Another great line from the Brits on the Hutton Report affair:
[Blair] had it absolutely right when he told the Tory leader in tones of withering contempt: 'Being nasty is not the same as being effective, and opportunism is not the same as leadership'.
Melanie Phillips' Diary
January 28, 2004
The Hutton earthquake
I haven't yet read Lord Hutton's report. But having watched his statement on TV, and then watched the exchanges in the House of Commons, two things become immediately apparent. The first is that the BBC has been eviscerated and will not recover. The second is that the Tory leader Michael Howard has shown that he is unfit to lead his country.
Lord Hutton's conclusions should surprise no-one who actually read the evidence presented to his inquiry, as opposed to the grossly prejudiced and misleading press reports of that evidence. It was always obvious -- as I wrote in the Spectator last year -- that the evidence completely exonerated Tony Blair from the central charge of dishonesty. Lord Hutton has now cleared the government and the intelligence services of all the charges made against them, with the one exception that the Ministry of Defence was at fault over its procedures in not sufficiently warning Dr Kelly when his name was finally revealed.
But Hutton has thrown the whole book at the BBC, for making one of the gravest allegations that can be made against a Prime Minister -- that he took his country to war on a lie -- on the basis of an utter falsehood. The BBC never checked whether the story was true and never retracted the lie but compounded the offence by insisting that it was true. The report leaves absolutely shredded the reputations of Andrew Gilligan, the BBC's senior mangement and its Board of Governors.
This devastating indictment goes much farther than the BBC had feared. The implications are huge. For the BBC's domestic and international reputation rests above all on trust. What marks it out from all other broadcasting organisations is that people trust implicitly that its journalism is impartial, authoritative and true. The Hutton report vapourises that reputation. Why should anyone trust anything BBC journalists say ever again after this?
So what now for the corporation? Those who have long been gunning for it and want to see it privatised, on the basis that it is the state subsidy which has created a mindest which has corrupted its journalism, have had their case immeasurably strengthened. Personally, I remain deeply torn. I have long thought and written that the BBC is astonishingly biased over a wide range of issues, assuming as it does that left-wing opinion constitutes the politically neutral centre ground. And I accept that a major factor in creating this mindset is its cocooned status. But its public service remit -- which it has betrayed for so long, not least by increasingly chasing ratings in competition with commercial broadcasters -- enables it to provide a service which others cannot deliver. Speech radio, for example, or dedicated foreign correspondents are extraordinarily expensive and without the licence fee would undoubtedly be drastically reduced.
What's happened at the BBC is a bit like what's happened in our schools and universities -- a pervasive corruption of the culture and the erosion of its founding values. I don't want to destroy public service broadcasting any more than I want to destroy our schools and universities. But how can one change the culture and restore it to its founding values? How does one cleanse the Augean stables? The resignation of the Chairman of Governors and Director-General would be a necessary start, but nowhere near enough to deal with the mindset which has so poisoned its ethos. And the criticism made elsewhere that it is wrong for the governors simultaneously to be defenders of the BBC and its regulators -- although correct -- opens up the possibility of putting the BBC under the control of the meddlesome, bureaucratic monstrosity that is Ofcom, which would destroy it.
If the BBC is in dire trouble, the Conservative party's recent smirk now deserves to be wiped off its face. Michael Howard's performance in the Commons was simply jaw-dropping. Having previously repeatedly accused the Prime Minister of lying about the naming of Dr Kelly -- a conclusion emphatically rejected by Hutton -- he not only failed to apologise but dug himself further into the hole by claiming that the naming strategy had not been covert but overt, on the basis that the government's statement revealing that an unnamed civil servant had come forward was bound to lead to his being named. Such sophistry didn't stop there; Howard also wrenched other remarks by Hutton out of context in order to arrive at a conclusion diametrically opposite to Hutton's own. And as if all that wasn't bad enough, he had the bare-faced cheek to try to move the goal-posts altogether by demanding an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the decision to go to war on the basis of the missing WMD -- a quite staggering demand, considering the Tories had originally supported the war and the reasons for it to the hilt. Yet now the Tories are apparently leaping on the anti-war bandwagon.
This disgraceful performance was quite sickening to watch. I am normally the first to criticise Tony Blair's government, not least for the way I think it has misled the public over a number of issues. But on this occasion, he had it absolutely right when he told the Tory leader in tones of withering contempt: 'Being nasty is not the same as being effective, and opportunism is not the same as leadership'.
Right from the time Iain Duncan Smith first started on this line about Blair having lied over Dr Kelly, the Tories have been told over and over again that they were calling this one completely wrong. First, there was no evidence that Blair had lied. Second, by deciding that Blair was the villain of the piece, the Tories were effectively siding with the BBC, when it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that the BBC was entirely in the wrong, that its position was utterly indefensible -- and that in the long run, it is the BBC, not the Labour party, that is actually the Tory party's biggest enemy because of the role it plays week in, week out in subverting the values of this country and the nature of truth itself.
But the Tories simply would not listen. They were warned again when Michael Howard came to power. They still would not listen, because they were transfixed by the mantra of 'Blair the liar' which they have elevated to their main plank of opposition. Now they have been well and truly caught out on the wrong side. The roar of derision from the Labour benches that greeted Howard's feeble and glancing nod towards Hutton's demolition of the BBC was well deserved.
The BBC is toast. The Tories are beneath contempt.
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