The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries Read Free

dossier on WMD presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister. Being asked to give my diaries to Lord Hutton’s inquiry into David Kelly’s death, as this volume shows, was something of a terrifying moment. As anyone who has read my diaries now knows, I can be very frank, I can say very harsh things, I can be hard on myself and on others. I confess to being so worried about what I might have written that when I drove from our holiday home in Provence to Marseilles airport to collect my diaries so that I could transcribe them and send them to Lord Hutton in advance of my first evidence session, I had one of those momentary reflections that life might be easier all round if I just careered off the motorway. Yet as it turned out, I think the diaries may have helped our case. They showed that we took rather more care over that dossier than the BBC journalist took over his report which led to my being called to select committee inquiries, ultimately to Kelly’s death, and the inquiry into that.
    I never met David Kelly, but I think about him often, and whether I could have done anything differently that might have stopped him from taking his life. With the exception of the deaths of family and close friends, the day his body was found was perhaps the worst of my life, certainly the worst of my time with TB. Had it not been for Fiona, and Philip Gould who came round to the house on hearing the news, I would almost certainly have resigned there and then. I was frankly beyond caring if it meant the blame would come my way. So far as many in the media were concerned, that was going to happen anyway. I just felt the whole thing had become like a horrible, dark novel and I wanted out of it. Ironically, the night before, we were felt to be ‘winning’ the battle with the BBC, its reporter having been strongly criticised by the Foreign Affairs Committee. But by the morning, all that had changed. It was horrific. The feelings I had then are among the reasons why, despite always staying involved, and going back to help out in two general elections, I have never really wanted to return to a full-time position in the front line of politics.
    When I gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into media practices in 2011, I made the point that much of today’s media like to act as judge and jury on those in public life. The coverage of the Hutton Inquiry, whose deliberations are covered in this volume, but whose conclusions came after I resigned from Downing Street, is a good example. The inquiry shone a microscopic light on both the process of communication in the run-up to war, and the circumstances surrounding Dr Kelly’s death. When Lord Hutton was putting government witnesses through their paces, and ministers and officials from the prime minister down were being questioned and cross-examined, day in and day out, media reporting was largely slanted to show the government in a bad light, and Lord Hutton in a good light because of the rigour of his inquiry. The bits of the evidence that suggested wrongdoing by the government led bulletins and newspapers. Anything that fitted with the government account tended to be relegated. The moment Lord Hutton concluded that the central charges against the government were not borne out by the evidence, he was condemned as Lord Whitewash. Hundreds, thousands of reports have subsequently sought to convey the sense that the BBC report was essentially true. It was not; and as Lord Hutton said at the time, even if it emerged there were no WMD in Iraq, that would not make the reporting true. It is important to remember what the accusations against us – and me in particular – were: that we inserted false intelligence into the WMD dossier, knowing it to be false and against the wishes of the intelligence agencies. To this day, I fail to see how a government can simply ignore claims as serious as that. Indeed, had the inquiry found against us, it would not just have been the end for me, but more importantly