Hutton Inquiry

The Hutton Inquiry was a 2003 judicial inquiry in the UK chaired by Lord Hutton, who was appointed by the Labour government to investigate the controversial circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly, a biological warfare expert and former UN weapons inspector in Iraq.
On 18 July 2003, Kelly, an employee of the Ministry of Defence, was found dead after he had been named as the source of quotations used by BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan. These quotations had formed the basis of media reports claiming that the government had knowingly "sexed up" the "September Dossier", a report into Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. The inquiry opened in August 2003 and reported on 28 January 2004. The Hutton report cleared the government of wrongdoing, while the BBC was strongly criticised, leading to the resignation of the BBC's chairman Gavyn Davies and the firing of the director-general Greg Dyke. The report was met with scepticism by the British public, and criticism by British newspapers such as The Guardian, Independent, and the Daily Mail, though others said it exposed serious flaws within the BBC.

Background

Kelly had been the source for reports made by three BBC journalists that the government, particularly the press office of Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, had knowingly embellished the dossier with misleading exaggerations of Iraq's military capabilities; specifically, a claim that Iraq had the ability to launch a strike using "weapons of mass destruction" within 45 minutes.
These reports were aired by Andrew Gilligan on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on 29 May 2003, by Gavin Hewitt on the Ten O'Clock News the same day and by Susan Watts on BBC Two's Newsnight on 2 June. On 1 June, Gilligan repeated his allegations in an article written for The Mail on Sunday, naming government press secretary Alastair Campbell as the driving force for alteration of the dossier.
The government denounced the reports and accused the BBC of poor journalism. In subsequent weeks the corporation stood by the report, saying that it had a reliable source. Following intense media speculation, Kelly was finally named in the press as the source for Gilligan's story on 9 July.
Kelly died by suicide in a field close to his home on 17 July. An inquiry was announced by the British government the following day. The inquiry was to investigate "the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly".

The inquiry

The inquiry opened on 1 August. Hearings began on 11 August. The first phase of the inquiry closed on 4 September. A second session of witness-calling began on Monday 15 September, where some witnesses from the first session, such as Andrew Gilligan, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, BBC chairman Gavyn Davies and Alastair Campbell were recalled for further questions arising from the first phase, and some witnesses were called for the first time. The taking of evidence closed on Wednesday 24 September. The inquiry heard evidence on 22 days, lasting 110 hours, from 74 witnesses. Examination and cross-examination came from five Queen's Counsels. Representing the Inquiry was James Dingemans QC and Peter Knox. Representing the government was Jonathan Sumption. Andrew Caldecott QC represented the BBC.
At the conclusion of the Inquiry there was widespread approval of the process conducted by Hutton. The Inquiry had provided exceptional access to the inner workings of the UK Government and the BBC. Virtually all the documentation provided to the Inquiry was quickly provided to the public on the Inquiry's website.
British ambassador David Broucher reported a conversation with Dr Kelly at a meeting in Geneva in February 2003, which he described as "from a very deep memory hole". Broucher related that Kelly said he had assured his Iraqi sources that there would be no war if they co-operated, and that a war would put him in an "ambiguous" moral position. Broucher had asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq were invaded, and Kelly had replied, "I will probably be found dead in the woods." Broucher then quoted from an email he had sent just after Kelly's death: "I did not think much of this at the time, taking it to be a hint that the Iraqis might try to take revenge against him, something that did not seem at all fanciful then. I now see that he may have been thinking on rather different lines."

The report

Hutton initially announced that he expected to be able to deliver his report in late November or early December. The report was eventually published on 28 January 2004. It ran to 750 pages in 13 chapters and 18 appendices, though this was mainly composed of excerpts from the hundreds of documents that were published during the inquiry. The main conclusions were:

Nobody could have anticipated that Dr Kelly would take his life
There was "no underhand strategy" to name him as the source for the BBC's accusations
Gilligan's original accusation was "unfounded" and the BBC's editorial and management processes were "defective"
The dossier had not been "sexed up", but was in line with available intelligence, although the Joint Intelligence Committee, chaired by John Scarlett, may have been "subconsciously influenced" by the government
The Ministry of Defence was at fault for not informing Dr Kelly of its strategy that would involve naming him

The report exonerated the government much more completely than had been expected by many observers prior to its publication. Evidence presented to the inquiry had indicated:

That the wording of the dossier had been altered to present the strongest possible case for war within the bounds of available intelligence
That some of these changes had been suggested by Alastair Campbell
That reservations had been expressed by experts within the Intelligence Community about the wording of the dossier
That David Kelly had direct contact with dissenters within the Defence Intelligence Staff and had communicated their reservations to several journalists.
That, following Dr Kelly's decision to come forward as one of Gilligan's contacts, Alastair Campbell and Geoff Hoon had wanted his identity made public
That the Prime Minister himself had chaired a meeting at which it was decided that Dr Kelly's name would be confirmed by the Ministry of Defence if put to them by journalists
That Dr Kelly's name had been confirmed after journalists had made multiple suggestions to the MOD press office.

Despite this evidence, Hutton's report largely cleared the government of any wrongdoing. In large measure this was because Hutton judged that the government had not known of the reservations in the intelligence community: it seemed they had been discounted by senior intelligence assessors — thus Gilligan's claim that the government "probably knew" the intelligence was flawed, was itself unfounded. Furthermore, the Inquiry heard that these were not the words used by Gilligan's source, but Gilligan's own inference. However, the judgement that No. 10 was not aware of the reservations of the intelligence community was not supported by other evidence contained in the report, such as the transcript of an interview given by David Kelly to BBC journalist Susan Watts. In addition to clearing the government, Hutton determined that any failure of intelligence assessments fell outside his remit, and the Intelligence Services thus also escaped censure.
Instead the report placed a great deal of emphasis on evidence of the failings of Gilligan and the BBC, many of which had been explicitly acknowledged during the course of the Inquiry. Gilligan, for example, admitted and apologised for surreptitiously briefing politicians on a select committee in order to put pressure on Dr Kelly. Gilligan, whilst disagreeing with the overall thrust of the report, also admitted that he had attributed inferences to Dr Kelly which were in fact his own.
The Inquiry specifically criticised the chain of management that caused the BBC to defend its story. The BBC management, the report said, had accepted Gilligan's word that his story was accurate, in spite of his notes being incomplete.
Davies had then told the BBC Board of Governors that he was happy with the story, and told the Prime Minister that a satisfactory internal inquiry had taken place. The Board of Governors, under Davies' guidance, accepted that further investigation of the government's complaints were unnecessary. In his report Hutton wrote of this:
There was considerable speculation in the media that the report had been deliberately written to clear the government, a claim disputed by Lord Hutton at a later press conference. Many people remain convinced that this was the case. Suggestions of whitewash were supported by Hutton's careful choice of language at certain points in the report. For example, he argued that the use of the phrase "sexed up" by Gilligan would have been taken by the general public to indicate an outright lie rather than mere exaggeration, and thus the claim was untrue.

Aftermath of publication

It was because of the report's criticism of his actions that Gavyn Davies resigned on the day of publication, 28 January 2004. Reporters from rival news organisation ITN described the day of publication as "one of the worst in the BBC's history". Two days after the publication of the report, at a meeting of BBC Governors where it is reported he only retained the support of one-third of the board Greg Dyke, the director-general, initially offered his resignation before withdrawing the offer. The Board of Governors then fired Dyke after which he unsuccessfully demanded his job back. However he publicly announced that he had resigned. Dyke stated:
Andrew Gilligan resigned because of his part in the affair on 30 January. However, in his resignation statement he questioned the value of Hutton's report:
Blair, who had been repeatedly under fire for the "sexing-up" allegations, told the House of Commons in the debate following the release of the report that he had been completely exonerated. He demanded a retraction from those who had accused him of lying to the House, particularly Michael Howard, the Leader of the Opposition:
Howard sidestepped the demand for an apology. However, immediately after the Board of Governors had accepted Dyke's resignation, Lord Ryder, as Acting Chairman of the BBC, apologised "unreservedly" for errors made during the affair. Dyke, who had not given the conclusions of the Hutton report his full backing, said that he "could not quite work out" what the BBC was apologising for. The Independent subsequently reported that the BBC governors had ignored the advice of BBC lawyers that the Hutton report was "legally flawed". Although this was denied by the BBC, it was confirmed in 2007 when the BBC was forced to publish minutes of a governors meeting at the BBC that took place directly after the Hutton report.
At the end of the report Hutton recalled how the final part of David Kelly's life had not been representative of his entire career in the civil service:
Deliberately or otherwise, Dr Kelly had raised wider questions about the quality, interpretation and presentation of intelligence that Hutton had left unanswered. Some of these were to be addressed in a new inquiry, announced by the government on 3 February 2004. Amongst other things, the Butler Report concluded that "the fact that the reference to the 45 minute claim in the classified assessment was repeated in the dossier later led to suspicions that it had been included because of its eye-catching character". Andrew Gilligan claims that this has vindicated his original story that the dossier had been "sexed up".
Over a dozen years later, the Chilcot Inquiry came to different conclusions. The Financial Times reported, "Every previous inquiry into Britain's decision to invade Iraq has swiftly been condemned by the public as a "whitewash". Such a description hardly applies to the monumental inquest that has been published by Sir John Chilcot."