liadnan

As I write this I'm watching Bremner, Bird and Fortune, as everyone who can should. Though I frequently disagree with them, it's still the most thought provoking and intelligent satire out there (as opposed to the funniest, that would be Dead Ringers).

I haven't said anything about the Hutton Report until now, this is partly due to fatigue with the whole thing and partly because I didn't finish reading it until last night. I still hold to the view that there was an arguable case for going to war, shortly put that the Second World War should have been an end to the idea of sovereignty as a perfect defence to any action against shitty regimes, but that the professed reasons for which we did so were not the right ones: the weapons case was never convincing, as I wrote at the time. In fact, borrowing a phrase coined by Martin, I thought Iraq probably did have Fairly Nasty Weapons, probably didn't have Very Nasty Weapons, and probably lacked delivery mechanisms which would cause any state but Israel serious concern.

Incidentally, I also continue to think that the term WMD is one of surpassing vacuosity, if that is a word, because the distinction between nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; between battlefield and strategic weapons; between payload and delivery mechanism is significant and is elided by the term.

Ideally, I would have wanted a UN resolution to go to war, based on the unpleasantness of the regime, passed. Having said that, I did finally come down on the side of supporting the war, largely because I felt that doing the right thing for the wrong reasons was better than continuing to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. For that argument to be defensible with hindsight, of course, Iraq would have to actually become a functioning state, and by that I do not mean a US puppet, in the not too distant future...

Hutton, of course, was never about any of this, nor was it an Inquiry into whether or not our intelligence was in fact defective. It certainly seems that such an inquiry might be a good idea, but then I'm not entirely sure we would, or should, know if such an inquiry was happening. For that reason I had some doubts about the point of this, and said so here and here at the time. It seemed likely to me fairly likely that the BBC would come in for some criticism, and that it had indeed been sloppy. Having said that, I am genuinely shocked, and concerned for the future of the BBC at the result, which seems particularly odd in the light of Appendix 3: the transcript of the conversation between Kelly and Susan Watts of Newsnight. It's also worth noting that, as Jim Naughtie said this morning on Today, (the first time a Today presenter has made any comment about the conclusions, as opposed to reporting them, so far as I know) the Today editors did not give evidence, which makes the criticism of Today's editorial processes somewhat surprising. One does briefly wonder what comnpromising photographs of Hutton Campbell has hidden away somewhere. (Oh, and on Campbell, hurrah for Ian Hislop on Question Time, and also for Oliver Letwin, both of them, and Boris elsewhere too, doing a better job than Howard, though the latter was admittedly in a difficult position: he must have gone utterly white when he read the report and realised what he could expect in the House.)

Hutton was never designed to answer the question everyone wants answered: as Rory Bremner put it: "we've found water on Mars... but no weapons." It's been a fairly storming BBF, incidentally: Hutton the Musical deserves a West End season, and Bremner doing Paxman as the "Suits you Sir" sketch from the Fast Show in his interviews before the publication of the report. And Bush to Condaleeza Rice, "so Qadaffi is flavour of the month, the IRA are power sharing in Northern Ireland... explain the War on Terror to me again Condy..." Strange now to think that Rory Bremner was once Tony Blair's regular tennis partner: one suspects those days are long gone.

Asking why someone killed themself is never likely to give a conclusive answer. Asking whether the BBC's reporting and editing standards are shoddy is a useful question, but one abiding thought I have is that Hutton seems to have applied to the question a principle from the law of libel which is itself in my view a bad one: that it is for the defendant to prove that what it said was true. Unless, that is, one is looking at the government.

For what it's worth, I personally believe that Blair did believe that there were weapons to be found, but that is an entirely different question and not necessarily a particularly interesting one except when considering his character, rather than the merits of the various matters.

Picking up on Naughtie's comment on Today this morning, which I note above, the BBC's reporting of the results of the inquiry and its fall out have been interesting to see. Humphries, who presented the original reports from Gilligan, was conspicuous by his absence from the interviews on Today this week (Gerald Kaufmann has apparently called for his head to roll as well, which God forbid). The most bizarre was on the 10 o'clock news on BBC 1. Having presented the story on Dyke's antics of standing on the table in the newsroom in TV Centre to give his farewell speech, Huw Edwards, sitting a few yards from that table, hands over to a broadcaster standing in the rain a hundred yards away, on his own, outside TV Centre, to report on how people are feeling t the BBC.... if this doesn't make a star appearance in Private Eye's occasional series recording pointless outside broadcasts I shall be sorely disappointed.