If it went to the West End they'd call it Whitewash( Guardian alert!)

Guardian ^ | 01/29/04 | Jonathan Freedland

[Pikamax]

If it went to the West End they'd call it Whitewash

Jonathan Freedland Thursday January 29, 2004 The Guardian

A soft snowfall was swirling outside the high court just before Lord Hutton took his place on the bench. It's a pity it did not last, because a blanket of fresh, white snow would have made the perfect backdrop to what followed: an extraordinary one-man show, a performance which had its audience snorting and occasionally gasping in disbelief. Transferred to the West End, the show could only have one name: Whitewash. For six months the government had been accused of the darkest of crimes: leading the nation to war on a lie and bullying a dedicated public servant to his death. In 90 minutes Lord Hutton crushed those claims entirely. He exonerated Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, Geoff Hoon, John Scarlett and Kevin Tebbit more completely than any of them can have dreamed. The judge placed a little dollop of pure white snow on the reputation of each of them.

As theatre, the show may have lacked visual splendour: just a modern, Ikea-blond wood courtroom with a white-haired judge at its apex, hunched over his text, reading aloud in his gentle Ulster brogue. But what it lacked in set design and costume it more than made up in narrative drive. The Hutton report had no confusing ambiguities or detours. It all thrust in the same, clear direction: the government was right and the BBC was wrong. (Downing Street, which along with all the parties involved in the Kelly affair had received the report 24 hours earlier, must have begun the day with a champagne breakfast. Once Lord Hutton had spoken, officials could barely contain their gratitude. One Labour apparatchik exclaimed: "Make that man a duke!")

Occasionally, his lordship tantalised with a hint of suspense. He would begin a sentence that seemed destined to hurt the government - only to swerve away with a "however" or "nevertheless" that backed the prime minister or his aides.

A classic of the form came when the judge assessed whether there had been an "underhand strategy" to name David Kelly. "For a time, at the start of the inquiry, it appeared to me that a case of some strength could be made that there was such a strategy ... " he began. Perhaps now the drama was about to turn! Perhaps this was to be the second act!

But no. He explained that the longer the inquiry proceeded, and the more he heard government witnesses explain themselves, the more his mild scepticism melted away. He concluded "that there was no such underhand strategy".

The judge faulted the Ministry of Defence for the way it told Dr Kelly he had been outed. Otherwise, the closest Lord Hutton came to laying a glove on the government was his suggestion that "the possibility cannot be completely ruled out" that the PM's desire to have a strong dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had "subconsciously influenced" John Scarlett and his joint intelligence committee.

Subconsciously! Forget all those memos from Mr Campbell to the intelligence chief asking for multiple changes in wording. There was no pressure to harden the dossier, Lord Hutton decided, just a possible twitch of Mr Scarlett's subconscious - and even that tiny "possibility" was remote. It was more likely that Mr Scarlett's sole concern had been to reflect accurately the intelligence available.

For the press benches, this was all too much. Several journalists began first to sniff, then to snort and finally to chuckle their derision. Jeremy Paxman, for once barred from asking questions, was shaking his head in bemusement as each new finding in favour of the government came down from the bench. When Mr Scarlett's subconscious was introduced, the room seemed to vibrate with mockery.

Often when judges hand down their judgments, the lesser mortals arrayed below feel compelled to put aside their own biases or expectations and bow to the sheer logic and coherence of the legal argument. Whatever their final conclusions, long, detailed rulings in high-profile cases are often spellbinding essays in tight, rigorous reasoning.

Yesterday was not one of those days. Observers who had sat through every hour of the Hutton inquiry, reading and hearing the same evidence as his lordship, were left scratching their heads at his final thinking.

For one thing, Lord Hutton seemed to have turned a deaf ear to crucial facts and testimony. Transcripts of interviews that the BBC Newsnight journalist Susan Watts had recorded with Dr Kelly corroborated much of what Gilligan claimed, not least the scientist's statement that the 45-minute claim was "got out of all proportion". But Lord Hutton appears to have put those transcripts out of his mind, preferring to assume that Dr Kelly could not have said what Gilligan claimed he had.

The judge further chose to believe there was no "underhand strategy" to name Dr Kelly, gliding over Mr Campbell's diary entries in which he confessed his desperation to get the scientist's name out. Lord Hutton concluded there was no leaking, even though newspaper reports from last summer show someone must have been pointing reporters very directly towards Dr Kelly.

He ruled there had been no meddling with the substance of the September dossier, just some beefing up of language, even though one expert witness, Dr Brian Jones, testified that, when it comes to intelligence, wording is substance.

On each element of the case before him, Lord Hutton gave the government the benefit of the doubt, opting for the interpretation that most favoured it, never countenancing the gloss that might benefit the BBC. Perhaps the clearest example was Lord Hutton's very judge-like deconstruction of the "slang expression" sexed up. One meaning could be inserting items that are untrue, he said; another could simply be strengthening language. Under the latter definition, Hutton conceded, Gilligan's story would be true. So his lordship decided the other meaning must apply.

The judge also seemed to have a bad case of Wandering Remit Syndrome. The late insertion of the notorious 45-minute claim was within the scope of his inquiry; but whether that claim related to battlefield or strategic weapons was not, even though the reliability of the claim might well turn on precisely that question. Repeatedly, territory that might discomfit the government was declared out of bounds; areas awkward for the BBC were very much in.

The whole performance set you wondering. For this has become a ritual in our national life. If an argument rages on long enough, we soon call for a judge to investigate it for us in the form of a public inquiry. We see and hear the same evidence he does, but still we invest in him some mystical power to reach a conclusive truth we have not seen. And eventually he comes down from the mountain, like the high priest of yore, and delivers his judgment.

Yesterday's show shattered that illusion. Suddenly you found yourself seeing through the grandeur and mystique and wondering, who exactly is this man? Why was he chosen for this task? What made him cast this whole, complex dispute so neatly in black and white?

We are not meant to think this way. We are meant to trust and accept the wisdom from on high. But that is becoming harder to do. For Britons remember Lord Denning's conclusions on the Profumo affair in 1963 and his belief that "people of much eminence" could not possibly have misbehaved. Many remember Widgery's similar whitewash job on the Bloody Sunday case. Or the judge in the Archer trial who believed the "fragrance" of wife Mary made it unimaginable that Jeffrey would have used a prostitute.

Yesterday was a reminder that these people are human beings like any other. It seems worth remembering that, before he was a law lord, the judge was plain Brian Hutton. That man might just harbour an old-fashioned faith in the benign motives of government and establishment and may, for all we know, take a dim view of journalism.

In a generation's time, the Hutton report may read as risibly as Denning's. Perhaps by then we will have lost our need to ask a single, bewigged man to separate truth from lies in public life. Yesterday such questions were far away, as the government crowed and the BBC bowed its head - and the snow kept on falling.

[RobbyS]

Speaking of being human, the Guardian can't admit that people on their side are capable of fanatical pursuit of a end, so much that they throw discretion to the winds. I could see fanaticism in the faces of all the people on BBC last spring. They were obsessed with topping that war.

[B4Ranch]

Law Lord Brian Edward Hutton, a veteran judge, formerly the Lord Chief Justice for Northern Ireland, has chosen to retire.

He deserves the utmost respect from everyone. This man was bought and paid for long ago and has stayed bought. A true rarity these days!