HUTTON HOOPLA
GUARDIAN - If Tony Blair thought that the Hutton inquiry would draw a line under the Kelly affair, he was utterly mistaken. So unequivocal was Lord Hutton's report, so apparent his willingness to give the government the benefit of the doubt, that only two papers swallow it whole. . . As Simon Hoggart puts it in the Guardian: "The gist of the inquiry is: Blair without flaw - official!" Apart from a minor criticism of the failure of the Ministry of Defense to inform Dr. Kelly that his name was about to become public, Lord Hutton exonerated the government from blame. His disdain for the BBC, on the other hand, was plain (of which more below).
"Whitewash?" asks the Independent on a largely blank front page.
"We could not believe it when we got it," a senior cabinet minister confided to the Telegraph.
"UNFOUNDED... the charge they '[word omitted] up' dossier. UNFOUND... the WMD they took us to war over," the Mirror splashes.
The Daily Mail sets out "what Hutton chose to ignore". . . "The dossier was altered at Campbell's request," writes an incredulous Edward Heathcoat Amory. "Hutton attacked the BBC hierarchy for allowing one of their journalists to criticize the government on the basis of one uncorroborated report from a source. . . . he was only too happy in another part of his report for the government to make the 45-minute claim on the basis of - yes - a single uncorroborated report from within Iraq.". . .
The paper also points out Lord Hutton ignored the evidence of the BBC's Newsnight science editor, Susan Watts - which corroborates a great deal of Mr Gilligan's report. At times, says the Independent's Donald Macintyre, the law lord's verdict "[bordered] on what looks like naivete."
What sort of a man is Lord Hutton? The Guardian paints a picture of a "master of fact" who applied the "criminal standard of proof" to the inquiry. "He is a trusting man as far a officialdom is concerned," one QC tells the paper.
Mr Blair, most of the papers agree, has been very fortunate. "It is just flipping unbelievable," complains Boris Johnson in the Telegraph. "He is a mixture of Harry Houdini and a greased piglet. He is barely human in his elusiveness ... Blair, Hoon, Scarlett, the whole lot of them, have been sprayed with more whitewash than a Costa Brava timeshare. Hutton has succumbed to blindness of Nelsonian proportions. As snow-jobs go, this beats the Himalayas."
Even the Telegraph's leader, which largely agrees with Lord Hutton's robust criticism of the BBC, concedes there are "various issues that Lord Hutton decided not to explore and that parliament might now consider".
Mr Blair will find some comfort in the FT, where Philip Stephens berates the cynics in the media who cannot bring themselves to believe that a politician might be telling the truth. "Had the inquiry pronounced the prime minister a liar, Lord Hutton's words would have been held up as if inscribed on a tablet of stone. Because he decided otherwise, many of those who had attacked the integrity of the prime minister were already last night beginning to turn their fire on Lord Hutton."
But there is little doubt among the papers - even the Times - that the report will not completely restore voters' confidence in Mr Blair's government. The venerable WF Deedes says the PM will find it hard to escape the "weight of his past". Like Harold Macmillan, who survived the 1963 Denning report but soon suffered a bout of ill-health that led to his replacement, Mr Blair may leave Downing Street sooner rather than later.
SIMON HOGGART Http://www.guardian.co.uk/Politics/kelly/comment/0,13747,1133757,00.html
TIMES LEADER Http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-981166,00.htm
TIMES: MATTHEW PARRIS Http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7813-981644,00.html
TELEGRAPH: BORIS JOHNSON <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/01/29/do2902.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/01/29/ixopinion.html>
INDEPENDENT: HUTTON IS ACCUSED OF A 'WHIEWASH' <http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=485689>
MIRROR: WHERE ARE THE WMDS? <http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid=13867519_method=full_ siteid=50143_headline=-BLAIR%2DCLEARED%2DBY%2DHUTTON%2D%2D%2D%2DBUT%2DWHERE% 2DARE%2DTHE%2DWMDs%2D-name_page.html>
DOCTORS QUESTION KELLY SUICIDE http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storyprint.cfm?storyID=3546211
JEREMY LAURANCE, INDEPENDENT, UK - Fresh doubts about the death of Dr. David Kelly, the British weapons expert, were raised yesterday by three doctors who questioned whether he took his own life. The doctors suggested that the former United Nations weapons inspector could not have committed suicide in the way described to the inquiry chaired by Lord Brian Hutton. Kelly was found dead in a copse near his Oxfordshire home in July after being named as the source of a BBC report claiming that the Government had sexed up an intelligence dossier on the threat from Iraq.
A forensic pathologist, Dr. Nicholas Hunt, told the Hutton inquiry that Kelly had bled to death from a self-inflicted wound to his left wrist. But Dr. David Halpin, a former consultant in trauma and orthopedic medicine at Torbay Hospital, Devon, and two colleagues, question this account.
In a letter to the Guardian they say: "We view this as highly improbable. Arteries in the wrist are of matchstick thickness and severing them does not lead to life threatening blood loss. Dr. Hunt stated that the only artery that had been cut - the ulnar artery - had been completely transected. Complete transection causes the artery to quickly retract and close down, and this promotes clotting of the blood."
The authors of the letter point out that, according to the ambulance team who attended Kelly, the amount of blood at the scene was minimal and that it is unlikely he lost more than a pint of blood. "To have died from hemorrhage, Dr. Kelly would have had to lose about five pints of blood," they say.
Kelly had also taken an unknown number of Co-Proxamol tablets, a powerful pain killer, but the forensic toxicologist who examined him, Alexander Allan, concluded that the level of drugs in his blood was less than a third of what would normally be found in a fatal overdose.
Halpin said yesterday: "We would like this inquest reopened so that in this very important case, no stone is left unturned."
Support came yesterday from Dr. Don MacKechnie, head of accident and emergency at Rochdale Infirmary and chair of the British Medical Association's accident and emergency medicine committee.
MacKechnie said: "From a factual point of view [the authors] are correct. When you transect an artery completely it usually does close off." But MacKechnie said it was possible Kelly died as a result of a sensitivity to the Co-Proxamol tablets. "I have seen well-documented cases of people dying with less than what would be regarded as a fatal dose."