05.02.2004
Media manipulation
Dave Osler on the government campaign of media manipulation in the wake of the death of Dr Daved Kelly
The day the police found David Kelly's corpse slumped against a tree - his bloodstream riddled with around 30 coproxamol tablets, his left wrist slashed open by the four-inch lock knife found nearby - I had been due to meet Andrew Gilligan to discuss a potential story. A series of emails exchanged earlier that week concluded with Gilligan writing: "See you there. Will call if any last Alastair Campbell-related backwash makes it difficult."
In the event, "Alastair Campbell-related backwash" - the knock-on effects of the spin doctor's determination to beat up on the BBC after it broadcast an inconvenient truth - cost a man his life. Kelly's suicide was a consequence of Campbell's hardball tactics. An unintended and indirect result, maybe, but a consequence for all that. Oh, how hilarious Whitehall press officers must have found the grotesque children's-party guessing game they devised to humiliate Kelly, with hand-picked hacks given unlimited chances to suggest the name of the mole until they finally lucked out. Pin the tail on the donkey. I spy, with my little eye, a whistleblower beginning with K. And just for an added laugh, after the guy was discovered dead, the Ministry of Truth went to town on his memory, branding him a latter-day Walter Mitty.
Rarely can one man's self-inflicted death have had such an immediate political impact. Faced with public revulsion on a grand scale, the Hutton inquiry was purpose-built to take the heat off. And, like a pack of frozen peas applied as a makeshift compact to a sprained ankle, it managed just that. Hutton spent six months - not to mention millions of pounds of public money - and finally delivered a report the government might just as well have written itself.
No wonder it had to be leaked to The Sun. A serious newspaper might have twigged the fairy story. Extra, extra! Read all about it! New Labour did nothing wrong! BBC entirely to blame! [PS: Thank you kindly, Mr Murdoch. Yet again we owe you big time.] Scrutinise the entire report and you find not one substantial criticism of the government. If Hutton had been just that teeny bit more savvy, he would have thrown in a few token words of censure, if only to lessen the appearance of a snow job bigger than the one undertaken by Britain's road-gritting crews on the day of publication. But no, not even that.
As the opinion polls show, the majority of the population is not taken in. Not that it matters much. The genuine anger of last July has largely dissipated. David Kelly's suicide is, like, so last year.
Hutton was notably keen to demonstrate his most unjudgelike familiarity with contemporary argot. In one of the more unintentionally hilarious passages in the report, we are told: "The term 'sexed-up' is a slang expression, the meaning of which lacks clarity in the context of the discussion of the document."
Not for most of us it doesn't. What Gilligan was openly trying to say is that a second government dossier on weapons of mass destruction - central to the New Labour case for war on Iraq - was built on flimflam. His biggest mistake was being far too polite. To put it in the language used in parliament and courts of law, the dossier was tendentious to the point of mendacity. Or in plain English, rubbish from start to finish. All of the central allegations in Gilligan's now immortal 6.07 broadcast on the Today programme last May have been proven completely true. Conversely, the government's denials are "¦ well, completely not true.
Who knows from where in his soul Blair mustered the chutzpah to tell the Commons: "The allegation that I or anyone else lied to this house or deliberately misled the country by falsifying intelligence on WMD is itself the real lie." Sorry, Tony. What is in "itself the real lie" is any suggestion that New Labour told the truth at any point in its extended campaign to sell war to the general public.
A first dossier on Iraqi WMDs lost whatever credibility it might have started life with after the discovery that sizeable chunks were ripped off from an ancient PhD thesis. Then a document purporting to prove that Saddam tried to buy uranium from Niger was shown up as a crude forgery.
And it wasn't even third time lucky. Gilligan's story totally took the second dossier apart. Yes, that document was "sexed up" - however Hutton understands or misunderstands the term. Yes, the 45-minute claim was false. And yes, the intelligence services were unhappy about what was written.
Ironically, conclusive proof for all these propositions was thrown up by the Hutton inquiry itself. Thanks to its deliberations, we know that between September 10 and 16 2002, the threat from Iraqi WMDs went from being simply potential to "current and serious". The first phrase was written by an intelligence officer. The second was written by Alastair Campbell. Again, the first draft described post-1991 production of WMDs as only a probability. Once Campbell had sub-edited the piece, it had somehow become "established beyond doubt".
Hey, judge! Remember all that stuff they taught you in law school about the difference between 'balance of probabilities' and 'beyond reasonable doubt'? Hmm, seems not. But then such nuances probably did not count for much in the Diplock courts.
And there is more. The statement that Saddam was prepared to use WMDs only "if he believes his regime is under threat" was mysteriously dropped, following an email from top Blair aide Jonathan Powell, who described this wording as "a bit of a problem". And more. Dr Brian Jones, of the defence intelligence staff - self-described as "the most senior and experienced intelligence community official working on WMD" - was so concerned about the "over-egging" of the dossier that he made a formal protest. His staff shared his concern.
Final corroboration comes from David Kay, America's top weapons inspector, who recently stated: "There is no doubt that the phrase 'within 45 minutes' included in the British report is incorrect." WMDs could not have been launched in 45 minutes. Not in 45 hours. Not in 45 days. Kay now believes there were no WMDs to begin with. Around 1,400 experts have been looking for them. And how many have turned up? Zero. Nada. Zilch. Jack. They simply are not there. So even the dossier's original draft was largely an exercise in wish-fulfilment fantasy. Game, set and match to Gilligan.
The last of the Hutton inquiry killer facts is the revelation that Tony Blair personally approved the outing of David Kelly. Ministry of defence official Sir Kevin Tebbit revealed that Blair chaired the meetings to decide on what became known as the 'naming strategy'. The prime minister has insisted all along that he "emphatically" did not leak Kelly's name. This is dissemblance of a very high order. Technically, he is right. He did not do so himself. But then he did not have to. That is what Campbell got paid for.
The only proper conclusion from the evidence presented to Hutton is that the government lied and lied again to cover its tracks, with all the inherent plausibility of my three-year-old daughter denying illicit raids on the supply of chocolate buttons kept in our larder. Yet we are asked to swallow the claim that "any suggestion that there was any pressure or intervention from Downing Street is entirely false". The BBC story was "100% wrong", we are told. Blair himself maintains that any allegation that the 45-minute claim provoked disquiet among the intelligence services is "completely and totally untrue". Campbell chips in with the position that there are "no errors of fact in the September dossier". All these assertions stand comprehensively trashed, even as New Labour claims exoneration.
Yet such is the government's reservoir of support among the press that, instead of being acclaimed as Britain's newest investigative journalism superstar, Gilligan's professionalism has been under brutal assault. OK, I'm biased. I know and like the bloke. I could not tell you what his politics are, and he seems to have friends on both the right and the left. But my guess is that Andrew is a natural-born boat-rocker, who would take delight in upsetting whichever party is in power.
After working on a couple of stories with him, I am certain he is a bloody terrific reporter. There is an apocryphal story knocking round that some of his predecessors as Radio Four defence correspondent spent their working time constructing Airfix replicas of fighter aircraft, when not rehashing MoD press releases. Gilligan did what journalists are supposed to do, and got out of the office and found sensational stories. News is what someone does not want published, remember. All the rest is advertising.
Yet as of the time of writing, I have not seen one unqualified defence of Gilligan in the mainstream press. Even the man himself has partially bottled out, mumbling perfunctory, half-hearted apologies, presumably while keeping his fingers firmly crossed. Why, Andrew? You are vindicated. Don't grovel now.
His work on the Kelly claims has been widely slated as a 'one-source story'. So what? For starters, Gilligan made it absolutely clear from the outset that this was so, and invited listeners to make their minds up on that basis. But what is unusual about one-source stories anyway? Pick up any national newspaper, any day of the week, and you can see plenty of one-source stories, written on the sole basis of a brief, non-attributable phone call from a special adviser. The Kelly revelations were a one-source story of substance, not a piece of overspun, second-hand tittle-tattle on the latest hissy fit between Gordon and Tony.
Granted, there is one aspect of this sorry business where Gilligan comes in for some legitimate stick. After Kelly's name had already been made public by the government, Gilligan sent an email to a Liberal Democrat MP sitting on the foreign affairs select committee, revealing that Kelly was the source of a similar story by a Newsnight journalist.
Kelly was questioned by the committee shortly afterwards, and was clearly taken aback when the accusations were put to him. At a stroke, he was made to appear a serial briefer against the government, thereby undermining his position. Gilligan may plead in mitigation that Downing Street was briefing tame Labour MPs on the committee to his detriment, and that he was only attempting to redress the balance. But for journalists, the 11th commandment is that you never reveal your sources. Revealing someone else's is even worse.
But that is essentially a nuance. Clearly the public had the right to know about the concerns Kelly raised. Clearly too, the BBC was absolutely correct to report them. Any half-decent news organisation would have done the same. Yet, thanks to an administration that clearly regards parliament and public with contempt, the Kelly affair fills the nostrils with the stench of media manipulation. And mingled faintly with that stench is the distant odour of dead bodies - from the woodlands of Oxfordshire to the badlands of Iraq.