Don’t pack your hockey sticks. 01/23 1:47 p.m.
The Blair Witch Project
As every divorce lawyer knows, turning the guilty into victims while condemning the innocent to torture is the shortest route to happiness, if not justice. British Prime Minister Tony Blair will find this out when the Hutton Report — mission statement: "an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. David Kelly" — is released next Wednesday, January 28, at which point all British presses will stop. Lord Hutton sits on Britain's highest court and his verdict will carry enormous weight. Although no one has read a word of his findings, nor even has a hint as to what they might be, the report has obscured the political landscape of Britain more than any recent event. Forget university fees and rail nationalization and the European economy: It's still the war in Iraq, stupid.
David Kelly, you may recall, was a specialist attached to the ministry of defense who very much enjoyed talking to reporters. He suffered from compulsive-source syndrome; although often bound by rules of secrecy in the national interest, Kelly was the kind of man a reporter needs to fill in the gaps of a piece with inside details and colorful leaks. He was revealed as the source for comments alleging the British government had lied to gain support for the war, and, perhaps as a consequence, killed himself. Forgive me if you already know all this; if you don't, John O'Sullivan's excellent account, published here last August, will bring you up to speed. My take, from last July, is here.
The most interesting thing about the Hutton Report is already obvious. "It's created a new division in British politics," The Spectator's political editor, Peter Oborne, explained. "It's not a right-left divide, but a divide between neoconservatives and the rest." Naturally, the divide has cut across media lines. According to Oborne, papers such as the Telegraph and the Times that traditionally opposed the Blair government are now supporting it against the BBC and for the war, and the papers once friendly to Blair, such as the Independent, are now very much in the anti-government camp.
There's also a new cross-ideological divide among journalists. Although Oborne had never met Gilligan before, he believed that Gilligan had been "victimized by the government." So Oborne and some of his colleagues recently gave a "Save Andrew Gilligan" dinner party for the reporter, captured with smart disapproval in the Observer by Nick Cohen, who claimed the Spectator had organized the thing.
The Cohen story, Oborne told me, "was more dishonest than the second Downing Street dossier. The Spectator was not involved [in organizing the dinner] at all." Cohen, said Oborne, was guilty of "deliberate mendacity."
Cohen denied that charge, but suggested it was beside the point anyway. "The right wing in Britain," he said, "are getting it all wrong. Instead of focusing on the weapons of mass destruction, they're tying themselves in knots trying to prove Blair lied. Hutton won't think so, and then where will they be?"
To the extent that the Right-Left divide still has meaning, the Left wants Hutton to nail Blair because Blair has privatized everything but air and isn't behaving the way traditional socialists (read, socialists who can't win a national election) think he should behave. But most of all, they want to nail him because he shrugged off their objections to unseating Saddam, turned his back on France and Germany, and went to war alongside America. The Right wants to nail Blair because he's not Michael Howard, the Tory party leader and the man who would have Blair's job if only some means could be found to bring the prime minister down. The Hutton Report is the shiny new gun in the Tory arsenal.
As the Guardian notes, most voters now want Blair to leave office if it's shown that he was the one who authorized leaking Kelly's name to the press. Some, such as Oborne, writing in the Spectator, and his boss, Spectator editor and Conservative MP Boris Johnson, writing in the Daily Telegraph, are so pleased at what they see in all this that they're willing to skip the Hutton Report altogether and go straight for the payoff, which very much resembles Blair's neck. Their common mantra: Gilligan mostly got it right — except for all the stuff he got wrong. After all, said Oborne, "the government did lie."
To the media, nothing is more important than a story involving the media. So to the British press, the release of the Hutton Report is the ultimate British reality-TV show. It completely dominates the news. The suspense is killing: Lord Hutton has enormous prestige; men's careers hang on his utterances. Who will he vote off the island? BBC chairman Gavyn Davies? Director-general Greg Dyke? A scapegoat, like news director Richard Sambrook? Andrew Gilligan? Or Blair and the government? "The battle lines," last Sunday's Observer reported, "have been drawn." Virtually every news outlet in the U.K. is building programs and special reports around the report.
On Wednesday, the BBC's flagship public-affairs program, Panorama, broadcast an unprecedented 90-minute, primetime documentary on Hutton, which was widely hailed not only in the Telegraph, but also in the Guardian, among other places, for being brave enough to report what was already obvious — that Gilligan and the BBC's management had all done a dreadful job. (I previously profiled Gilligan's reporting from Baghdad here.) Although much of the program's focus was on playing gotcha with Blair quotes, as Damien Thompson, who used to cover the BBC with great skepticism for the Telegraph, told me, "the program did manage to reveal how chaotic and imperfect much of the [BBC's] editorial process has become," and that in itself was an accomplishment. Perhaps the fact that Gilligan, according to the Guardian, thought the broadcast was "f****** outrageous" makes it a triumph. Sky News, the World Service, and others are preparing their own broadcasts.
Maybe Blair did let loose the dogs of the press on Kelly. Maybe not. Maybe Hutton will castigate the BBC. Maybe not. As this Guardian story makes clear, it won't matter to the BBC nearly as much as it will matter to Blair — Davies and Dyke have already made it clear that no matter what Hutton reveals, the wagons are circled and they won't back down from a thing. There will be no firing of Gilligan, no change in operations, no variance from the kind of arrogant management that can only be called power corrupted, when it has no visible means of accountability. In other words, the stonewalling will last as long as Ozymandias's statue. It's definitely a tactic from the Sun King School of Media Management.
The importance of all this to Americans is simple. The new fault line in British politics falls between those who are, generally, anti-American, and those who are, generally, not. The politics of values has, at least for the moment, replaced the politics of economies; this argument isn't over how to build a workers' paradise. In brief: If Blair loses and the BBC wins, the U.S. will lose, too, because Blair likes us and the BBC hates us. The Corporation has just announced its latest hire: the editor-in-chief of al-Jazeera. (Talk about media consolidation!) Said Thompson, "I went to the BBC to look for Bush's State of the Union address — and found Nancy Pelosi's speech instead." Although Blair and New Labour spend money like a bunch of congressional Republicans, in foreign policy, Blair has been stalwart in his loyalty to the British-American relationship. The Hutton Report is as much about that as anything else. Michael Howard and Boris Johnson will have their day; it's better for us if it isn't this one.
Besides, when it's all over, you might be excused for wondering what it was all about anyway. An "investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. David Kelly"? Those circumstances might be summarized thus: Dr. David Kelly was a man who had promised not to release information to people like Andrew Gilligan, but did so anyway. He was caught and revealed. His solution to that problem was to kill himself. Where does the responsibility for David Kelly's death lie? With Tony Blair? Defense Minister Geoffrey Hoon, who was said to have approved leaking Kelly's identity? The BBC? There's a chance — although it's minuscule — that Lord Hutton will distinguish himself by ignoring the BBC's claims and the government's counter-claims and determine that, ultimately, the party liable for David Kelly's death was none other than David Kelly.
ITEMS
Gone with the wind. Unfortunately, the need to make somebody else responsible for the deranged acts of others is taken for granted in modern Britain, where a neutered society is easily stirred to impulsive acts of hysteria like launching a huge investigation to figure out why some poor soul committed suicide. Soft sentiment is devouring Britain; the whole country seems ripe for an NPR membership drive. No wonder Col. Tim Collins, the author of a very famous eve-of-battle speech and the closest thing the British have had to an authentic military hero in 60 years, threw in the towel last week. According to the Daily Telegraph, Collins has had it with the nancy policies of the new British military. Collins's wife told reporters that her husband was "worried [the Army] is being crippled by political correctness, petty bureaucracy and the refusal of politicians who send British soldiers to war to give them enough money to do their job." A few days later, the paper carried the diary of a British soldier killed because nobody was paying attention to what it takes to fight a war.
SOTU something entirely different. In the buildup to Bush's State of the Union speech broadcast to Europe (and perhaps in the U.S., for all I know), CNN International's Walter Rodgers described The Independent as "a mainstream paper" — then showed the paper's front page, which had been given over entirely to a Harper's Index-style stat-rant about George W. Bush. Rogers also overlooked a few other relevant Independent factoids:
Standing of the Independent among national British dailies: Last.
Number of Telegraph readers to Independent readers: 4.3:1.
Number of Sun readers to Independent readers: 16:1.
The reason: The Independent has targeted only angry anti-American readers uninterested in any other events other than those having to do with George W. Bush. The Independent's not a newspaper: It's the disturbing diary of an obsessive. How many editors does it take to produce a national daily without one word of national news on the front page?
Singing in the rain. The winter-wet streets of Paris, France, are filled with natives in their colorful conehead costumes, some, according to Le Monde, protesting the banning of headscarves and filling the air with their jolly anti-Semitic bile, others, according to Le Parisien, shouting insults and pushing around visiting Americans. To find sense in France these days, you have to leave the beaten path and go to a more exotic quartier of the French press. Try Les 4 Vérités, where Guy Millière sets his wobbly countrymen back on their feet and holds them in place while he reads them the riot act. A great essay, and worth giving it a Babel if your French is rusty.
One man's pond is another man's ocean. John Vinocur's two-part look at trans-Atlantic relations (here and (here) is one of the best things to appear in the IHT since the Washington Post stopped paying rent. It's amazing that Vinocur's stuff isn't carried in the New York paper. He has always made the Times uncomfortable; I remember a piece he did for the magazine when he was the Bonn bureau chief. It was an article on Monaco, and one of the funniest things the mag ever ran. The powers hated it. He may soon be in better company in Paris. According to this item from the New York Observer, Roger Cohen, has been busted as the NY Times' foreign editor, and is being sent to the IHT to earn pay as a columnist. Cohen used to write some very good, often funny pieces for the old Paris Metro, so here's hoping. The move doesn't bode well for William Pfaff, however, whose IHT columns have become more and more...uh...obscure. Take this one, for example.
Transitional phrases. The Daily Telegraph (along with the rest of the Conrad Black's publications, including the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post and The Spectator) has been wrenched from Conrad Black's hands and tossed into an ownership limbo. The event has caused W. F. Deedes to write about the modern history of the Telegraph — and he has been an eyewitness to much of it — in a column in which a metaphor is extended to a length impressive in a much younger man. Deedes in the Telegraph (try his At War with Waugh: The Real Story of "Scoop") and Alistair Cooke on the BBC together represent almost two centuries of experience. Neither seems capable of producing bad work. I find that simultaneously life-affirming and professionally depressing, since I can produce bad work — and lots of it — at the drop of a hat, as you may have noticed.
Correspondence course. Most of my e-mail comes from people I don't know living in far-flung places, like Nigeria. And many of them have surprising things to offer to me, like multimillion-dollar sums stashed in a bank account in Nigeria (or Ivory Coast or Zimbabwe or even London), a huge portion of which can be mine if I will just send along my banking details — which I always do because I need to get rich quick. Now, according to the IHT, my source of investment advice may be going dry. I hope they hold off until my ship comes in. Next stop for me? Albanian bonds!
Go to H-E-double hockey sticks! Oh, man, the Europeans, according to the IHT, are having a cow at the idea of using sky marshals to keep the airways safe. Instead, reports EU Politix, they've come up with a more civilized, more somehow quintessentially European solution: They're banning skateboards on airplanes. Oh, and hockey sticks. |
