Hutton Inquiry: Ask the expert

Political analyst James Humphreys answered your questions in a live interactive forum.

Transcript

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Lord Hutton is beginning the process of pulling together of evidence submitted to the inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly.

The six-week inquiry into the apparent suicide of the government scientist ended on Thursday, and Lord Hutton said he hoped to report in late November or December.

Dr Kelly apparently killed himself after being named as the suspected source of a BBC report claiming the government "sexed up" a dossier on the threat from Iraq.

The report sparked a bitter row between the BBC and the government.

What lessons have been learnt from the Dr Kelly affair?

James Humphreys, former head of Corporate Communications at Downing Street and now an academic at Kingston University, answered your questions in an interactive forum.

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Transcript

Andrew Simmons:
Hello and welcome to this BBC News interactive forum, I'm Andrew Simmons. The inquiry into the death of the British government expert David Kelly has now ended and the man in charge, Lord Hutton, has begun compiling his report. The inquiry was set up to look into the circumstances surrounding the death of the weapons expert. Dr Kelly apparently killed himself after being named as the suspected source of the BBC report claiming the government "sexed up" a dossier on the threat from Iraq. That report sparked a bitter row between the BBC and the government. On Thursday lawyers representing all sides involved made their closing submissions. Well what lessons have been learnt from the dossier affair?

We're taking your questions and here to answer them is political analyst James Humphreys. Now you were head of Corporate Communications in Downing Street until early this year James, welcome to the studio. Can you first of all tell us something about your role within Downing Street?

James Humphreys:
Sure well I was a civil servant, I worked for the previous administration as well. My role at Number 10 was looking after, what they call, corporate communications, which in a way is everything that isn't dealing with the national media - so it could be anything from the way the government presents itself to its own staff, in fact the internet and one of the things I looked after was the Number 10 website.

Andrew Simmons:
What about Alistair Campbell then, how did you relate to him?

James Humphreys:
Well I worked directly to Alistair and it's very difficult because nobody on the outside ever believes this but he was one of the most pleasant people I've ever worked for, I learnt a lot from him, a very nice guy.

Andrew Simmons:
Okay, fine. Well you're very well qualified to answer these questions or at least try to answer them. We're going to start with this e-mail from A K Agarwal in the UK: The inquiry was not needed. The MOD and intelligence exists to give information as best as they can and the government has to act on it. At no time can the government be said to have lied, whereas the media certainly did so. The justification for war was not only the existence of WMD so where was the story?

James Humphreys:
Yes I mean it's interesting because I think this line that, if you like, Lord Hutton could come to the conclusion the government basically didn't do anything wrong. You don't hear much about it on the media but actually a number of journalists behind the scenes do voice this opinion and it's along the lines of saying well the dossier, the experts now conclude, was not sexed up by the government, therefore the original story was wrong, therefore the government were right to criticise it and the BBC should have corrected it. And I think that - when Lord Hutton comes to his conclusions - I think he may put it in exactly those terms.

Andrew Simmons:
I mean some viewers are making the point that the BBC should have admitted its mistakes earlier - what do you say to that?

James Humphreys:
Yes, I mean I think they should, just as you'd expect the government to admit mistakes. And I think in particular there is a question - and it started to come out in the summing up of the counsel to the inquiry - James Dingemans - yesterday, which is that the BBC owed their source - David Kelly - a duty of care, not only just not to name him but also, if you like, to look after him more widely and if they misrepresented him - which they now admit that they did - and if they didn't correct that - which they also have admitted that the should have corrected it and they didn't - that put David Kelly in a very, very difficult position because the government were running around going who is this bloke, where are we going to find him? And he was also then in a position of not knowing quite what to say to his employer and it's sort of drawing him into this maelstrom. So there is there a charge that certainly can be laid against the BBC.

Andrew Simmons:
This question from Vic: It's clear that the government is objecting to a story which events have shown to be largely, although not in every detail, correct. Lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq further supports this. Are we not seeing attempted censorship by the government, so that every trivial detail can be used to block important revelations?

James Humphreys:
I think this really comes to the heart of why the government reacted so vigorously, or indeed violently, to the story and I think it's very interesting that, if you like, there are two versions of the story. David Kelly talks to Susan Watts of Newsnight and we have a story that says effectively yes the dossier was sexed up at the behest of Number 10 and the government doesn't object to that. We then have another story, subsequent to David Kelly talking to Andrew Gilligan, which is very different and lays this particular charge that the government knew that the information it was putting in was wrong but it went ahead anyway and that's effectively lying to the British people, lying to Parliament - a more serious charge and one where there's a question as to whether David Kelly ever said anything remotely like that. And I think that is where you then get into a situation in which the anger that you could see very clearly with Alistair Campbell and others in Number 10 was because they felt that the story was wrong because they hadn't sexed up the dossier. What I think is very interesting is we're now in a situation which it feels clearly that the dossier was wrong, so then who was doing the sexing up, where did the errors come in? And I think it's fair to say that it is as likely that those errors - if they were errors - were taking place within the intelligence services rather than the original allegation which was the intelligence services felt that it was being taken out of their hands and sexed up by the politicians. So there was a story but in a way the story was very different than the one that Andrew Gilligan originally ran.

Andrew Simmons:
That's an issue which is picked up by N P Gabrielsen from Greece who asks: Nobody blames the intelligence of the CIA and the MI6 for not providing better and more reliable clues as to intelligence. Why not?

James Humphreys:
Well again I think it's very interesting if you look at the timing of the criticisms. What we don't have here is whistle blowing, we don't have people sort of seeing something that they feel is utterly wrong within government and, if you like, stepping outside the rules of confidentiality to alert people. If that was what this was about it would have happened last September when the dossier was published. The sort of rumours that first surfaced in Sunday newspapers in the UK in the spring and then end up with this gossip or information being passed on to BBC journalists by David Kelly, that starts at the time when it first becomes apparent that these weapons of mass destruction are not around, when they're not being used during the Iraq war itself and when they don't turn up afterwards. You can make a case, I think, for saying that well whose interest is it that those rumours should start to exist? And it seems to me that one argument is you say well you've got the intelligence community, it suddenly becomes apparent the information that they put up is looking pretty wobbly, do they go round going yeah we got it wrong or do they go well we got it right but it was awful Alistair Campbell who sexed it up. So you can I think see it as being actually on the intelligence services benefit that they benefit most from these rumours emerging and therefore that does pull you back to the question - has this all been a distraction, was it ever really about the politicians sexing it up or was it false information in the first place? That's not really to blame perhaps the intelligence services but you'd want to know why it happened and you'd want to try and ensure it didn't happen again.

Andrew Simmons:
Roger Hill wants to know: Are civil servants expected to keep things confidential? Why have we not heard more about whether Dr Kelly was stepping out of line more than is 'normal' in his discussions with the media? If not, why was he not defended more by his superiors?

James Humphreys:
I think it is - yes I mean in a way it's a difficult one because there aren't rules that are clearly written down that are then published and pointed to, to say what you can and cannot do as a civil servant but it is for civil servants themselves - and I was one for 10 years - absolutely clear where the line lies and what you do not do is talk to the media without being authorised to do so and what you certainly don't do is criticise government policy to journalists. If you do that you know you're breaking the rules and you know that awful consequences might flow.

Andrew Simmons:
But wasn't it part of Dr Kelly's job to have talks with the media, to have dialogue with the media?

James Humphreys:
It is and I think this is where the MOD's claim that they gave him outstanding care and all of this is a little bit misleading because it was part of his job to talk to the media, although the rules are there and it's absolutely clear where they should stop, there is a temptation the more you talk to the media, the more you build those relationships with individual journalists the more the risk is that you start to say a bit more than you should, you're asked to speculate, you're drawn into may be passing on a bit of gossip. And the tape conversation that we heard in the inquiry between David Kelly and Susan Watts I think falls into that, I think there we have David Kelly talking to somebody who he knew and trusted, passing on a bit of gossip. He shouldn't have done it but it's a very, very fine line to cross from one to the other and in a way you could argue that the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office should have spent a bit more time making sure that those officials they asked to play this role of dealing with the media had proper support and was sort of brought back in just to remind them that there is a line and that they shouldn't cross it and just to check that they weren't being drawn into deeper relations, if you like, with journalists than they should have done.

Andrew Simmons:
Well this e-mail is just in from Toby in Woking: Why did the intelligence agencies and the government in both this country and the United States get the presence of weapons of mass destruction so wrong in Iraq? Are such mistakes a common part of intelligence assessments? He's going back to the point, he's obviously been listening to the point you made in the previous question.

James Humphreys:
It's very difficult to know and again this is why I was saying that you feel some sympathy for the intelligence community on this one because the research, if you like, is necessarily very, very fragmentary because you've got an awful lot of disinformation, secrecy, on the part of anyone who might have had these. And I think it's also fair to say to them that it seems pretty clear that the bulk of the evidence, if you like, in the dossier came from two areas. One of which was about the plans that Saddam Hussein clearly had - he would have liked to have built up weapons of mass destruction, he had an appetite for obtaining them. The other pretty convincing chunk of information that was in the dossier oddly came from the UN, it was the stuff going back to 1991 that Saddam Hussein, when the UN inspectors went in, found he had these weapons programmes, found he had stocks of nerve agents and chemical weapons and they were unaccounted for, quite serious amounts of this stuff was unaccounted for and the assumption there was well he hasn't destroyed them therefore he's still got there. Not that assumption seems to have turned out to be wrong but I think again it was the sort of assumption you might make, it wasn't like MI6 cooking the stuff up, they were getting it from the UN. Then there was additional information that they put in, such as this thing about the 45 minutes and that's the stuff that looks much less reliable. So we have a picture of the dossier that I think probably would still stand up as being fairly accurate in the long term threat that Saddam posed but far less accurate in the assessment of what he actually had his hands on at the time.

Andrew Simmons:
I mean that 45 minute claim, which you referred to, Nicholas Simpson from Malta wants to know: I heard the government barrister say that the responsibility of government statements rests with the ministers. If so why is it so difficult for Tony Blair to take responsibility for the 45 minute claim?

James Humphreys:
It's a very odd thing but the intelligence services are saying that that 45 minute claim was accurate and this is where you get into a very, very strange world in which how can it be that something can be accurate in September 2002 as an assessment and yet six months later those weapons clearly were not there, they have vanished? There are a couple of explanations that are put forward by the intelligence community. One of which was to recreate the timeline here, that in September 2002 the dossier's published ahead of the UN inspectors going back in. Saddam mucks about for a bit but then does let the inspectors back in and may be in that time he did dispose of his weapons. There's then a question which hangs over all of this, if he didn't have the weapons why on earth did he not cooperate with the UN inspectors? If he had there would have been no legal justification for the UK going to war, it may well not have gone to war. So it's a very tangled process but one of the aspects is to remember that the dossier was six months prior to war and things may have changed from the publication of the dossier to February when the war begins.

Andrew Simmons:
And one point that was made - just going back to the 45 minute claim - was that Geoff Hoon said that when it was published in the press the next day that the 45 minute claim related to weapons of mass destruction and not simple battlefield weapons, he didn't correct the media in getting it wrong. I mean where do you stand there? I mean as somebody who's in Downing Street, if the odds had been stacked differently surely the first person to be complaining about the gross error in the media would be Geoff Hoon?

James Humphreys:
Well it's odd actually, it's one of the things I found surprising about working, if you like, on the inside of that particular government machine was they actually didn't spend as much time correcting or rebutting that I might have thought they would have done and it's certainly clear that an awful lot of stories passed by government, they don't agree with but they don't try and correct them and partly because if you try and correct stories that are wrong or you believe they are wrong what you're actually doing is giving them another day in the news headlines, you're actually perpetuating the story. The chances are the people won't actually correct it in the way that you want and you could end up in a much worse situation than if you just leave the things alone.

Andrew Simmons:
But in such a crucial situation with the run up to war I mean Chernor from Spain just wants to know quite simply: Where does the inquiry leave Geoff Hoon? He's accused of hypocrisy, accused of - effectively of lying. Where does he stand now as a government minister - a fall guy?

James Humphreys:
I think he stands in difficulties on two grounds. I mean the first of which is the accusation - I'm not sure the accusation is wholly right because there is this - and he being a barrister in his background when he was giving his oral evidence in the inquiry played it as any barrister would advise their client - you tell the truth but you don't volunteer anything and therefore he, when asked the question, I think answered them strictly accurately but in doing so he left the impression that he was playing - particularly the naming of David Kelly he had one role whereas in fact he had another. What he will say in his defence is that in the written submissions he made to Lord Hutton is was absolutely clear about what his role was. So it leaves him looking a little bit shabby but perhaps not going as far as lying. The other position though that he's in difficulties on is, he was the responsible minister for the Ministry of Defence, if Lord Hutton finds the Ministry of Defence was negligent or uncaring or playing a game, whatever it might be, then he as the responsible minister may feel he has to carry the can for that. But he didn't directly do anything wrong but the ministerial accountability requires the minister to take the can when things go wrong. So he has almost two grounds on which he might or might not resign.

Andrew Simmons:
And the latter do you think is the more likely?

James Humphreys:
In a funny way I think it is, yes, because perhaps - and this may be being over cynical - it's perhaps in a way easier to resign to take responsibility for what someone else has done than it is to admit by resigning that you yourself have done something wrong, particularly if you believe that you haven't. So in a way going back to the more honourable way of resigning may be the way he would prefer to go.

Andrew Simmons:
Now this question is just in from James in Scotland, he says: Do you think the word hindsight has been overused in this inquiry?

James Humphreys:
Very much so. In a way hindsight can cover a multitude of sin. There are genuinely occasions where hindsight can be used, for example the psychiatrist who's been retained by the inquiry team, very clearly makes the point that whatever anyone was doing in this they couldn't have known that their actions would lead to someone taking their own life. And so in a sense a lot of what we're looking at is, in that sense, with hindsight, i.e. you couldn't have seen it at the time, you can only see it looking back from where we are now. There are other actions on all sides which I think were entirely possible to see at the time were wrong and yet people did them anyway and those are things where people might then say oh well now with hindsight we can see that but no, I think it's fair for people to be pulled up and said, no you had every possibility of seeing it correctly at the time, that was a different kind of mistake.

Andrew Simmons:
What about Andrew Gilligan then, because that's one of his prime areas of defence isn't it, in hindsight I should have done things differently, I should have not done that, I should not have ad libed that today and on the Today programme I should have written a script. What do you say to his defence?

James Humphreys:
You see I think it was that that was an issue - and indeed some of the questions in the inquiry have touched on this - for example, if you phone up the Ministry of Defence at 11 o'clock at night, the night before a story runs and sort of go yeah we might run this story have you got anything to say about it, he may or may not have done that at all. But that is very different from phoning up the Ministry of Defence because you actually want to see whether the story's correct or not. I think this is one of the things that when Lord Hutton has his chronology of events, right at the very start you see this gap, Andrew Gilligan speaks to David Kelly on the 22nd May, he then runs the story on the Today programme on the 29th May, so he has basically a week in which he can talk to other people, he can put the story to the Ministry of Defence, he can put the story to Number 10, in a genuine spirit of enquiry to say well I've got this source and he's making some pretty serious allegations about the government but what have you, the government, got to say, what light can you shed on it so that the story that I run is balanced and fair. Now that doesn't happen and I think that is - gives an indication of the attitude that lies behind the story, which is it's a great story. In newspaper journalism there is this phrase - there's a call too far - you'll try and stand up your story but sometimes you know if you make that phone call to that source they may contradict it and you haven't got a story anymore, so you don't make the phone call in the first place. And I think there's a little bit of that hanging over this because if the desire is to have a big impact, a big story, that dominates the headlines fine, but once that starts to cut across accuracy then I think there will be criticisms and I think that's what's happened in this case.

Andrew Simmons:
What do you say then to Mr Gompertz, the lawyer for the Kelly family, who said that the Kelly family felt that the Today programme's style should be more reporting the news rather than making the news?

James Humphreys:
Well there is - and I think it's interesting as a way into seeing the BBC as an institution wrestling with this problem because it is under a lot of pressure to get ratings, to justify the licence fee and so on, so it needs viewers, it needs listeners. However, the BBC also has this amazing reputation, far more people trust the BBC than trust national newspapers and if you see the statistics they're very - they're very startling. And that's to be protected and cherished. And you have these two journalists and it's so tempting to see them operating, if you like, as to different traditions within the BBC - Susan Watts, who speaks to Andrew Gilligan, a very measured piece on Newsnight, doesn't make all the allegations that Andrew Gilligan does, you then have this - and let's be frank - more sensational account from the Today programme that has much more impact on the news agenda, makes waves, stirs people up and all the rest of it, but at the end of the day is the one they have to correct and they have to admit is to a certain extent wrong and which is the subject of the government's criticisms. And there is a question - and you can see the tension within the BBC - should they be doing one, should they be doing the other?

Andrew Simmons:
Okay, R J Stockwell from the UK wants to know: How much money do you think the Hutton inquiry cost the tax payer?

James Humphreys:
If you take the tax payer paying the fees of the barristers and also the licence fee payer paying the fees of the BBC barrister, I think it's probably going to be upwards of £2 million. Which is a lot of money. There is a question, and it comes back to the first question, did we need the inquiry at all? I think even with those sorts of costs we did because the idea of somebody in David Kelly's position, a very senior figure, being placed in this situation - the BBC on one side, the government on the other, the MOD, the security services - that you have there such a potent mix for conspiracy theories and more widely for people having very grave doubts of what had happened. If what we had had was an inquest in the usual way or may be a police inquiry that concluded that he probably killed himself, there would have been a lot of questions, a lot of accusations, a festering wound in the body politic, much better, I think, to have said - let's just sort it out now, we know that if we leave this to run these unanswered questions will hang over everyone. So yes it's been expensive, yes it's taking a lot of time, yes it's done a lot of damage to a lot of people but I don't really see that there was an alternative once it had moved, if you like, from the knockabout of politics into something as serious as someone taking their own life.

Andrew Simmons:
This one from Bernard Swords [phon.] from Farnham, who's e-mailed during the programme: Could Alistair Campbell's so-called diary entries be his swan song spin or are they definitely genuine?

James Humphreys:
Oh did he forge them? No they feel like very, very genuine diary entries and perhaps if he - I'm pretty convinced he wouldn't have fiddled with them - if he had they'd perhaps have looked very different. Whether they're the swan song of spin, I think is a very interesting question because at the end of this process I think people who have looked at the actions of the government, the actions of the BBC didn't like what they saw, I mean I sat both in the media seat and in the public seats for the inquiry and you could see when people were giving evidence about spin people just didn't like it, they don't like the feeling that this is the way that the government and the media interact. Is there a way of improving it? That I have to say I'm fairly doubtful about. I think on the government's side they will say we can't reach out to people directly, we have to work through the media, we have therefore to struggle to fight to get our voice heard when the media is a bear pit of competing agendas and voices. The media's side would say the government is misleading us, it's lying to us, it's peddling information, will tell us one thing, it's sort of sneaking things out of the back door, we have to be aggressive, we have to take little that they say on trust. Both of them are going to continue to spin and that's why I think although Alistair Campbell has gone and the government may try to lift its game and maybe the media as well, it's going to be very difficult because the temptation will be to return to their old ways.

Andrew Simmons:
But evidence taken from those Campbell diaries is very important in this inquiry.

James Humphreys:
Yes and I think in a way one of the fascinating things about this inquiry has been how open it has been and that in a way is some point of comfort - that almost all the information, all the documents that were put in were volunteered, they weren't extracted at great pain from the participants. There's very little that came in late, if you like, and the witnesses too, I think, have been very frank. And so we've seen the workings of government in a way unprecedented beforehand.

Andrew Simmons:
James Humphreys, that's all we've got time for I'm afraid. Thank you very much for joining us. And thank you for watching and more importantly for sending in your questions. Apologies to those we weren't able to read out, I'm afraid we've been inundated. Just a tip in future, we can take your questions live through our system during the programme itself and obviously topical questions put we often take those - I'm not saying there's a preference for those but it's useful for you to know. And also if you want to see a recording of this programme you can go to www.bbc.co.uk/haveyoursay and there you can get on the web a recording of this programme if you've missed part of it or if you want to see it twice. Anyway that's all from us, thank you very much for joining us, from me Andrew Simmons and the rest of the team here a very good bye and take care.