On a more personal, certainly more trivial level, I was puzzled recently when a friend pointed out to me that D R Thorpe’s magisterial biography of Anthony Eden included a description of the Suez misadventure as "the intentional creation of a situation in which we would claim the right to intervene to stop what we had conspired to start", and attributed it to (of all people) me. I had no complaint about being identified as the source of this (I thought) rather neat little epigram, but also no recollection whatever of having written or said it. Correspondence with Mr Thorpe and advice from another distinguished author, Keith Kyle, revealed that Kyle had also quoted the epigram in his own book about Suez, and that he had got the quotation from a letter of mine in The Times of 1 August 1996, around the time of the 40th anniversary of Suez. Armed with the date, I duly found the letter in my press cuttings bundle, and found that the extract quoted had been among the more moderate and restrained of my descriptions of that act of criminal folly and deceit. I had been prompted to write to The Times in these admittedly intemperate terms by an article in that newspaper by the egregious Lord Rees-Mogg, written to mark the Suez anniversary, in which he explained that the whole thing had been due to a perfectly understandable political misjudgement by Eden, implying that it was one that anyone might easily have made at the time. Since it seems that Rees-Mogg had been working for Eden at the time of Suez, this struck me as distinctly provocative — or what our politicians call, when offended by a piece of chutzpah on the part of their political adversaries, "a bit rich coming from the party opposite". I hope my letter made a tiny contribution to the demolition of Mogg’s brazen attempt to re-write history. At any rate, it’s good for morale to find oneself quoted like this in not one, but two serious works of political history. (Incidentally, I should perhaps warn anyone trying to click on the hyperlink to my Times letter above that you’ll have to register with The Times and then pay to see the full text of the letter, a deplorable constraint on the use of the archives of what still purports to be our principal journal of record.) And now to finish packing for tomorrow.
The Home Office seems hell-bent on making us all carry identity cards, despite the apparent scepticism of the police about their likely benefits in detecting or deterring crime (very little benefit fraud is based on false identity, and real crooks will quickly find profitable ways of manufacturing plausible forgeries of the things) and despite the strenuous opposition of the civil liberties lobby. Elements of possible smart ID cards are to be "trialled" (or tried out, as humans prefer to say) in a ‘small market town’ shortly. The Cabinet is said to be lukewarm and even Mr Blair is said to be unconvinced, but no doubt Mr Blunkett, ever vigilant for opportunities to extend state power over the individual, will get his way in the end. One of the purposes of ID cards, according to the Home Office, is that they would provide a way of stopping people using two or more identities. But why should such a relatively harmless practice be "stopped" by the State? Provided that assuming a second identity isn’t done to obtain money under false pretences or involve obstructing the course of justice, or entail any other illegal activity, why shouldn’t Mr Smith become Mr Jones while he is spending a pleasant weekend with "Mrs Jones" in Brighton, or visiting his second, undeclared family in Malaga? Indeed, why shouldn’t he become Mr FitzSimmons now and then to escape the boredom of being Mr Smith, thus enabling him to enjoy the luxury and liberty of a wholly different and more flamboyant personality for a while? Because, evidently, it would be too untidy for the Home Office, who like to know not only where we all are (by putting little trackers in our cars and wheel-chairs, their latest jolly idea), but also who we are at any given time.
At the time of writing, the principal casualties of the Hutton inquiry so far seem likely to be: (1) the hapless Geoff Hoon, forced to admit in his evidence that he had played almost no part at any stage in the agonised discussions of what to do about the Gilligan allegations, the outing and/or disciplining of Dr Kelly or the question of throwing him to the jackals of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, all apparently matters on which the Ministry of Defence was the lead department but about which no-one thought it necessary either to consult or even to inform the Secretary of State for Defence; (2) a highly agitated Andrew Mackinlay, MP, whose defence at the inquiry of his piranha-style questioning of Dr Kelly at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee hearing deserves to be read in full on the admirable Hutton inquiry web site and may well set a new record for panic-stricken incoherence; (3) Ms Susan Watts of Newsnight, whose main objective in testifying to the inquiry seems to have been to try to establish that her television report based on what Dr Kelly had told her didn’t tend to corroborate Andrew Gilligan’s earlier reports on the Today programme based on what Dr Kelly had told him, even though it manifestly did (the answer to her plaintive question in her email to Dr Kelly — "Have I missed a trick?" — was obviously "Yes, I’m afraid so, dear"); and (4) Alastair Campbell, whose obsessive pursuit of his vendetta against the BBC seems to have crowded out all other activity in Whitehall and Downing Street for weeks on end, and whose resignation, without bothering to wait for Lord Hutton’s verdict, was announced today — although since no date for his departure and no successor to him seem to have been decided, the resignation apparently amounts to no more than a confirmation of his intention to move on, as announced several times in recent weeks.
Other questions rather more interesting than the minutiae of who attended Alastair Campbell’s interminable meetings (and who didn’t attend them, such as Mr Hoon) relate to the future of our Iraq policies, as well as their past. It seems to be generally accepted now that the security situation in the country is deteriorating all the time. Hardly a day passes without an American soldier, sometimes several, being killed, and increasingly often British soldiers too. The bomb attack on the UN headquarters and the murder of the outstanding, indispensable Sergio Vieira de Mello, outstanding UN diplomat, Human Rights Commissioner reluctantly taking time off to head the UN effort in Baghdad, has highlighted the extent to which even the most selfless aid workers and international civil servants, in Iraq to try to help the Iraqis, have become associated with the occupation forces and so come to be regarded as fair game for bomb and bullet. Things clearly can’t go on like this. It may go against the grain for the UN (in the form either of other countries acting under a UN mandate, or of the UN as an institution under the sure-footed Kofi Annan) to come to the aid of the Americans and the British, thus granting them a kind of unearned retrospective legitimacy and rescuing them from the consequences of their own folly, misjudgements, illegalities and lack of foresight. But without international intervention now, under a blue UN flag of some sort, it is the Iraqis who are going to suffer even more than the invaders and occupiers. The fascinating question now is how far the Americans will agree to go in eating humble pie by asking the Security Council to help bail them out, and how far they will agree to share authority with the UN for both security and political governance (i.e. mainly accelerating and managing the restoration of sovereignty to the Iraqis), as well as humanitarian aid and reconstruction. But if the necessary temporary administration is to have any credibility with the Iraqis and with international opinion, and to win the cooperation of Iraqis without that cooperation branding them as collaborators with the invaders, the UN must be seen to play a leading and independent part, in partnership with the Americans and not subordinated to them. Do the imaginations of Messrs Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld and of Ms Rice run to that? Colin Powell, and (one hopes) Tony Blair, even Jack Straw on a good day, could probably have a stab at it. But how would the bewildered man in the White House square it with his conviction that in toppling Saddam and installing Mr Bremer in his place, he has won a smashing victory in the "war on terrrrism"?
The Hutton inquiry has continued to fill the front pages and the lead stories in the media, showing once again how self-obsessed our media can be. The real story, as some commentators have kept reminding us, is not Campbell and Gilligan or even Kelly, but Iraq: how and why did we get into this mess? If our intelligence really convinced Blair and his key colleagues that Saddam’s WMD presented an immediate, current threat, how did the intelligence agencies get it so badly wrong? If, as Jonathan Powell pointed out in his email, it was clear before we went to war that the intelligence didn’t in fact support the proposition that Iraq represented a threat, let alone an immediate threat, why did our government base its case for war on the assertion that it did? At what point did Bush make a firm decision to launch a military attack on Iraq and when precisely did Blair commit himself, and us, to participating in it, whether or not it had UN Security Council authority? Were we already committed to the war when Blair was promising in his television broadcasts in January and February of this year that the only circumstances in which Britain would join in military action against Iraq without UN authority were if there was a majority in the Security Council in favour of authorising it but that majority was frustrated by "an unreasonable veto"? Had Blair warned the Americans at that time that unless those two conditions were satisfied, Britain would not take part in military action without the UN’s blessing? If so, what persuaded him to take us to war alongside the Americans despite the fact that none of his conditions had been satisfied — no UN authority, no majority in the Security Council in favour of authorising war, and no veto (reasonable or otherwise)? Why have so few of the government’s critics sought to confront Blair, every single time he goes on television or radio, or answers questions in the House of Commons or from the Select Committee chairpersons or at his monthly press conferences, with the plain fact that he broke those specific and emphatic pledges, and with the demand for an explanation of that breach of faith? I would have thought that these were much more interesting and pregnant questions than whether Alastair Campbell or some other functionary pressed the intelligence agencies to change the words "may have" to "have" in the draft dossier, and who first wrote in the bit about the 45 minutes within which the Iraqis could fire off their non-existent nuclear rockets in the general direction of London SW1 and New York’s upper east side.
Jane and I have been busy moving house, a traumatic experience which has engulfed the past three or four months to the exclusion of virtually anything else, including periodic additions to the web site. In my former job we used to move around every three or four years from country to country and home to temporary home, but always with a certain amount of support and help from our official colleagues (sometimes but not usually counter-productive, and always well meant), and always with the knowledge that we would be returning in due course to our real and permanent home in Putney, where we had lived since 1977, where our children had grown up and lived with many of their friends and partners, where Jane’s mother had lived after her husband died until her own death, and where we had for many years deposited the accumulated detritus of a gypsy life, despite Jane’s mounting apprehension and thanks to my own inability ever to throw anything away. So the move to a significantly smaller house entailed kissing goodbye to many of these accumulated possessions: almost half of our precious books; a mountain of clothes which had unaccountably shrunk so as no longer to accommodate my present waist; pictures and ornaments that had value only as reminders, none as objects of beauty or interest; videos that we knew we would never watch again, but whose titles on their spines were strangely enjoyable to look at now and then; crates of ancient files and papers, letters, bills and bank statements, kept in case we needed to look them up one day but which we knew we would never be able to find in the improbable event of actually needing to. This should have been a liberating experience, but in practice was just a painful wrench. However, we have somehow squeezed the surviving residue into the new house and it begins to look as if we, and no others, live here. It’s undeniably more convenient and cosier. Its fewer stairs pose less of a threat to our ageing knees. And we don’t miss our old home so much now that its young purchasers have had its innards comprehensively ripped out down to the bare bricks, its exterior paint (in a controversial colour chosen by me over my entire family’s frenzied objections) pressure-steamed off to reveal beautiful dark red bricks, our kitchen and bathroom fittings chucked into the front yard and relegated to the dump, whole walls dismantled, rooms re-aligned, floor-boards taken up, the whole place encased in scaffolding and green canvas. It doesn’t look anything like the house we left only a few weeks ago, so there’s nothing there to miss. But we’re determined that this is the last time we’re going to move house. The next time we move it will be either organised entirely by men in white coats, or feet first.
On a somewhat less exalted level, another thing I find incomprehensible is the way the media pursue Ulrika Jonsson with such apparent venom. Whether her offence in their eyes is to remain a notably attractive woman in her maturity, or to combine her good looks with obvious intelligence and wit, or to have been involved with a number of men who in some cases have behaved extremely badly towards her, or to be a foreigner who has become a household name and face (and figure) in her adopted country, or to have suffered a number of other misfortunes without feeling any compulsion to flee public life, or whether it’s a combination of all these misdemeanours that causes such animosity, I can’t begin to guess. Her latest supposed offence is to refuse to name the individual who she says in her autobiography raped her several years ago: she refuses to confirm or reject widespread speculation about who the rapist was. But Ulrika is now engaged to be married to someone whose parents Jane and I have known, liked and respected for many years, and whose judgement of others has always proved completely reliable. They have got to know Ms Jonsson well since the outset of her relationship with her son, and they both vouch unreservedly for her charm, her natural manner, her sense of humour and her decency. Good enough for me!
To return for a moment to the saga of the two Kellys: I find it incomprehensible that Tom Kelly, an experienced and well-regarded government spokesman and former journalist, should have allowed himself to engage in uninhibited speculation about Dr David Kelly and his possible resemblance to Walter Mitty in a “private conversation” with a journalist, without having agreed beforehand on the terms of the conversation. When I was a public servant I had it constantly drummed into me that in any contact with the media, however casual and however apparently trustworthy the contact, it was essential to lay down clearly the basis on which one was speaking: and that the options were strictly confined to “For attributable use” (“The Downing Street official spokesman told me today that…”), “For unattributable use” (“A senior figure close to the government was speculating yesterday that…), and “For background, not for use” (strictly for the personal information of the journalist and not to be used either attributably or unattributably). It was perfectly OK to stipulate that specific sentences or paragraphs of what one was saying should be on one basis and the rest on another, so long as both parties to the conversation knew and agreed in advance what terms applied to what information. Those treacherous terms, “Off the record” and “On the record”, were formally and rightly banned as being hopelessly ambiguous and likely to lead to dire misunderstandings about what could be used and how it could be attributed. Perhaps the rules have been relaxed since my own liberation from the Whitehall dungeons. A pity, if so, as Tom Kelly would no doubt now agree. I used to try to be pretty rigorous in my observance of the old rules and found that they worked well, enabling one to be usefully forthcoming in talking to reputable journalists without any serious risk of letting sensitive information leak into the public domain. At any rate, I was never let down in that way by my journalist friends, many of whom, especially when I was serving overseas, were able to let me in on much more useful information than I was able to provide to them.
Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about the Kelly issue, apart from its tragic outcome for its protagonist, is that it has diverted attention from the real issues underlying it. Was the government’s public case for joining the Americans in invading and occupying Iraq firmly based on reliable information in its possession, or did the government dress it up, embroider or otherwise misrepresent it in order to gain public support for the war? Was the government’s public justification for the war really the same as its actual motives: was there a genuine belief that Saddam’s WMD posed an immediate threat to Britain , or was it rather the case that Tony Blair was convinced that only by supporting George W. Bush through thick and thin could he or anyone else exercise some restraining and civilising influence on the conduct of the neo-con hawks in Washington with their crazy and belligerent plans for world hegemony? Why did Blair break his often-repeated public pledge that he would not take Britain into a war without UN authority unless a resolution authorising it had been supported by a majority in the Security Council but “unreasonably” vetoed, a condition that was never satisfied? Was the war really about weapons of mass destruction, or was that just the pretext likeliest to win UN approval, with the toppling of Saddam the real target? And has the Kelly affair been deliberately pumped up by the government’s PR machine precisely to lead the hunt away from these much more gritty questions? It seems unlikely that Lord Hutton will feel able to probe questions such as these when they go so far beyond his terms of reference, despite the freedom he has apparently been given to define the scope of his enquiry himself.
For what it’s worth, my own view remains much as it was at the outset: there was a persuasive case for military action against Iraq, namely that unless the UN inspectors could remain permanently stationed in Iraq with their authority backed up by a credible western military force permanently stationed near Iraq’s borders, Saddam would sooner or later resurrect his WMD (including nuclear) development programmes, and that the longer the international community delayed action to nip these programmes in the bud, the more dangerous and difficult effective intervention would become. But I was also clear from the beginning that early pre-emptive intervention on these grounds would have to have Security Council backing and that the Council was unlikely to approve armed intervention on these grounds until the UN inspectors had had several more months to see if they could themselves track down and terminate Iraq’s WMD or WMD programmes without the need for military intervention. Sadly, this was not the argument for intervention put either to our own electorate or to the Security Council. Instead, it was asserted, implausibly even at the time, that Saddam’s WMD posed an immediate and urgent threat, somehow linked to international terrorism, and that there was no point in giving the UN weapons inspectors more time to try to accomplish their task. By implication the British government even signed up to Mr Bush’s outrageous threat, subsequently acted upon, to use military force against Iraq even if the Security Council was not prepared to authorise it at that time. This was an inexcusable betrayal of the United Nations and of the most basic principles of the UN Charter, opening the way to the wholly unacceptable and perilous doctrine that any nation claiming to perceive a distant threat from another country was entitled to intervene militarily in that country, without the need for UN authority. That precedent has now been established, and the genie won’t easily be squeezed back into its bottle. It’s shaming that Britain , under a Labour government at that, was an active accessory to this international crime before, during and after it was committed.
There can’t be any excuse for failing to start with a word or three about the two unfortunate Kellys, the late Dr David, expert on chemical and biological weapons and Tom, the Downing Street spokesperson forced to grovel for having speculated, in what he thought was a "private conversation" with a journalist, that David Kelly might have been a Walter Mitty character — i.e. a fantasist (although as some of the brighter columnists have pointed out, the point about Thurber’s wonderful creation, Mitty, was that he was an unimportant, obscure nobody fantasising about being a Somebody, whereas the point about David Kelly is that he was a genuine Somebody who didn’t need to fantasise about it). It’s probably reckless to speculate about the truth of the Kelly saga in advance of the findings of Lord Hutton’s enquiry, but the scenario which seems to me the least implausible of many runs something like this.
Kelly (and from now on that means Dr. David unless otherwise identified) was a top expert in a somewhat narrow field, but with his hands-on experience of weapons-inspecting in Iraq and his technical knowledge of specific kinds of WMD (chemical and biological), he was clearly entitled to an opinion worth hearing on the government’s case for justifying the invasion and occupation of Iraq. There seems however to be some doubt about the extent of his involvement in the drafting, editing and final production of the government’s dossier, later nicknamed the ‘dodgy dossier’ (because it made unattributed use of material from an academic thesis on the Web). Kelly seems to have written a historical section of the dossier and perhaps to have contributed other sections on chemical and biological weapons, but how far he was involved in editing sessions at which the No. 10 staff and the intelligence agencies exchanged views on what was to go into the final version remains obscure, at any rate to me. It seems more likely than not that Kelly did complain in unattributable and unauthorised briefings of Gilligan and at least two other journalists that No. 10, and perhaps Alastair Campbell himself, had embroidered the material supplied by the intelligence agencies, or had changed its emphasis or interpretation in ways that had made the intelligence fraternity unhappy. Possibly Gilligan had further embroidered what Kelly had said to him, or put an unwarranted interpretation on it: that we shall probably never know. But the essence of his account seems likely to have been reasonably faithful to what Kelly had said. In the subsequent hullabaloo, Kelly (probably unwisely) volunteered an admission to the MOD that he had briefed Gilligan and perhaps the other journalists, although he claimed not to have said what Gilligan had quoted his source as saying. The MOD and/or No. 10 saw an opportunity to discredit Gilligan’s story by letting it be publicly known that Kelly had been Gilligan’s source but that Kelly denied having said what Gilligan had alleged in his articles. The BBC refused to confirm Kelly’s identity as Gilligan’s source (following the indispensable tradition of not naming a source of information provided in confidence), so the MOD arranged to ‘out’ Kelly as the source by means of a juvenile game in which they provided the media with enough information about the source to enable Kelly to be rapidly identified, and then confirmed the identification.
At the same time the MOD threatened Kelly, certainly publicly and presumably also privately, with dismissal from his job (and therefore the withdrawal of the plan to send him back to Iraq to join in the US-UK hunt for the WMD) and possibly even the cancellation of his pension rights if it turned out that he had indeed made the allegations to Gilligan which Gilligan had reported, and Kelly was denying. This placed Kelly in an agonising dilemma: with a wife and children to support, and only a year to go before his date for retirement at 60, he couldn’t afford to sacrifice his job and pension by admitting that Gilligan’s account had been broadly accurate; yet as a man of universally acknowledged integrity and principle, he must have hated having to deny having said what he had (probably) actually said to Gilligan, and in somewhat less stark terms to the other two reporters also. Summoned by the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, he faced a rackety and often hostile-seeming interrogation in which he was effectively forced into denying that he had been the source of Gilligan’s story, with the knowledge that the saga was certain to co0ntue to run into the indefinite future and that the truth would eventually come out. Cutting his wrists must have seemed the only way out.
Of course much of this is pure guess-work. Perhaps Hutton will be able to unravel the various mysteries in a definitive way. Did Kelly really speak to Gilligan in the way asserted by Gilligan but later denied by Kelly? If so, was Kelly in a position to know that his allegations against No. 10 were well founded, or was his own source (if any) questionable, self-interested, or in a position to know the facts? If Kelly did not make the allegations attributed to him by Gilligan, what was the motive for his (Kelly’s) subsequent suicide, assuming as one must that his death was indeed suicide? Alas, with the principal witness dead, it seems quite possible that we shall never know for sure what are the answers to these and other questions. Hutton has an unenviable task: but with his experience of presiding over non-jury trials in Northern Ireland, he has plenty of experience of unenviable tasks.
