<font color=green> I think Director Campbell is Mr. Blair's poodle and I think Mr. Campbell has a tendency to bite!! LOL! <font color=black>
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politics.guardian.co.uk
Campbell plays the blame game
There was little doubt whom the No 10 press supremo held responsible for the dossier row - and it certainly wasn't himself, writes Ros Taylor
Tuesday August 19, 2003
Even as the hacks gathered in the chandelier-hung overflow marquee were switching off their mobile phones, Alastair Campbell explained that he had brought along the document everyone present was longing to see.
"I write a diary. Not every day, but several times a week," he told the Hutton inquiry. "It is not intended for publication."
But unlike the hundreds of pages of emails, letters and draft dossiers presented to the inquiry - many of which have been, as his interrogator James Dingemans QC put it, "redacted" for public consumption - Mr Campbell was not about to have his private jottings flashed up on the screens for the entertainment of the assorted hacks. The Campbell diaries were, undoubtedly, in the room: but he alone would decide which extracts Lord Hutton needed to hear.
He had evidently decided there was to be no repeat of the irate anti-BBC polemic on Channel 4 News which had led to speculation that Tony Blair's head of communications was "losing it".
The 40-odd members of the public who were denied a seat protested loudly. "That's outrageous!" a young woman told one of the court attendants. Tourists wanted to know why the inquiry wasn't on the BBC.
A rather belated anti-war demonstration was taking place outside the front entrance to the royal courts of justice. Mr Campbell ignored it. "I've seen him going in!" a Mail reporter announced triumphantly. "Looks breezy."
Mr Campbell was not exactly breezy. He was, it soon became clear, speaking more in sorrow than in anger about the "ghastly Gilligan story" which the BBC - with its "sense of moral equivalence between democratically elected governments" and the Iraqi regime - had allowed to be broadcast.
He had been in Kuwait, supervising Tony Blair's visit to the troops in Basra, when Andrew Gilligan's story broke. The claim that No 10 had been responsible for "sexing up" the dossier had initially struck him as so absurd that he had thought no one would believe it. How had he reacted? There was a long, weary pause. Mr Campbell looked pained. "I was torn, really. On the one hand, I did not imagine anyone would take them terribly seriously. It was such an extraordinary thing to say, that the prime minister and government would do that."
The middle finger jogged up and down furiously, but he kept his hand clenched. As if No 10 would ever have allowed the dossier to be published had the intelligence services objected to any of it!
Had Mr Campbell been aware of any "onhappiness [sic]" about the dossier among the intelligence services, the Ulster-born Lord Hutton asked?
"Well, only through what I was reading in the newspapers," he replied sardonically.
Most importantly of all, Mr Campbell's own role in putting together the dossier had been purely "presentational". The JIC chairman Sir John Scarlett had taken "ownership" of the dossier - indeed, he had insisted on doing so - and had merely passed on the drafts for Mr Campbell's advice. Far from sexing it up, he had advised Sir John to tone the rhetoric down. He wanted to take out the words "vivid" and "horrifying".
These weren't even suggestions, he added pointedly. They were "observations".
The careful, "meticulous" Mr Campbell wanted every claim backed up by evidence: "I was concerned that we were relying too much on an assertion - without the explanation underpinning it." Unlike a certain BBC journalist, he didn't quite mutter.
A member of the Downing Street pondlife who expressed reservations about its content was "making contributions effectively above his pay grade ... I receive an awful lot of emails that I don't read, because they're sifted for me," Mr Campbell warned Mr Dingemans. Some he recalled; some he recalled, but couldn't recall replying to; some he couldn't recall at all.
So it was hardly surprising that he didn't know when the 45-minute warning had been inserted, "and I didn't make any effort to find out". There was, he remembered, a shift in the choice of qualifier for the 45-minute claim as the dossier moved through the drafting process: "may be able to deploy" became "could". The inquiry would have to ask Sir John about that.
Was Sir John guilty of sexing up the dossier in the intelligence room with his fictional WMDs? There was little doubt about who Mr Campbell held to blame. Sir John, Gilligan and the BBC, in that order. |
