The beleaguered Blair government in Britain has resorted to a time-honoured technique to blur the outrage over the David Kelly affair. The row over BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and his stories about "sexing up" an Iraq arms dossier has been referred to a judicial inquiry headed by Lord Hutton. And, crucially, it's summertime. Brits are bored with politics and media infighting. They're heading for the beach. When they come back, unfortunately, this episode will be distant history. Kaput. Displaced by the latest barney over Blair's new limousine or yet another television presenter nicked for paedophilia. Whatever. But it shouldn't be. Much about the situation remains deeply troubling. For Blair. For Britain and, of course, for my alma mater, the BBC.
Journalism is often a tightrope. It is largely a matter of fossicking through the claims, counter-claims, blatant attempts to mislead and other clumps of filth in our in-trays. Occasionally, something gleams pure gold but even then, it's best to be suspicious. As I found out in March of '93 as a somewhat damp-behind-the-ears South Asia correspondent in Pakistan, finding the glittery lump in the dirt can be a risky business.
By March of that year, it was clear that we were in for a wild ride in the Islamic republic. (Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's battles with President Ghulam Ishaq Khan made the Gilligan spat look like a love-in.) So I tuned in to Khan's Pakistan Day speech on March 23 with some interest. I don't remember the exact wording but in impeccable Urdu, the bureaucrat-president seemed to be dissing his prime minister. My Urdu at the time, ahem, was poor. So I made a few calls to what I now admit were interested parties. One being an isi agent who pretended to be a journalist, an old colleague of Khan's from the civil service. All gave me the line, yes, Khan was preparing to dump Sharif. I reported that, much in the manner that Gilligan told BBC audiences that the Blair government had deliberately "sexed up" the Iraq report we now know to be false.
Oops. Khan was livid with me, apparently. Not that I was wrong, but he'd deliberately said what he said on a national holiday. No newspapers on the following day. No nasty questions asked about improprieties. And you can guess what happened. Like Andrew Gilligan, I became the story. "Who was the BBC's source," screamed one Urdu paper. "BBC schemes against Sharif," said another. In the end, I was proven right. And I didn't need a senior judge to exonerate me. To digress slightly for readers who don't remember 1993 in Pakistan, we had five changes in government, four prime ministers, three presidents, two army chiefs and just one BBC correspondent. But I still remember with a shudder how it felt to be out on a limb on that day. Unable to take back my broadcast analysis of Khan's speech. Praying to the gods I don't believe in that I was right.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't say Gilligan went too far out on any limb. He is one of the Beeb's more tenacious hacks, steeped in the fierce competitiveness of Fleet Street rather than the drawing room, pipe-and-slippers sensibilities of traditional British political reporting. But a man died in very troubling circumstances and no one—repeat, no one—is going to come out of this looking good.
I believe that the villain of the piece is indeed Tony Blair's government, no matter what Lord Hutton's findings about the behaviour of Gilligan and the BBC. It has to be asked: have we lost sight of the main point here? Blair and his team, in dogged support of Bush and Co in Washington, told massive and horrible lies to justify the invasion of a country that was no direct threat to theirs. In my day, we called this imperialism, or just plain arrogance. Of course, they "sexed up" the dossiers, speeches and justifications for war.They had to. There were no smoking germs, no missiles, no mobile labs making anthrax, no Ebola, TB or Sarin gas. Nothing. The Saddamites had destroyed it all. Or hidden it so well that Brits and Yanks couldn't find it. Mind you, as we're seeing with Osama, Hussein Senior et al, that's not hard.
Lies of historic proportion—Goebbelsian in their audacity and scope—spewed forth from the likes of Powell, Blair, Straw and, of course, Bush Jr. Aside from the president, those other chaps were supposed to be decent men, conviction politicians, a cut above the rest. No more, no longer. They used information they knew to be false to wreak unholy havoc in a country already on its knees because of a decade of sanctions, a country that was cooperating with UN inspectors, a country that—yes—had an evil government, but deserved better than the slapdash invasion it has suffered.
Of course, none of this is within Lord Hutton's mandate. Blair has been careful to specify—respectfully of course—that Milord will confine himself to the case of the late David Kelly, his words to Andrew Gilligan and how the ministry of defence handled the aftermath. No chance of proving whether or not what Kelly is alleged to have told Gilligan was true. That's water under the bridge. Or so Mr Blair thinks. So he hopes. What I hope as a journalist—not as a citizen or a political animal, but as a member of a profession too often scapegoated by politicians—is that Tony Blair and his merry men suffer the sanction of democracy for their perfidy, their cynicism, their lying. I hope they continue to see their stock plunge in the market of British public opinion. And I pray to those non-existent gods yet again that history marks them down as the Great Liars, along with Bush and Co in Washington. Long after Andrew Gilligan is forgotten and David Kelly's family is done with grief.