BETRAYAL
There are occasionally times when not even the most sophisticated & ingenious dissembling of government can conceal the raw, amoral manoeuvring that underpins so much of its functioning.
Dr David Kelly would have remained an anonymous civil servant, one of many working quietly in the background of mighty public events. He was a weapons inspector. He’d spent time in Iraq, doing the spadework that provided material for the document that eventually appeared in the public domain as justification for the invasion. Concerned as to the content, character & general authenticity of that document, he gave an unofficial interview to a BBC journalist expressing his reservations. Who better, we might ask, to pass judgement than on whose diligent research generated the original data?
That interview, motivated by simple, decent, old-fashioned conscience, has blown the whistle on the First & Fourth estates simultaneously. As soon as a paraphrase of the interview was made public on the radio, the claim being that Downing Street had ‘sexed up’ the pro-war document, the full, righteous &, as quickly became evident, immoderate wrath of government was turned upon the BBC. Instantly horns were locked & there ensued a battle royal between the two institutions. Conference rooms at the Beeb’s Bush House & at Downing Street rung to the sounds of enraged men in suits, appalled that their virtue was seriously in question & pledging no quarter until satisfaction was granted by the other.
Inevitably there had to be a sacrificial lamb. The search was on for the BBC source. Had Dr Kelly been a good company man instead of the straightforward, uncomplicatedly honest man he was, he would simply have set in motion the standard mechanisms whereby a junior official would have taken the fall for him. But he didn’t: he went to his masters at the Ministry of Defence & confessed that the BBC source was almost certainly himself. Caught on the hop somewhat by such unfashionable candour, the MoD promised him discretion & then promptly revealed his identity.
There followed a noisy, combative & at times ugly public enquiry. During the course of it it was suggested bluntly, indeed sneeringly, that Dr David Kelly was no more than ‘chaff’ & that he had been made a fall guy by anti-government interests. With Downing Street braying of its innocence in the face of accusations that they had tampered with the original document in order to better represent the case for war, & the BBC piously claiming concern for public interest, the ground quickly became very muddy. Within days Dr Kelly was accused by one of Tony Blair’s personal advisors of being a ‘Walter Mitty’ who had fantasised both the claims that he had made & his own importance in the affair. The Ministry of Defence tried to characterise him as a minor official with no status & thus with no authority to speak out against a document prepared by those superior to him in every sense.
Crushed by the full, coordinated weight of government, betrayed by the institutions that he had loyally (if misguidedly) served for so many years, Dr Kelly left his Oxfordshire house, ostensibly to take a walk to clear his head, & he killed himself. And in so doing he brought about, in the most dreadful & tragic of ways but swiftly & ruthlessly, the exposure of those whose interests it had been his lifelong concern to conserve.
The interrogations carried out by the Hutton Enquiry have revealed with startling clarity the direct involvement of Downing Street & the Ministry of Defence in the handling of the aftermath of Dr Kelly’s admission & the cynicism of government in general. Tony Blair’s political judgement & his personal honesty – both diamonds in his crown in the bright days of early triumphs – have been brought into serious question & his overall credibility is extremely precarious. It would seem that neither serious press nor public were even slightly convinced by the bellicose straight shooting of (now ex-) press secretary Alastair Campbell or the earnest, Holy Joe pleading of Tony Blair before the Hutton Enquiry.
But what really cut the ground from beneath these world-class champions of disingenuous cant was the testimony before the Enquiry of Dr Kelly’s wife & daughter. Their quiet, dignified, heartbreakingly sad declarations brought to the proceedings an almost novelistic symmetry, providing a quietly dramatic counterbalance to official bluster & rhetoric. The unimpeachably authentic picture that emerged of a man destroyed by the utterly ruthless machinations of government has done devastating damage to this administration. It’s not fanciful to suggest that where three million people in the streets of London & millions more across the world failed ultimately to reveal the dishonesty of the stated motives for going to war, a few hours testimony from two apparently unremarkable middle class English women may have achieved that, & more.
History will, as ever, pass judgement. But if Tony Blair & his coterie of pragmatic zealots are able to climb out from under this particular pile of wreckage & rise up again with impunity, then we are left only with a sense of Orwellian pessimism as the State prevails yet again.
1:55:10 AM 
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