Thousands of kilometres from Britain, talking to journalists on a plane heading for Hong Kong, Prime Minister Tony Blair this week tied the fate of his premiership to the outcome of the judicial inquiry into the death of the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence weapons specialist, David Kelly.
Asked by journalists if he had authorised the leak of Kelly’s name, Blair said: ”That’s completely untrue.”
Blair, who insisted he believed the government had acted properly throughout, echoed a denial by his Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, last Saturday: ”I am not aware that his name was leaked. It was certainly not leaked by me and I assure you that we made great efforts to ensure Dr Kelly’s anonymity.”
The claim of both men is about to be tested by the Lord Hutton inquiry into Kelly’s death. The UK government line is that it is for the inquiry to establish who said what to whom, where and when. But, unusually, the answers to a lot of these questions are already known.
Much of the information is in the public arena, and it heavily implicates both the ministry and Blair’s office at No 10 Downing Street in the events that led up to Kelly’s death.
Everyone in a senior position within the ministry, including Hoon, were involved in putting Kelly’s name into the public arena — and they did so in collusion with Downing Street.
Reflecting the anger in Labour Party ranks over the affair, a former minister normally loyal to Blair described the denials of the prime minister and Hoon as ”weasel words”. The ex-minister said: ”Kelly did not deserve to die. If his name had not been made public, he would still be alive. Is that not the truth?”
He blamed Hoon and the Downing Street director of communications, Alastair Campbell: ”It was a collaborative job between the two of them. Neither would have acted on his own but they shamelessly put their heads together and sacrificed this guy.”
There were signs on Tuesday night that Downing Street was seeking to put the blame on the ministry by claiming the final decision on how to handle Kelly was one for that department alone.
Since the Iraq weapons row broke on May 29, Downing Street and the ministry had been hunting for the mole who leaked information to BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.
Kelly came forward on June 30 to inform his ministry superior that he might be the source of Gilligan’s story. In normal circumstances, this would have remained an internal ministry matter. Kelly had broken his department’s rules about speaking to journalists and would have been reprimanded. The decision to make his name public was a purely political one.
There was a series of discussions between Campbell, other senior No 10 staff, Hoon and the top brass at the ministry.
”There is no way Hoon would have done this without the specific authority of Campbell,” said a well-placed government press officer. Another described the British government’s battle with the BBC as ”Campbell’s war”, with the Downing Street director of communications calling the shots.
”When he says jump, ministers such as Hoon ask how high. [Hoon] has no independent political base or authority,” said the Whitehall press officer.
Campbell orchestrated the government’s public offensive to sell the war to a sceptical public and crush opponents. Tactics were regularly discussed at a daily 8.30am strategy meeting of government press officers. One of those who attends regularly said Campbell dominates proceedings. ”He is obsessive about everything he does. When he took up running, he does the marathon. He controls the news agenda.”
The ministry communications chief, Pam Teare, or her deputy, Kate O’Connor, attended and O’Connor took notes alongside the two defence ministry minders when Kelly was grilled by the foreign affairs select committee. But, according to Whitehall insiders, the real decisions were taken by an informal Downing Street group headed by Campbell.
Downing Street and the ministry are in a bind. It is now known to everyone that the ministry, with Downing Street’s help, encouraged journalists in a hunt for the identity of the mole and happily confirmed it when journalists came up with Kelly’s name.
Kelly had ”volunteered” to his line managers in the ministry that he might have been one of Gilligan’s sources.
The ministry sat on the information over the weekend of July 5 to 7. Ministry officials say they warned Kelly that sooner or later he would be named in public. It was to be sooner.
On July 8 Hoon sent a ”confidential” letter to the chairperson of the BBC governors, Gavyn Davies, asking him if he stood by his story. The following day, July 9, Hoon sent a second letter to Davies naming Kelly and asking if the BBC would confirm he was their man.
About the same time the ministry press office was handed a briefing note based on a strategy drawn up by Sir Kevin Tebbit, Permanent Secretary at the ministry, and approved by Hoon.
It offered even more clues than its statement of the previous day (when it dismissed what it assumed to be Gilligan’s source as ”middle-ranking” and not a member of the ”senior civil service”).
The best clue of all was that the man referred to in the statement had been an Unscom inspector. Within an hour, The Guardian had identified Kelly. When it put the name to the ministry press office, it was confirmed.
Tom Kelly, from the No 10 press office, had briefed lobby journalists that morning and again in the afternoon with details about the mole’s background, without naming him.
The ministry also provided helpful clues. The Guardian gave three names to the ministry press office, which confirmed the last one, David Kelly.
The London Financial Times took information from Downing Street and the ministry, as well as further information given in a one-to-one chat with No 10’s Kelly, and fed it all into a computer, which provided them with David Kelly’s name. The Times put 21 names to the ministry, which eventually confirmed Kelly’s.
Downing Street and the ministry, unable now to deny that they helped journalists to identify Kelly, this week attempted to justify that decision. The government intends to tell Hutton that the BBC’s handling of the scientist’s identity left it with little choice. Officials claim they can explain their willingness to confirm Kelly’s name to reporters.
According to the No 10 and ministry versions, the reasons lie in the BBC’s insistence that Kelly, still unidentified at that stage, was a ”senior intelligence source” when it simultaneously refused to confirm or deny that he was Gilligan’s primary informant.
Officials knew that on July 3 Richard Sambrook, Gilligan’s boss as head of news, lunched at the London Times, which, as a Murdoch-owned paper, has long been hostile to the BBC. The next day the paper reported that the BBC was poised to concede defeat on key points and to publicly correct the claim that No 10 had ”sexed up” the September dossier. It would accept ”vicarious liability” for Gilligan naming Campbell.
The Times report — under the heading ”BBC on edge of defeat in Iraq dossier row” — again spoke of ”a single source within the intelligence community” and said the name was now known to Sambrook, Greg Dyke and Kevin Marsh, editor of the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Yet the Sunday night meeting of the board of governors — according to Lord Ryder, deputy chairperson — was not told Kelly’s identity. It backed its staff and, in a statement, again referred to ”senior intelligence sources”.
So determined was the board to defend the BBC’s independence that, according to one Labour MP, Dyke did not even read the dossier prepared for the board. All talk of a compromise, as floated in the Times, evaporated. Some MPs blame the political inexperience of the Davies-Dyke partnership.
Few believe Hoon, an ambitious politician without acute political antennae, would have acted without agreement from No 10. Kelly’s name was already seeping out.
As is now clear, he had become a well-known BBC source, used as a reference point for BBC journalists doing stories about Iraq and weapons.
The No 10 and ministry reasons for letting Kelly’s name out were:
Continued BBC obfuscation over either the identity or status of the source;
Failure to say that an official had come forward would be called a cover-up;
If Kelly was not identified, other suspects in a small field of experts might be wrongly blamed; and
Kelly’s career was not on the line, though he would have to expect to face select committee questions.
A desperate Downing Street on Tuesday claimed Kelly’s name would have been made public, pointing to a July 13 report in The Sunday Times saying the newspaper had asked him if he was the source. Kelly denied it, according to the paper, which appears to have accepted his reassurance.
Why Kelly killed himself may never emerge. Government officials suspect his suggestion to the foreign affairs committee that he could not have been Gilligan’s source left him facing the prospect of a recall after Gilligan’s second committee appearance on July 17. Instead he took his own life.
”He feared he might be exposed as a liar and couldn’t hack it,” one said.
This week the ministry said, in response to reports that Hoon approved his ministry’s briefing strategy: ”Like the prime minster, the defence secretary is ready to give evidence to Lord Hutton in public at the earliest opportunity.
”Geoff Hoon and ministry officials will then set out the approach taken by the department after Dr Kelly came forward and admitted to his meeting with Andrew Gilligan.”
The repercussions of this affair have not yet been fully felt. Given the way that the ministry and Downing Street made Kelly’s name public it is hard to believe that Hutton will not at least reprimand the ministry.
The main question for Hutton is whether the ministry took the decision entirely on its own or whether Downing Street’s involvement was crucial. The former minister said: ”If the prime minister wants to save his own skin, there may have to be two heads that roll, Campbell and Hoon. I do not see any way out of it.” — Â