It was about two minutes long, some off-the-cuff comments made in a BBC domestic radio programme at six in the morning. Eventually, so inflated by spin and the media, this short broadcast became the reason the BBC lost its director general, the chairperson of its board of governors and the journalist who made the comments. How long this cull will continue is anyone’s guess. The BBC is said to be in a state of ”meltdown”.
If you haven’t followed the story, it’s briefly that early last year, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s offices published a dossier explaining why Blair intended to dispatch British forces to Iraq in support of the United States President George W Bush-managed war on Saddam Hussein. The dossier included the dubious claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which could be deployed within 45 minutes.
In the radio programme, BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan said that a source in British intelligence had told him that the 45-minute claim was probably at the behest of Blair, who had instructed the dossier be ”sexed up” so as to make the reasons for going to war more compelling.
Blair’s chief spin doctor then was one Alistair Campbell. To describe Campbell as despicable would be to flatter him. A political thug, he was noted for his insidious manipulation of the media. Favouritism, dissimulation, witch-hunting, skew and corkscrew, Campbell is a ruthless bully — the BBC resignations are the latest in a long line of his casualties. His earlier career, both as an hysterically pro-Labour journalist and close Blair adviser, had helped get New Labour into power. His reward was the appointment.
It was Campbell who responded in mauve fury to Gilligan’s comments, saying they traduced his precious Emperor Blair. He shrieked for BBC blood. The BBC board didn’t take much notice. As one commentator noted, the board was suffering from ”Campbell fatigue”, a condition causing it to become immune to complaints from Downing Street because of their almost daily frequency.
Saddest victim was one David Kelly, a highly-respected weapons inspector, named by Downing Street as the source of the 45-minute claim. Faced with the mauling of his reputation and shortly after being harshly grilled by a specially convened parliamentary committee, Kelly committed suicide.
Blair was blamed, primarily for having released Kelly’s name — in fact, an entry in Campbell’s diary at the time read: ”We need to fuck the source.”
The accusation had the effect of making Blair look and behave even more like a cornered rodent than he usually does. He did what all leaders do in situations where they need wriggle time, he appointed a commission of enquiry, set an antediluvian law lord, one James Brian Edward Hutton of Bresach, to investigate the whole affair.
Hutton’s report was published last week and was immediately condemned as a whitewash. Hutton was accused of wilfully narrowing his terms of reference so as to avoid any criticism of Blair — he found Downing Street’s behaviour as akin to saintly, but dumped heavily on the BBC.
The gloating by Campbell, Blair and their cronies was quite sickening. The BBC resignations followed, accompanied by a rash of clichés about ”falling on swords” and ”only honourable options”.
Well, at least in England they resign when the heat comes on. If the same honour system applied in South Africa, government officials in personal profit-taking institutions such as the Mpumalanga, Limpopo and Eastern Cape provincial administrations would become an endangered species.
For Blair, Hutton’s report couldn’t have come at a better moment. The day before it was published, the House of Commons had seen New Labour’s 160 majority reduced to a sliver of five votes in support of a contentious university student funding Bill.
A few days previously, chief US weapons inspector David Kay had said that Saddam Hussein had never had any more weapons than he’d had after the Gulf War: yet more evidence that the war on Iraq had been undertaken on exaggerated, if not frankly dishonest grounds. Blair desperately needed to move the spotlight and Hutton’s report was the ideal lever.
That Hutton was biased seems an unavoidable conclusion. But, as an American journalist commented to me, in the US such an inquiry would never have been left to one man. A commission of something like seven people would have been appointed — each one probably in support of an identifiable lobby — and offering a certain safety in numbers. The British, in a display of appealing naivety, were quite happy to invest their trust in a single lord of the realm. There’s a distinctly medieval feel about that.
In the latest development, Brian Jones, a British Ministry of Defence official, revealed this week that Downing Street had ”overruled” grave intelligence misgivings about the extent of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Not a single defence intelligence expert backed Blair’s claims about weapons of mass destruction, resulting in a dossier that was ”highly misleading about Iraq’s capabilities”.
In the meantime the media will continue to scratch away at the more shameless offences of the Blair administration. Among these will be that, eventually, he must take the blame for having been little more than Bush’s ninny. How many more British lives need to be lost to Blair’s conceit, his ludicrous attempts to play the ”great statesman”?
One thing I will say for him. Having appointed Hutton, Blair didn’t continually adjust his terms of reference as new political exigencies arose. We needed the Hefer commission for that.