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August 29, 2003
Blair's
Political Suicide
by Christopher Montgomery
Right,
here's the problem: you need to go to war, but you'd find it ticklish
– and frankly, boring – to go into your real reasons for
doing so, so what are you going to do? If, last September, you were
Tony Blair, you'd decide that the best way forward was to blind
the electorate with science. Or at least, the next best thing: secret
stuff, which you'll allude to (can't go into any serious detail,
obviously, I mean, grow up), and other people, well, journalists,
will get het up about and print banner headlines and generally go
woo-hoo for war. And thus problem solved: your case for going to
war is that you need to, despite the fact that you know full well
that you don't need to, but are instead doing so for entirely optional
reasons of statecraft.
Anything
else would be complicated to explain to the electorate: they're
not interested in nuance like your belief as to how Britain needs
to go to war in order to put one over the lesser satrapies, or how
– and admittedly, you can't regardless say this in public –
our participation will act as a desirable deadweight on elements
in the administration who otherwise will push on with a war you
won't like. All jolly complicated that, and sooo much more
tempting to take advantage of all those right-wing ninnies in the
Murdoch and Black papers who'll cheer you on to Baghdad. That's
it, dress it up as a moral crusade, and a vital matter of
the national interest: hee hee, won't that be the clever thing to
do? Never mind that you
haven't the slightest what you'll do once the cakewalk's over,
at least you'll have solved the short term problem, and that's what
you're good at. Is this the genesis of the Hutton Inquiry, and l'affaire
Kelly? Yes, and, uh, no. Bad, which is to say, incompetent government,
has brought us to this pass, but that it is not a very serious pass
at all is soon going to be seen as the truth it is, no matter how
much the press squeals otherwise.
How
We Got Here
Oh
it would have so much simpler if only Tony Blair had done what I
told him to do: if you have to fight the war (and I understand from
your point of view – blind, unthinking, reflexive Atlanticism
– why you felt that was the realistic thing to do), then do
so with as few rhetorical commitments as possible. Don't fall into
the rhetorical bog alongside our wanna-cons, who ludicrously thought
that virtue was afoot a few months ago in the Gulf. Shrug your shoulders,
roll your eyes, jerk your head towards Dubya and knowingly arch
your eyebrows: 'well if it had been simply down to me to decide
what to . . .' – that would have been the way forward. Make
clear to the Cousins what an absolute chore it was to get involved,
screw something substantial out of them in return, then high tail
it out of Iraq, where you never wanted to be in the first place,
even sooner than decency allowed.
Gosh,
think on all those soldiers who'd still be alive, hmmn, anyway,
let's keep this light-hearted, it's only make believe after all.
That's what he ought to have done, and to pre-empt all those right-wing
clowns who believe that Blair believes what they believed, and thus
think that 'Tony' wanted to go to war to get rid of Saddam: baloney.
The Prime Minister, appreciating what a fourth or fifth order of
consequence the Iraqi dictator's departure was always going to be,
never sought it as his principal goal. How do we know this? Desperately
easy that: if, by whatever implausible means, war could have been
avoided (the inspectors had been allowed back in, Saddam, ah, acquired
serious amounts of WMD in order that he might, er, disacquisition
them, on television, with an ad during the superbowl – seriously,
whatever is very much the thought here) Blair would have
avoided it. His goal, the object of British foreign policy as
directed by him, was neither war, nor the supposed consequences
of the war that did in fact take place, but the maintenance of the
Anglo-American lock-step. If that could be done by America keeping
pace with Britain, so much the better, but if it had to be done
the other way round, so be it. The thing was, not to get out of
step. Hence off to war we went, and now that that conflict is over
as easily as, ahem, some of us said it would be (no
chickening out here, not like those fretting wusses in the war
party: remember the wobbling?), the problems of peace are firmly
with us.
As
far as the British government (and the Australian too, though not
yet the American) is concerned, the primary problem of peace is
not the good government of Iraq, or even of the sacerdotal 'war
on terror', but the rising complaint that what we supposedly fought
for doesn't seem to be quite the pressing and precarious urge it
was once felt to be. I have limited political sympathy with this
complaint, if boundless patience for the 'slow to anger, but sure
to fight' spirit which I think informs it. In other words, all the
mewling left-liberal nonsense that, 'Blair put one over on us: he
lied us into war' – well boo hoo. Who actually believed all
the 45 minute pap at the time? A few addled hacks on The Times,
perhaps, but nobody seriously thought the government was telling
anything like the truth. This sort of reasoning was seen as being
entirely secondary by whole-hearted advocates of the war ('we're
in it for the children of Iraq' blah blah); and, those opposed to
the war either disputed such claims as being factually tendentious,
or right but utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand. Which is to
say, all the stuff in the
dossier being arduously investigated by Lord Hutton did not
determine whether we entered the war. The canard that it did should
be dispensed with by clever people like us: we know why we went
to war, despite, not because of all the arguments bandied about
at the time. We knew it at the time, and media myopia notwithstanding,
we should remember it now.
In
relation to what was supposedly at issue in the Prime Minister's
famed dossier, and thus is causing, in the debate over its veracity,
the current fuss, I have no idea whether Saddam had plentiful,
weaponised battlefield ABC munitions. Whether we just got lucky,
or, our super-smart spooks [of whom, more later] brilliantly bribed
the right Iraqi officers (not to use any WMD gizmos when the command
came down from on furry-white-cat-stroking high), or, the right
people on the other side all, at the same time, saw the writing
on the wall, and wisely forbade from carrying out their supposed
orders, who can say? My ante-bellum point was that it didn't matter
a fig either way, as Saddam was never going to use WMD even if he
did eventually get them. (And there was the British side argument
to this particular recipe for peace that added: 'it especially doesn't
matter to us, because no matter what we do, the Americans will sort
[sic] it out anyway. With us benefiting to exactly the same
degree that every other civilized country that didn't take part
in the war against Iraq is assumed to have profited thereby from
America's selfless discharge of the burden of global leadership'
etcetera, etcetera – honestly, you sometimes get the distinct impression
the other side forget what script they're reading from).
Scepticism
therefore seems to me to be the most natural response to the claims
of both the 'we were lied into war' brigade, and the 'we lied you
into war, but it was good for you, and you wanted it anyway, bitch'
lot. So what that we were lied into war? With the feeble counter-arguments
put up by most of the loudmouths the antiwar left scrabbled together,
the plain truth is that, had we stayed out of the conflict, we'd
most likely have been lied out of the war. I mean, you did
listen to the tosh the likes of Tariq Ali and Edward Said spouted,
but you, wise old you, surely didn't believe it?
Lying
to one side, the more practical problem for Tony Blair appears to
be that he's now caught in a vice between the lumpen-realism of
the public (which consistently supports 'national interest' wars,
but opposes cuddly, humanitarian ones) that expected there to have
been some semblance of a threat for us to have met in Iraq, and,
weirdly enough, that of the state, and its functionaries. And it
is this latter realism, which conflicted with his Atlanticist realism,
that is really causing the Prime Minister all his present bother.
Simply
put, although Atlanticism is a defining and widespread realism within
the British establishment, it is not the only realism on offer,
and in advance of the war against Iraq there were plenty of men
inside the military, diplomatic and intelligence services who felt
that the country could safely sit this one out. All kinds of disparate
thinking – crypto-Europeanism, old fashioned Ameroscepticism, plain
and simple Arabism, sublime inertia, you name it, there were plenty
of powerful ideas that could justify the exceptional move of, for
once, not standing by America – separately and severally
informed this forestalled desire for a policy of strategic lethargy.
But what, I believe, was crucial to this dissent, and the form it
took, was precisely the way the Government publicly justified the
war. By drawing upon the prestige of the state to make the case
for war, by suggesting, rather than stating, that the war was in
our interest, as well as being more windily "right", the
Blairite Labour leadership relied upon what could not be said to
justify fighting. They depended upon that which, to some small degree,
they and their most advanced followers had been waging cultural
war against for a decade: the security services, the armed forces,
and all the rest of the panoply of 'old Britain', most notably the
higher ranks of the Foreign Office.
What
more than anything else the outward case for war rested upon was
the Government's stated faith in what these men had told them. Crucially,
for this compact to work, the Government has to affect to the public
very largely what indeed they actually have been told – for
if they don't, it compromises the professional pride of the people
in question. These are the sort of men who care what the history
books will eventually say about them after the thirty year rule
has had its way. This is the origin of David Kelly and his discontents,
and of the far wider unhappiness which lies behind him. Tony Blair
said, let's go to war because you've got to trust the people whispering
in my ear. They didn't like the use their good name was being
put to, not because they're anti-war, but because they knew he was
using the wrong arguments. That he had to rely upon the credibility
of such quintessential 'forces of conservatism' says a lot about
the Labour leader's diminishing political capital, but that is a
distraction from the issue at hand: the coming irrelevance of the
Hutton report.
They'll
Tell You It Is, but It Isn't
What
the press want to do – it suits their collective ego, and at any
rate, some hacks feel guilt at the degree to which they were manipulated
before the war, and wish to assuage it – is to tell you that this
is all about them and the government: that the factions within the
Government, and the country's relations with its allies, big and
small, let alone the contest with the Official Opposition, these
are all small beer compared to the fight between Mr Blair and the
fourth estate. In one sense, and one sense alone, it is true that
this is about the press. David Kelly committed suicide for reasons
which we can never know, but that the consequences of his actions
entailed a press culture barbarous enough to prevent him from even
reaching his own home was unlikely to have been absent as a factor.
Whatever coddling term you want to use, tipping point or final straw
or as you wish: Dr Kelly died after he had been subject to the attentions
of the British press. The evidential onus is on them to disprove
responsibility: they can't. Their manner of going about reporting
Kelly directly contributed to the state of mind in which he foolishly
and wrongly took his own life. In that sense, this ought
to be about the press, but just as David Kelly's death is not really
the issue at stake in the Hutton Inquiry, despite its official remit,
so too are the media ultimately a preening irrelevance. Britain
went to war, and 'why?' is the question. The arrant pointlessness
of having a judge ask this is neither here nor there, for soon we
are to have his oblique answer.
Before
coming onto the sequence of events that leads up to the Hutton Inquiry,
we should though praise the Tory party, which for once is doing
the right thing, and saying nothing. There's plenty that an opposition
which had pursued the correct policy before and during the war could
now be saying, and gravely to the detriment of the Government too,
yet sadly that option is forever precluded by the hapless line we
actually took, which was of course one of supine support. So the
best the comprehensively compromised Conservatives can do is to
leave this to the Government, the civil service, and their bastard
off-spring, the BBC. We'll benefit, if we can keep our traps shut,
even though we don't deserve to, and should instead be soundly flogged
for our incompetence. But I feel deviation coming upon me, so should
return to Lord Hutton and his inquiries.
Brian
Hutton, as was, is an Ulster QC from one of those 'well-established'
middle class legal families that used to be the mainspring of professional
life in the Province. There were few things better in Britain gone
by than having some measure of professional gentility: outside of
London lawyers and doctors and the like enjoyed, as our Marxist
friends would like to put, all the status of the ancien regime,
without many of the unprofitable or time-consuming responsibilities.
In short, if you wanted to socialise someone a Tory, Brian Hutton's
your man. He rose to become Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland
during the troubles at their most dispiriting (the 1980s, not the
time when most people were being killed but the period when it became
evident that the state was never going to do anything much to deal
with terrorism beyond the least possible). After his retirement
from that post, he was inducted into the law lords, being in recent
years, though this amounts to a gross over-simplification, the most
conventionally 'conservative' of them after the great Lord Lloyd.
I don't think it would be to suppose too much of his table talk
that, this, additionally, is a man who would share the puzzlement
that we have a Prime Minister who can send troops half way round
the world, all the better to fight terrorists, whilst at home he
prefers to have them made devolved education ministers. All in all,
a friend of the state, and the state moreover that Tony Blair, until
oh so very recently, seemed to have terribly little time for.
The
Government man then, for all that? I rather expect so: or to put
it a more emotionally honest way, a man predisposed to respect proper
authority. The danger for Tony Blair lies in his having transgressed
against, rather than merely allowed others to fulminate at, the
established way of doing things in Britain. Has, will or even, can,
Hutton demonstrate that he did? What, in retrospect, this period,
that is to say, the first six years of Tony Blair's premiership
(or as I am sure we will say in the fullness of time, 'the first
half' of the 1997-on Labour regime) will amount to is this: he tried
(to subvert traditional means of governance) but failed. The will
was there, but the job was never truly pulled off. This is what
the Hutton documentation proves, and, ironically, it is exactly
the sloughing off his attempts at an unconventional style of personal
government that is going to enable Tony Blair to continue in office
for some time to come.
What
Hutton Saw
As
a favour to a friend – papers are very short-staffed in August –
I went into a Sunday last week to help plough through Hutton's documentation.
One of the engaging things about the Inquiry is that so scared are
the Government of being assailed with any more charges of 'spinning',
they have neglected to equip Lord Hutton with any of the press paraphernalia
any such undertaking would have received during the previous five
years of new Labour (cf Campbell, NATO's press room and the war
against Yugoslavia, etc, etc). As a result Hutton neither knows
when it is being spun, nor indeed how to spin itself. One tragically
missed opportunity came when Alistair Campbell was revealed by the
paper [sic] trail to have canvassed the idea of leaking Dr
Kelly's name by means of planting it on a tame hack. Sadly no one
at the Inquiry asked the Prime Minister's Director of Communications
& Strategy, 'now, how would you have done this? Do take us through
the process, pull back that curtain and show us the magic at work
. . . I see, you'd have rung up who? Tom what-win? At The Times?
And what, he'd have written it up just so – how jolly interesting,
who'd have thought?' – how we'd have laughed, but we must remind
ourselves that the discomfiture of the press, though amusing, is
trivia. This really is a matter of war and peace. Anyway, Hutton's
media unworldliness extended to publishing its documentation (all
the stuff anyone who felt themselves covered by the remit of the
Inquiry had voluntarily submitted to it) at an ever-slipping
hour last Saturday. Much to the angst of people putting together
Sunday newspapers.
In
consequence, every Sunday paper, to the varying standard their,
uh, resources allowed, filleted as much of the 900 pages as they
could before they had to go to bed, and each one tried to find some
magic bullet, ideally fatal for the Government, but at pinch, especially
on the Murdoch papers, anything damaging for the Beeb would do.
All this naturally took place before Hutton's report, and in fact,
before even the final round of witnesses have this week been taken
(and that includes both Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon). The paper I
was helping settled on, 'Blair knew Kelly was feeling under pressure
and did nothing to help him', and this did for a front page.
Others went as the mood took them. No one found anything terminal
though for the Prime Minister, and nor will they. To see why that
is, and why it was always going to be the case, and why convening
this oddly inappropriate forum was always going to facilitate Tony
Blair vaunting out of the mess Alistair Campbell had immediately
created, and he himself had more fundamentally caused, we have only
to look to the origin of the Inquiry.
Lord
Hutton is being asked to 'urgently to conduct an investigation into
the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly'. No more, no
less. He doesn't have the power to compel witnesses to attend, those
who do won't be subject to criminal sanction should they subsequently
be proven to have fibbed through their teeth to him, and no one,
government included, is legally obliged to provide full documentary
disclosure, should they fall under the mysterious remit of the Inquiry.
Self-evidently the terms of reference would better have been served
by an investigation by a minister of the church, or to satisfy any
secularist fanatics reading, a psychiatrist I suppose. Not a judge,
sitting in a pretend court, considering ream upon ream of bureaucratic
output concerning the formulation and advocacy of a war, and not
of the unknowable mental and moral state of being of Dr David Kelly.
Hutton is due to Kelly, but it is not about Kelly; and nor will
its findings be treated as being him. That after all it what the
poor man's inquest will be for in due course.
The
Lord Chancellor sought out this esteemed law lord to inquire into
the death of Dr Kelly because no other way was to hand to stop the
crisis caused by Alistair Campbell from spinning out of control.
This crisis started with Andrew Gilligan's infamous, single sourced
report on BBC Radio 4's Today programme (morning talk radio, for
those of you not familiar with it: I must say, I never listen),
which, inter alia, claimed that it was being claimed that Alistair
Campbell had personally 'sexed up' the Prime Minister's parliamentary
dossier justifying the case for war against Iraq. Campbell, an entertaining
and talented man, ten times the performer anyone in the parliamentary
lobby is, went [word? word please!] mental [not totally sure that's
the mot juste, but we'll go with it]: here then is the start
of our crisis – Campbell did not have to react as he did, Blair
did not have to let him react as he did. Now whether Campbell went
nutso for tactical effect (he casually demolished one Marxoid telly
hack in a captivating live appearance, which should have been but
won't be an exemplary masterclass in how political actors should
treat broadcast journalists ie with contempt), or was genuinely
out of control is tangential. Here, in response to the debilitating
BBC smear that the Government spun before it governed, and lied
as easily as it breathed, is where the crisis began. And it started
because, in point of fact (as Hutton and his documentation are going
to demonstrate in excruciating detail) Campbell didn't technically
do what Gilligan had allowed him to be accused of.
Here,
therefore, is what I, moving over to historicist pomposity, think
we can sensibly reconstruct as to being the thought-processes of
Alistair Campbell during this critical period: Gilligan misspoke
[we'll come back to that]; Campbell saw his opportunity; it was
an opportunity he should have been cold-blooded enough to resist,
but he didn't. Why was that? I shall explain: Campbell is already
quitting Downing Street. This very fact is what gave him the freedom
to over-react in the way that he did. Control and calculation went
out the window in response to a chance to go out on a high, sticking
one on the BBC and the high liberal-leftist critics of the Blairite
project as he went. The end result is going to be that Alistair
Campbell's departure from Downing Street is delayed until the forthcoming
Hutton report finally serves to drain this issue of all immediate
passion. In that sense, yet again Campbell's demob unhappy lack
of judgement will have cost him (extra, unwanted time in Downing
St – where the Prime Minister's wife, and her kooky friends, humiliate
Campbell's wife on a daily basis) but, he will, as we shall see,
get that uncertain pleasure of landing a sickner on Auntie.
It
goes without saying that Campbell obviously did do his bit (he wasn't
alone, and the tone came from the top) to pitch the case for war
in the Jesuitical and logic-chopping manner we are wearily familiar
with. But he didn't do what Andrew Gilligan accused him of having
been accused of doing, right when he was supposed to have done it.
That mistake is going to result (career-wise) in Andrew Gilligan's
guts being spread all over the place. Which is good. Not because
I wish my university coeval any personal harm, but because his epating
will do its bit – which will not be enough in itself, so we all
have to keep pushing – to smack the BBC out of its bad, relatively
recent habit of trying to make rather than merely report news. The
BBC is too powerful and too left wing to be allowed to do this.
Andrew
Gilligan was brought to the Today programme by its former
editor (former because he was sacked, after a fashion, for mistiming
his boringly 'shocking' views about pro-hunting types in a newspaper
column), Rod Liddle. Liddle, a third rate self-publicist, though
by all accounts exceptionally able BBC fonctionnaire, managed,
in the course of his self-serving defence of Gilligan and his shabby
performance, to repeatedly and unintentionally knife him and his
kind over and over again. The reason, he said, why he had brought
Gilligan (from The Sunday Telegraph) on board was to generate
the sort of stories Sunday papers ran. In other words, speculative,
anticipatory, and above all else, manufactured to deadline. This
is not what BBC broadcast news ought to have been doing. Today,
already the worst and most self-opinionated aspect of the BBC's
output has long been riding for the fall that Gilligan's error has
set it up for. So what was his error? The world and its mother will,
slyly or directly, write this up as having been to reply upon the
late Dr Kelly, and his take on Campbell and the presentation of
news (not exactly the good Doctor's area of expertise), but that
just ain't so: what Gilligan did wrong was to belong to a culture
of comment in a place where there should have been none. Had Gilligan
run straight with what he had, rather than trying to be needlessly
confrontational with the government he would not now be in the undoubtedly
unhappy place he presently is.
David
Kelly came to Andrew Gilligan, rather than the other way round:
this, at least to begin with, is always the way with hacks and their
most esteemed source. The motivations of the sources, whatever the
news to hand, are as varied as the topics they know about; the functional
interest of the hack is always and in every instance the same: to
meet the deadline, to fill the page, to drive away the dead air.
The media are always hungry, there are generally always enough sources
to keep them well enough fed. This, to a substantial extent, is
what Dr Kelly did, in between finding WMD, and other still more
secret stuff. He was, in a suitably and usefully hands off fashion,
licensed by his employers in the MoD in his enterprise.
Here
then is where we find the downfall of Andrew Gilligan. It is as
old as journalism, and it is of two equal parts: Dr Kelly, ambiguous
as all experts are, told Gilligan what he wanted Gilligan to hear,
Gilligan heard what it was useful to hear; then, Gilligan was allowed
on this basis to opine on air just after six in the morning on an
underheard radio station. Without wanting to put too fine a point
on it: this is journalism everywhere. It's not so much that Gilligan
was unlucky and got 'caught', it's more that for once, and unlike
99.9999% of all forms of media output everywhere, this actually
mattered. As we have seen, the transformative factor, what made
this matter, was the quixotic intervention of Alistair Campbell.
To repeat: if Campbell hadn't played up the way he did, no one other
than Gilligan, and probably not even him, would have remembered
a solitary word of his report on Today. It wouldn't even
have had the consolation of providing wrapping for fish n' chips.
And David Kelly would, most probably, still be alive.
I
say no one other than Gilligan would have remembered an untransmogrified
by Campbell report, but that is not absolutely true: Kelly would
have remembered, near word for word, for as a source, this would
have been of compelling interest, in as much as any of his work
mattered to him. And that brings us back to the class of men David
Kelly can assuredly be taken as being entirely representative of:
the secret people horrified, for reasons of tone as much as anything
else, by the manner in which the Blairites used their public reputation
– essentially one of deliberative efficiency – to justify as unavoidable
a war in fact positively optional.
This
stance may not be that of the majority of the British military,
diplomatic and intelligence community, but it certainly has taken
on enough of a critical mass for it to be unwise for the Prime Minister
to ignore it. Moreover, as with all state bureaucracies – we can
call this the Guthrie syndrome for want of a better term – the men
able enough to hack their way to the top of the governmental service
tree have the skills necessary to be agreeable to their temporary
political masters. On paper, in emails, this is going to look an
awful lot like they actually agree with them, on substantive
matters of policy, when in fact all they are doing in what is required
for the sound dispatch of government business. Hutton and his documentation
are going to confuse a lot of people about the whys and wherefores
of senior civil service behaviour: priestly as it might be to say
this, there really is a case for historians being left many years
later to read minutes and explain what apparently oleaginous bureaucrats
were actually up to.
As
to whether simply just Hutton so far shows eg a JIC incapable of
adequately analysing and extrapolating intelligence streams, or
whether the incoming intelligence is woefully, monumentally misshapen,
is something we will have to wait even longer to discover and understand.
Either way, the fact of John Scarlett having had ownership of the
dossier does neither him nor his craft a great deal of credit. And
should the fears of Muslim-fearing friends be anything other than
baseless, our shield is not comforting to think on.
What
Hutton Will Not Do
It
is a deceit of our frighteningly shallow media to call for the head
of the Defence Secretary because he over-ruled the senior MoD civil
servant, and agreed that Kelly's name would have to be released
to the press. The forgotten chronology of this is the very start
of the present fuss: when Gilligan was challenged on the veracity
of his claim, his source was sought, both by the Government, and
by the rest of the press. When Kelly 'fessed up to his line manage,
it was a development no one inside the political track can have
meaningfully expected (certainly there was no assumption that any
internal leak inquiry would produce a name), and Alistair Campbell
least of all. It is possible indeed that the unfortunate man may
not even be able to comprehend the notion of confession to a superior
that one has leaked something to the press. But being in possession
of this unwelcome knowledge, what on earth was Geoff Hoon to do?
Had he denied or otherwise suppressed it, any subsequent discovery
would have led to braying calls for his resignation (for the 'cover-up')
from exactly the same poltroons who are presently demanding it for
his releasing, when asked, poor Dr Kelly's name, and thereby
adding to the pressure Kelly felt himself under. That, as we have
discussed, a mighty part of the direct and upfront pressure Kelly
surely felt himself to be under was precisely that exerted upon
him by the press, is not something much of it seems as yet to have
found subsequent space to regret. Perhaps when Hutton publishes
his report, they will, but then again, perhaps not.
The
good news for Labour that Hutton unwittingly encapsulates – and
as I have said, it runs through the fascinating documentation –
is how one central part of the new Labour project has been defeated.
Tony Blair, rightly from his own point of view (if he has, that
is, a point of view he believes in), wished on coming into power
to transform the machinery of central government. He wished to make
it much more responsive to the personal wishes of the Prime Minister
(in, I contend, a witting or otherwise extension of 'mandate theory',
which held that since the Prime Minister, as party leader, was really
the source of his government's electoral mandate, he ought to have
much more say in its direction than our parliamentary system seems
to allow him), and accordingly less hedged in by Cabinetism (such
an old theory) like, for example, the Cabinet Office. This manifested
itself in the appointment, by orders in council, of Labour party
flacks in Downing Street, who rather than being there to advise,
were able to direct civil servants (something the civil service
act rightly otherwise bans political advisors from doing). Campbell,
Hunter, Powell, and Morgan all superintended the attempted Prime
Ministerialisation of British government, and, one by one, they
failed, and have either left, or are about to leave.
To
take the obvious examples, when Campbell goes, and then Blair's
chief of staff, Jonathan Powell departs, neither man's hybrid
job will be replaced. Their roles will fall with them, as legacies
of the Blairite project's opposition mode. What the Hutton documentation
inescapably shows is how Downing Street has been recaptured by,
and for the traditional forms of the British civil service. This,
after the disastrous final period of Blairism as a governing technique,
will be greatly to the benefit of Tony Blair the politician, and
his prolonged presence in Downing Street as a result is singularly
to the electoral benefit of the Labour party, which could not hope
to compete as well without him. Such is the perversity of politics.
What
Hutton will hopefully do is to damage the BBC in a way that shocks,
or more realistically, starts shocking it back into being what it
should be: a public service broadcaster, and not a self-appointed
public champion, defender of right, and scourge of the wrong. We
have, in a parliamentary and capitalistic system, fully enough of
those. The BBC in its arrogance takes on more and more the qualities
of the unreformed church of English legend. Andrew Gilligan has
done his little bit to trigger its necessary reformation. One final
point is particularist in the extreme, and it is this: the BBC is
also a bigger danger to both conservatism, and to the Conservative
party than is the Labour government. If what we call 'Hutton' damages
just the government, it will be a far lesser gain for Toryism than
if it damages chiefly the BBC-as-is. Do that and you will fatally
weaken both enemy propositions, attack merely Labour and the BBC
will await the next Tory government as strong as ever.
–
Christopher Montgomery
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