Cease Fire

Dry, courtly Lord Hutton, exemplar of the British establishment, formally ended his brisk, floodlit march into its innermost corners last week. He will not have an easy time figuring out why weapons expert David Kelly was moved to kill himself in July. A psychiatrist suggested that Kelly’s public exposure — after admitting to his managers that he had talked to BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan — had caused “the severe loss of self-esteem … from feeling that [his employers] had lost trust in him.” But whatever Hutton can deduce about the anguish that Kelly took to his grave, the millions of words in testimony, documents and e-mails he received in evidence — and instantly put on his website — have painted a gripping picture of political hardball, blame shifting and bad judgment inside Tony Blair’s government and the BBC.

Heroes were in short supply. Gilligan defended the basic thrust of his reporting, but admitted he had overstated the case against Alastair Campbell, Blair’s communications chief, for “sexing up” the September dossier on Iraq’s weapons. BBC managers, reeling under a ferocious assault from Campbell, looked hapless as they described a stout defense of Gilligan mounted without checking the foundations of his report. Excerpts from Campbell’s diary released last week showed how eager he was to “out” Kelly after he advised his bosses he didn’t think what he told Gilligan could possibly be the source of the “sexing up” claim: “GH [Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon] and I agreed it would f___ Gilligan if [Kelly] was his source,” read one. But the real loser from that evidence was Hoon, who had already claimed he had nothing to do with the way his officials outed Kelly to journalists.

Hutton will report by December. But Blair, who has slumped at the polls, starts fighting back this week, with a fateful speech to the Labour Party’s annual conference.