Brian Hutton has done us a great service. His decision that the bulk of the evidence presented to him should be place on the web is a very important precedent, which will be difficult for future inquiries to ignore. This makes it particularly sad that his name is likely to pass in to the language as a joke.
To call the Hutton Report a “whitewash” is unfair. I am sure that he did as honest and as scrupulous job as he was capable of doing. However, like Dr Kelly, he found himself in a situation, which he did not understand. Just as Dr Kelly, an expert his field, can be seen as naive in talking to Andrew Gilligan in the way that he did, Brian Hutton was naive to accept a job that lay outside his field of competence. Like Dr Kelly he appears to be an intensely private man, driven by a deep sense of public duty, and like Dr Kelly may find his public belittling difficult to cope with.
Dr Kelly, a supporter of the war on Iraq, was scrupulous about scientific fact and it seems likely that it was this that led him to making intemperate remarks to Gilligan, who with less scruples rushed in to grabbing a scoop without doing the necessary work to support it.
Brian Hutton seems to have found himself as much at sea as Dr Kelly when he found himself trying understand a world where as Dr Kelly told Susan Watts “We’ve seen on the mobile labs the POLITICS of that is so STRONG that it deflects all practical objectivity.” This appeared to lead him to assume that the most senior people in the intelligence services would have the expertise to be able legitimately to over-rule the doubts and reservations of more junior, but more expert, people in the service. Nor did he appear to understand the actions and motives of a man like Campbell, who seemed to think couple of apologies was sufficient to excuse the publication of a report on the Number 10 website that not only contained plagiarised material, but where that material was “sexed-up” to make it look stronger.
A more worldly head of inquiry might have been able to draw more satisfactory lessons to learned for the conduct of both government and media from this affair. Unfortunately Brian Hutton is not such a person.
A careful reading of his report will reveal a number of instances that support these conclusions, but the most telling, that made me laugh out loud when I read it, comes very late in the report:
“The Walter Mitty remark by Mr Thomas Kelly
462. In a conversation with journalists about the start of August 2003 Mr Tom Kelly made a remark to the effect that Dr Kelly was a “Walter Mitty” character. On 5 August Mr Kelly issued a press statement in which he apologised unreservedly to Mrs Kelly and her daughters for this remark. In the course of his evidence to the Inquiry Mr Kelly twice repeated his apology. On 20 August he said:
[20 August, page 204, line 18]
? as I said on the day after this article appeared, I unreservedly apologise to the Kelly family that words of mine intrude into their grief at that time. Whatever my motives, it was a mistake that led to that intrusion and I have to take responsibility for that mistake.
On 23 September he said:
[23 September, page 35, line 3]
? I fully accept that I should not have used what was a too colourful phrase. I fully accept that in doing so I ran the risk of misunderstanding; and I fully accept that that must have caused the family much distress. It was not what I intended and that is why I gave my unreserved apology at the time, why I repeated it when I appeared at this Inquiry the first time and why I repeat it again today.
463. The remark was a wholly improper one for Mr Kelly to make and he has apologised for it unreservedly. However I consider that it casts no light on the issue whether there was an underhand strategy on the part of the Government to leak Dr Kelly’s name covertly.” (My italics)
Dr Kelly made one error of judgement and found himself thrust in to a conflict not of his choosing to become on the one hand a “scoop” and on the other an instrument “to fuck Gilligan”. Brian Hutton, likewise, was lured into a dispute, where neither his brief nor his experience enabled him to distinguish what was significant about what was going on.
Let us hope that in time Dr Kelly will be remembered more as a man who helped make a safer world and Brian Hutton will be remembered as a man who helped open a window on the decision making processes of government that became an important precedent. Sadly, the more likely outcome is that Dr Kelly will be remembered as a man who killed himself in the woods and Brian Hutton as a man who didn’t get it.