Issue: 11 December 2004	PAGE 1 of 3 next >>

If you, like me, had gone charging up the stairs of The Spectator last Tuesday afternoon, and if you had rounded the corner to see the noble profile of Lord Butler of Brockwell, silvery, craggy, radiating patience and integrity as he sat on the sofa, then it might suddenly have occurred to you to wonder — as I did — why this monument of discretion, who served as secretary of the Cabinet and head of the Home Civil Service under three prime ministers, from 1988 to 1998, and who is generally accounted the safest pair of hands in Whitehall, had come to this den of journalism and you might have asked yourself why, for the first time since he had delivered his famous report on the discrepancies between British intelligence, government rhetoric and the pitiful reality of Saddam’s weapons programmes, he had consented to an interview. Why talk now, Robin?

In a way that is both inspiring and exhausting, Lord Butler of Brockwell, 66, has all the manly virtues. He took a first in Greats. He has a rugby blue, and he does not bother to list either distinction in his Who’s Who entry because he also possesses the virtue of restraint. He has consecrated his career to the impartial service of government, Tory or Labour, and all that time he never offered a single public opinion about the way that government was carried on.

The glow-worm politicians came and went, with their ludicrous antics and slogans, and Butler was there to pick up the pieces. He buttled on and he buttled for Britain. He was there in the Cabinet long before Thatcher was slain, and he was still there, trusted and admired, after Blair came to power.

So I think we can agree that it is no desire for publicity that causes him to open his mouth, and we can more or less discount the ostensible grounds for the interview: that he is repaying a debt incurred by a speech I gave to undergraduates at University College, Oxford, where he is the Master. No: this is a man who has spent his life negotiating the exact semantics of Cabinet minutes, and who was most recently charged with arbitrating in the case of Tony Blair and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, an issue of truth and meaning that turned out to be considerably more toxic and explosive than Saddam’s own capabilities.

Frederick Edward Robin Butler, KG, GCB, knows the importance of weighing your words, and he does not speak to the media unless he has something to say.

I begin by asking him whether he is happy with the way the report was received, and he says that by and large he was, though he didn’t like the suggestion in the London Evening Standard that it was a whitewash. In fact, as our conversation goes on, it becomes clear to me that he wants to dispel that impression. Butler’s purpose in the report was not to draw the moral and political conclusions of his findings — that, he says, should properly be left to Parliament and the press.

But he thinks his findings were important, and not favourable to the government. The nub of his criticism is that it was wrong to present the September dossier, to Parliament and public, as the round, unvarnished whole of the wisdom of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and yet to leave out the caveats and saving clauses that went with the original intelligence. ‘When civil servants give material to ministers, they say these are the conclusions we’ve drawn, but we’ve got to tell you that the evidence we’ve got is pretty thin. Similarly, if you are giving something to the United Nations and the country, you should warn them. You should give the same warnings to the public as were given to ministers.’

So why, I ask, didn’t the dossier contain these warnings? Butler couldn’t be clearer. It was about politics, and selling a message. ‘One has got to remember what the purpose of the dossier was. The purpose of the dossier was to persuade the British people why the government thought Iraq was a very serious threat.’

And if those warnings had been included, would that have undermined that purpose? ‘Would it have undermined it? I think it would have. I think it would have weakened it. What the government was saying is, we really think this guy is a threat, because he’s got this terrible stuff, he’s a very bad man, nobody’s got any idea what he may do with it, and then if you say that we’re only drawing this conclusion on the evidence we’ve got, and the direct evidence we’ve got is thin because Iraq is a very difficult country to penetrate — that would have weakened it.’