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The emperor's new clothes

15 September 2003

When everybody around the prime minister knows what he wants to hear, objectivity is the first casualty.

Following the first, information gathering stage of Lord Hutton's enquiry, it is already possible to put together a plausible narrative of events. To what extent these events played into the death of Dr Kelly, and whether any of the actors did wrong in that regard, are questions that will come more sharply into focus as selected witnesses are recalled.

But the narrative is important for another reason. It reveals how the entire episode turned upon a specific mis-assumption, a misunderstanding about the flawed reality of policy-making that has left Britain so helplessly and expensively mired in the post-war aftermath in Iraq.

The story is simple enough.

The government, sought to publish a dossier of intelligence-based evidence on the weapons threat from Iraq that had to (1) make a convincing case and (2) be the work of intelligence officials in order to be credible. The JIC and its chairman, John Scarlett, in undertaking this, immediately (if unintentionally) compromised their objectivity in relation to the intelligence they were handling.

They made the dossier as strong as possible (including the infamous 45 minute claim). They also agreed to changes of emphasis that were politically inspired.

More junior (but still relatively senior) intelligence officials (including Dr Kelly), who had contributed material to the dossier, thought the final version too strong. They requested changes, which were not made.

This all happened back in September 2002. Nine months later, and after the war, Dr Kelly was preparing to return to his work in Iraq. To him, the dossier was water under the bridge, so, when dealing with journalists (including Susan Watts and Andrew Gilligan), it was not really what he wanted to talk about. But, since they asked, he gave them the facts as he knew them. The dossier, he said, was strengthened in its last few days for political effect. He cited the 45 minute claim a an example of this. He probably thought it was old news.

This much he knew: the language of the dossier had been firmed up towards the end of the process and the efforts from his own level to tone it down had been unsuccessful. He could not believe this of intelligence officials; therefore he assumed that control of the dossier had now been passed into the hands of officials of the Downing Street communication machine. Dr Kelly used (or allowed the use of) the word "Campbell" in this context because for him (as for many) the name "Campbell" was synonymous with that machine.

That is really all there is to it. Gilligan got his story and unfortunately garbled it somewhat at its first telling (from his bedroom shortly after 6 am). But for Kelly, as its source, the assumption it was based on was disastrously wrong. Even so, the outrage that flowed from Downing Street in the wake of its having been broadcast might, if the consequences had not been so tragic, have seemed funny. In a charade reminiscent of a 1970s industrial demarcation dispute the individuals who work for the Prime Minister stepped delicately around the issue of what it was or was not their job to say.

The unmistakable conclusion at this stage of the enquiry is this. If communications supremo Alastair Campbell had beefed up the dossier to help the government by quoting doubtful intelligence as fact, it would be so scandalous that, the Prime minister would, apparently, have had to resign. But if the Chairman of the JIC (an official having direct access to the prime minister) beefed up the dossier to help the government by quoting doubtful intelligence as fact, that's OK.

In seeking to excise from the dossier "weak" words such as "might", "may", "could" and "probable", Alastair Campbell was only doing his job. Scarlett's job was to provide the government with balanced intelligence assessments, but in agreeing to write a dossier for public exposure he knew that he was undertaking to make the government's case. He would clearly be damned if he did, and damned if he didn't, but the more immediate damning would come if he didn't make it convincing. The damning-if-he-did might never happen. (He could not have foreseen the exposure that would be his fate.)

If Scarlett takes the rap (as he may) it will be because he ought not to have been suborned by the government's presentational agenda. It wasn't OK for him to firm up stuff that was doubtful. It wasn't what he was paid for.

But Campbell was so paid, or rather, he was paid to persuade Scarlett to do it. When he read "might", "may", "could" and "probable", his job was not to think about what the words really meant but to try and get them changed. Had he thought about it, this, "the second most powerful man in Britain", might have said to himself: "Hmm, there's a lot of 'might' and 'may' about this. The intelligence boys don't seem too certain. Maybe it's not as bad as we've been saying." (Memo from second most powerful man in Britain to first most powerful man in Britain - "Are you sure we've got it right about this WMD thing - intelligence is pretty flimsy when you look at it closely. Tell George maybe we should back off...")

And what of the urbane Jonathan Powell, the prime minister's Chief of Staff, who famously tells Scarlett that the dossier "does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam" and that the only case against him is that he is in breach of U.N. resolutions?

It is refreshing to discover such a candid assessment circulating in Downing Street at this decisive moment, but, once again, the issues are all presentational so far as Powell is concerned. He counsels how to get round these evidential shortcomings, but we see no e-mail to his boss to the effect that, since Iraq is no threat either to her neighbours or the west, maybe it would be a good idea to ease up a bit on the rhetoric and the war-mongering.

A man is dead because he fingered the wrong Downing Street official. That is what in amounts to. If Kelly had said that Scarlett added the 45 minute claim to help the government, knowing that it was suspect intelligence (and only related to battlefield munitions), he would not have been wide of the mark. But Kelly, the true professional, did not imagine that was possible.

Meanwhile the game of pass the buck can go on for ever in Downing Street as each man says he was just doing his job. Sadly it turns out to have been nobody's job to advise the prime minister of the unvarnished truth - the distinct possibility that all the evidence of weapons could be deeply flawed.

It is true that governments need policies in situations like these. Sometimes a working hypothesis is the best they can get, and in Blair's mind the threat of Saddam was less a hypothesis that a point of principle.

But it's no good being principled if you are wrong. If a decision turns out to have been ill-founded, it is better to change the decision than to plough blindly on. But, when officials and advisors only say what they are paid to say, the Emperor's New Clothes syndrome rapidly sets in. In this case the dossier has proved altogether too thin a raiment to protect the prime minister's modesty and his reputation.

David Kelly's tragedy stems from his mistaken assumption that an intelligence official would necessarily be immune from the demands of spin. The Prime minister's own nemesis may yet flow from his own staff being too good at giving him what he asks for. Next time they are presented with a sow's ear of a policy to deal with, they might consider that instead of giving it the silk purse treatment they could simply point out the essentially porcine nature of the product. Such an approach last year might successfully have averted the pig's breakfast that is now Anglo-U.S. policy in Iraq.