing everything to the question of individual rectitude, Blair avoided the broader question of whether the intelligence was correct. As at Labour’s 2002 conference, when he had to strong-arm his party into war, ‘What Blair was looking for …was not a consensus around his policies, but recognition of his personal tribulations, and affirmation for his character as a man of conscience’ (The WEEK, 6 October).
In the Topsy-turvy world of Lord Hutton’s enquiry, then, it could be proved that the Prime Minister was not lying when he said that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction – just as key figures in the US administration were acknowledging that there never had been any.
JOURNALISM OF ATTACHMENT
Radio 4’s Today programme that first aired Andrew Gilligan’s report was realising an ambition first articulated by BBC reporter and later MP, Martin Bell, for a ‘Journalism of Attachment’. Bell thought that it was not enough for journalists to report the news impartially: they ought to take sides. In the Iraq war, key figures in the BBC felt that they ought to give a voice to the protestors as well as the government. In itself, that was a good thing. But in the absence of a mainstream political opposition, the BBC was in danger of assuming that role.
Downing Street Press Officer Alastair Campbell’s diary commitment to ‘fuck the BBC’ was a response to the enhanced role the corporation took on as unofficial opposition during the war. But the BBC could never sustain such a position. Even if the BBC were an independent institution, the media generally are not capable of substituting themselves for the political opposition that has failed to materialise. As it is, more than any other broadcaster, the BBC is beholden to the government, dependent on its sponsorship and subject to its political appointments. Reminding the world of this state broadcaster’s subservience is just one more sacrifice to Tony Blair’s feelings.