by Tom Bower
Another irritation was a report on the BBC Today programme that morning. Andrew Gilligan, an experienced BBC reporter disliked by Campbell for his critical dispatches from Baghdad, had broadcast that the government ‘probably knew’ that the dossier’s assertion about intelligence showing that Iraq could prepare and fire WMDs within forty-five minutes of any order ‘was wrong even before it decided to put it in’. Gilligan added: ‘Downing Street, our source says, a week before publication [of the dossier], ordered it to be sexed up, to be made more exciting, and ordered more facts to be discovered.’
In later broadcasts that morning, Gilligan altered his narrative, saying that the government knew the ‘forty-five minutes’ claim was ‘questionable’ rather than ‘wrong’, but he repeated his central allegation that Blair and Campbell conspired to falsify the assertion against Scarlett’s wishes. In fact, Scarlett had wholeheartedly approved the dossier, although he knew that the ‘intelligence’ did not describe a rocket but an artillery gun. Gilligan assumed that Campbell and Blair were aware of Scarlett’s mistake.
The dam had broken. In Washington and London, military and intelligence experts conceded that the WMDs may not have existed. In Westminster, seventy Labour MPs demanded an inquiry. Many were briefed by friends in Whitehall that the September dossier was based on flimsy evidence. Over the next three days, Gilligan’s ‘sexed-up’ allegations were repeated across the media. Critics described a common thread running from Blair’s macho protection of Jo Moore after she had suggested ‘burying bad news’ on 9/11 to Gilligan’s allegations about the manipulation of intelligence.
A journalist accompanying Blair to Iraq and then on to Poland was told by the prime minister, ‘The idea that we authorised or made our intelligence agencies invent some piece of evidence is completely absurd.’ Blair also told the journalist about the discovery in Iraq of ‘two trailers which were used to make biological weapons’. Blair was repeating Curveball’s invention, which had been accepted by Dearlove.
During his onward flight to St Petersburg for an EU–Russia summit, Blair read in the Mail on Sunday an article by Gilligan in which he spelled out his allegations under the subhead, ‘I asked my intelligence source why Blair misled us all over Saddam’s weapons. His reply? One word – Campbell’. Gilligan described how Downing Street had ‘sexed up’ the dossier and how the intelligence officers responsible had become distressed by Campbell’s distortion of the ‘forty-five minutes’ report. The combination of Campbell, Iraq and the dishonesty about the dossier created a frenzy of lurid headlines that fuelled the public’s loss of trust in Blair and, eventually, all politicians.
Campbell was incandescent. Tired and ready to resign, he understood the damaging effect of even a partial truth. Blair was equally dismayed. ‘It’s another attack to go to the heart of my integrity,’ he told his PR man, knowing that the dossier’s foreword, which had been written by Campbell, misrepresented the ‘sporadic and patchy’ conclusions in the original JIC report. ‘It is grotesque,’ continued Blair. ‘There is no story here at all, but it is being driven by the BBC as a huge crisis for us.’
Neither had survived for nine years in the spotlight without the skills to deflect the truth. They were helped by Gilligan’s two principal mistakes: Blair and Campbell had not distorted the ‘forty-five minutes’ intelligence; and Gilligan’s source was David Kelly, a weapons expert employed by the government and as a UN inspector in Iraq who had no role in compiling the dossier. Authorised by his superiors to brief journalists, Kelly had cautiously repeated a complaint he had heard from Brian Jones, an analyst at the MoD. However, even Kelly was convinced before the invasion that Saddam possessed WMDs.
Under pressure to shame Gilligan’s unknown source, John Reid blamed ‘rogue elements’ in the security services, and a hunt was launched for a disloyal senior officer in MI6 or the JIC. ‘John believes you should go for the throat when you’re in a corner,’ said one of his allies. Reid’s mistake horrified Blair. Clinging onto Dearlove’s and Scarlett’s loyalty was important for his own survival. They would sink or swim together. Campbell for his part took comfort from Dearlove’s support, forgetting that the MI6 chief was vulnerable himself.
Blair’s initial instinct was to allow the media frenzy to burn itself out. His misfortune was that Robin Cook and Clare Short joined the debate to denounce him for ‘duping’ the country. Both the party’s and the public’s anger grew. Loyalist Labour ministers accused the intelligence services of skulduggery. In retaliation, anonymous voices said Blair was paranoid. The public’s trust in him dived. To his irritation, the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee opened an inquiry into the ‘forty-five minutes’ claim. At least he could be confident that, under the chairmanship of Labour MP Ann Taylor, the committee’s Labour majority would be sympathetic towards the government. His dependency upon Campbell was less secure.
Blair’s good fortune since 1994 was to be supported by outstanding political operators. None was better than Peter Mandelson or Alastair Campbell. His misfortune was that neither could satisfy the public’s expectations of probity. For nine years, Campbell had successfully shaped and misshaped the news to promote and protect Blair. In that time he had become infamous as a bully and a liar. His misleading descriptions about Blair’s relations with Brown, the fate of a hapless minister or government achievements were trivial compared to the two dossiers that persuaded many Britons to support the Iraq war. By the end of May 2003, both were known to be untrue.
As he returned to London from St Petersburg, Blair failed to assess his principal defender dispassionately. Ever since Fiona Millar had told him that she and Campbell wanted to resign, Blair had noticed his ally’s instability. The obvious solution was to bid both farewell and start afresh. He resisted. He needed the comforting support of his consigliere, for Brown was once again agitating for his resignation, citing their disagreement over the euro.
As agreed, Brown had submitted the Treasury’s studies to the Cabinet. To Blair’s dismay, the eighteen massive volumes made normal scrutiny impossible. But, with the Cabinet’s support, he still proposed a referendum in which he would advocate membership. Brown appeared on television to say he was against joining and, among several other obstacles, could wield a veto. The following morning, Blair told Campbell while eating toast with marmalade in his flat that ‘The best way would be to get out a gun, shoot the obstacle and then have a reshuffle.’ Once again, Blair was urged by Alan Milburn, Reid and others to dismiss the chancellor. He refused. ‘Removing Brown’, he wrote, ‘would have brought the entire building tumbling down around our ears.’
When, three days later, Milburn announced he was resigning, Blair mishandled the reshuffle. After several emotional arguments, Derry Irvine was replaced by Charles Falconer as Lord Chancellor. Irvine’s sacking was quoted as another example of Blair’s disloyalty, and the resulting reorganisation of the justice system was chaotic. Blair was vulnerable on so many fronts – except against the Tories. Iain Duncan Smith had failed to exploit Labour’s divisions both on tuition fees and foundation hospitals, and, having given unequivocal support for the Iraq war, was perplexed about how to lead the charge over the intelligence flaws. Blair had no reason to fear the lame leader of a demoralised party as an alternative prime minister. His chancellor was the only serious threat. Under attack from Ed Balls and other Brown supporters, Blair feared life without Campbell.
Hating any journalist who failed to show obedience, Campbell used his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee on 25 June to defend the September dossier and assault Gilligan: ‘I simply say, in relation to the BBC story, it is a lie, it was a lie. It is a lie that is continually repeated, and until we get a public apology for it I will keep making sure that Parliament, people like yourselves and the public know that it was a lie.’ Blair congratulated Campbell without grasping the truth: his great protector had lost his self-control.
Two days later, Campbell walked unexpectedly into the Channel 4 News studio duri
ng its live broadcast, sat down and launched a vitriolic attack against those who accused him of ‘sexing up’ the dossier. He was looking for scalps – Gilligan’s in particular, then the BBC’s editors’ and that of anyone else whose demise would resurrect his reputation for probity. That night, even Blair realised his spokesman was unbalanced. Yet Campbell’s mental state was unimportant compared to the thrust of Gilligan’s report. The public, Blair understood, would excuse an ‘error’ but would not forgive ‘a deception’ or that he himself ‘had deliberately misled the House of Commons’.
Blair’s fate – possible ‘resignation and disgrace’, as he would later write – depended on how his representation of Scarlett’s summary was judged. The JIC had originally described the intelligence on WMDs as ‘sporadic and patchy’, yet Blair represented it as ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative’, and pleaded that any discrepancy was an ‘error’.
‘The intelligence was wrong,’ he would write. ‘We admitted it. We apologised for it.’ That was inaccurate. In June 2003, he emphatically insisted that the Iraq Survey Group, a thousand inspectors under American command, would eventually find the WMDs. In the meantime, he needed to deflect criticism, and agreed with Campbell to launch a broadside against the BBC. ‘Alastair was concerned by the lowering of the standards at the BBC’, recalled Hoon without irony, ‘and wanted to fight against that.’ To their relief, the ‘chaff’ who, like the metal fired into the sky to disorientate guided missiles, could deflect the public’s criticism unsuspectingly offered himself on 1 July.
David Kelly, an honest, loyal and troubled man, wrote to his manager at the MoD to reveal that he had spoken to Gilligan. However, he explained, he could not be the journalist’s source because Gilligan’s story did not match what Kelly knew nor his contribution during their conversation.
As the news spread in Downing Street that Gilligan’s ‘source’ was known, Blair’s confidants and top security officials, including Scarlett, were summoned to discuss how Kelly could be used to discredit the BBC. Campbell was agitating for retaliation. ‘The biggest thing needed’, he noted, ‘was the source out.’ That would ‘open a flank on the BBC’.
On the afternoon of 8 July, Blair was under pressure. Instead of recalling the humiliating retreat the previous year after Campbell had complained about a newspaper’s allegation that Blair had sought to promote his own role in the Queen Mother’s funeral, he succumbed again to his lieutenant’s impetuosity. In what Tebbit would call ‘a decisive meeting’ that included Campbell, Powell and others, Blair agreed that the MoD should announce that Gilligan’s source had revealed himself. Gleefully, Campbell ordered that the government machine be mobilised ‘to fuck Gilligan’. The only complication was that Tebbit arrived in Downing Street just after the meeting had broken up.
‘Alastair will explain to you what we’ve decided,’ Blair told him as he disappeared into an education stock-take.
Tebbit found Campbell completing a press release. ‘We’re going to leak the name,’ Campbell told him.
‘You can’t do that until I have spoken to him,’ said Tebbit. In the meantime, the press release, he said, should state that ‘someone has come forward’.
‘OK,’ replied Campbell, without betraying his emotions.
Tebbit agreed that the government statement could describe Kelly’s background to hasten his identification. That had been authorised by Blair, even though such an announcement was unprecedented. Kelly’s outing, Blair would later write, was ‘handled’ by Tebbit ‘at my insistence’. He drew a distinction between ‘leaking’ Kelly’s name and ‘confirming’ enquiries.
In reality, at Campbell’s behest Hoon directed spokesmen at the MoD to confirm Kelly’s name whenever a journalist correctly identified him. Soon after, a ministry official told Kelly that his name would be released. Kelly was mortified. Blair would subsequently deny ‘the brutal media allegation’ that Campbell had ‘leaked’ Kelly’s name. ‘He hadn’t,’ wrote Blair, which, strictly speaking, was true because the revelation of Kelly’s identity, as Tebbit agreed, matched the commitment by the MoD to ‘provide as much information as we can’, albeit with Campbell’s encouragement. To aggravate the smear on Kelly, he was described by Tom Kelly (no relation), one of Blair’s spokesmen, as a ‘Walter Mitty character’.
Both then and later, Blair confused the true nature of the dispute. He described Kelly as Gilligan’s ‘source’. That was inaccurate because Gilligan had misrepresented Kelly. More importantly, the dossier was more than ‘sexed up’ – it was wholly inaccurate.
The one weak point was Gilligan’s focus on the forty-five minutes. Kelly had mentioned to the journalist Scarlett’s inaccurate description of an artillery shell and how the public misconception of rockets carrying WMDs had not been corrected. Blair bore the responsibility for that mistake. To deflect the media’s attention from the phoney intelligence, Blair joined Campbell’s roller coaster. ‘I was outraged by the BBC’s position,’ he would write about the corporation’s refusal to apologise. He agreed that Kelly should testify before the Foreign Affairs Committee. Kevin Tebbit protested that Kelly, a reticent scientist, was unsuited to the parliamentary spotlight, but Hoon overruled him. The summons to Westminster aggravated Kelly’s distress. Under intense questioning by petulant MPs on 15 July, he was pummelled, leaving the public puzzled and the scientist agitated.
Blair was preparing for a glory trip to Washington. He was to address both Houses of Congress, receive the Congressional Gold Medal and be feted by Bush. He was exhausted. Distrusted and disliked by so many Britons, he was undecided about the theme for his speech to the party conference in two months’ time. An election victory would depend upon rebuilding trust and reasserting the party’s values. Endless slogans, targets and announcements had contaminated the New Labour brand. His hope of re-establishing a relationship with his supporters was being torpedoed by the Kelly row. The public’s attention had returned to Iraq just as relief over the victory was vanishing. The worst offenders were Labour MPs. Their constant criticism had galvanised the ineffectual Iain Duncan Smith to surprise everyone by accusing Blair and Campbell of creating ‘a culture of deceit and spin’, provoking even Tory MPs to call for moderation in order to avoid damaging the morale of British troops.
During July, General Jackson witnessed the first security problems in the British zone. A roadside bomb had killed a British soldier. Some blamed Rumsfeld’s order for American soldiers to return home for encouraging rival religious groups to bid for power in Basra. Others highlighted Bremer’s decision to disband the army and remove Ba’athists from the Iraqi government for fomenting defiance in the north. A bomb had destroyed the headquarters of the UN mission in Baghdad, killing over twenty officials, including the admired chief officer. With one blast, Blair’s insistence on a UN solution evaporated. Iraqis watched helplessly as their country slid into chaos.
Blair denied what was happening. ‘There was no inevitability about the violence,’ he would write. Even when he wrote this – seven years later – he did not recognise that a power vacuum was the predictable consequence of Saddam being deposed. Without a dictator, few Arab nations have remained peaceful. The pre-war intelligence failure about WMDs was all one with Blair’s misunderstanding of Iraq. In 2010, he denied that the country’s violent collapse ‘lay in planning failures [before the invasion] to rebuild Iraq. It isn’t true … It’s a delusion.’ He explained that ‘The truth is that we did not anticipate the role of al-Qaeda or Iran’ in organising an insurrection. In actual fact, he had been deaf to loud warnings of exactly those dangers.
No other foreign leader could have expected more applause than Blair received in Washington on 17 July. ‘Our ultimate weapon is not our guns but our beliefs,’ he told his congressional audience. ‘We are fighting for the inalienable right of humankind to be free.’ He charged America to ‘listen as well as lead … because destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time, and the task is yours to do’. The nineteen st
anding ovations, Blair noted, were partisan. Some parts of his speech were cheered by Democrats, others by Republicans. ‘The problem was that this, in a way, describes my political weakness,’ he would write. ‘The right agreed partly, the left agreed partly. But very few in whole!’
After dinner with Bush in the White House, Blair and Cherie flew on in a celebratory mood to Tokyo, the first of seven cities to be visited over the following eight days. The journalists at the back of the plane, he hoped, would repair the image created over three pages of the New Statesman under the headline ‘What’s the Point of Tony Blair?’ The lead-in stated that Blair ‘doesn’t really know who or what he is. More technically, he is diagnosed as a psychopath capable of reinventing himself with remarkable dexterity, like an actor.’ The magazine’s owner was Geoffrey Robinson, the disgraced former paymaster general.
During the flight, David Manning woke him. ‘Very bad news,’ he said. David Kelly had been found dead in woods near his home. Suicide was suspected. ‘It was truly a ghastly moment,’ Blair reflected. A firestorm was inevitable. Within an hour he had agreed with Charlie Falconer, his friend the Lord Chancellor, that any inquest should be chaired by a judge rather than a coroner. The judge would consider all the circumstances, including the compilation of the dossier that might have contributed to Kelly’s suicide.
Lawyer to lawyer, Blair and Falconer knew that no judge was impartial. Both recalled John Major’s folly in 1992 of appointing Richard Scott to investigate the export of arms to Iraq. From the outset, Scott conducted an exhaustive inquiry aimed pointedly at humiliating Major’s government. Four years later, his report provided invaluable ammunition for Robin Cook to demolish the Conservatives’ reputation. To avoid that fate, Blair and Falconer agreed that the ideal choice would be someone sympathetic to Labour’s cause. Three hours after Kelly’s death, while Blair was still flying towards Japan, Falconer personally interviewed and then appointed Brian Hutton, a former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, to start work within three weeks. Hutton had a reputation as a steadfast bastion of the Ulster Establishment whose judgements had favoured servants of state rather than the media, but he had also once ruled against the armed services. ‘His sobriety guaranteed that he would do no favours to the clamour,’ noted Andrew Turnbull. With that agreed, Blair walked to the back of the plane to announce the news to the accompanying journalists.
