Hutton Inquiry

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 3:38 pm on 4 February 2004.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Lord Waddington Lord Waddington Conservative 3:38, 4 February 2004

My Lords, I am proud to follow the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor because I greatly respect the office he holds. I hope that he will hold it for a long time. I know that he has some subsidiary offices, but he knows as well as I do that governments in their declining years tend to create offices to divert attention from their misdeeds. Such offices do not usually endure for very long. They are here today and gone tomorrow. The noble and learned Lord would be wise, therefore, to emphasise the historic role that he performs rather than any other.

I was disappointed in his speech. When he reads it over, he might think possibly that he should have voiced more sympathy for the family of Dr Kelly and indeed have apologised for the misdeeds of the Government that were recognised in the report.

I, too, pay tribute to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hutton, for the skilful way in which he conducted his inquiry. Nobody could have gone to more trouble to try to arrive at just conclusions, but some of those conclusions trouble me greatly. I do not find it easy to accept that there was nothing wrong in the way in which Dr Kelly's name was made public. I would just remind noble Lords of the evidence given before the Hutton inquiry, which of course was beyond contradiction.

I cannot get out of my mind the references in the diary of Alastair Campbell. I quote:

"GH [Geoff Hoon] and I agreed it would f*** Gilligan if that was the source".

I quote again:

"The biggest thing needed was the source out".

And I quote again:

"Spent much of the weekend talking to TB and GH re the source".

I cannot forget Campbell agreeing with Mr Dingemans at the inquiry that in government circles it was recognised that it would indeed assist them to get Kelly's name out.

How on earth, in the face of all that, can one take seriously Mr Hoon's statement that he made great efforts to ensure Dr Kelly's anonymity? Far from doing anything of the sort, he agreed to the issue of a press statement and a course of action which he knew would lead to the naming of Dr Kelly. He did not even bother to tell Dr Kelly what he was going to do.

As for the Prime Minister, he may not in the strictest sense have authorised the leaking of Dr Kelly's name, but he presided over the meeting where it was decided to issue a press release that led, inevitably, to the naming of Dr Kelly. Campbell's diaries show that neither he nor anyone else in No. 10 were the slightest bit interested in Dr Kelly's welfare. On the contrary, they spent hours and hours in unminuted meetings and made unrecorded telephone calls plotting not how Dr Kelly's interests might be protected, but how his being thrown to the media might be turned to their advantage.

A fair summary of events is surely this. Campbell decided to wage war on the BBC, a war with no holds barred—and he was happy to use Dr Kelly as a weapon in that war. Dr Kelly, already under intolerable pressure, was given no support, but instead was thrown to the media wolves and in that situation of mental turmoil, largely created by others, he took his own life. If I were a member of Dr Kelly's family, I would find it hard to accept that no one is really to blame.

Having got that off my chest, perhaps I may now turn to the other aspects of the inquiry, and to Mr Gilligan. I accept, without reservation, that he was entirely wrong to say what he did on the "Today" programme. But while accepting the central finding of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hutton, that the Government did not know that the 45-minute claim was wrong, I am bound to say that the evidence as a whole discloses a course of conduct by those in Downing Street concerned with the preparation of the dossier which is deeply troubling.

From his background as a lawyer rather than a politician, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hutton, may not have appreciated how wholly unusual were some of the goings on in Downing Street at that time, and how very different was the manner in which business was conducted from the way in which it was conducted by previous administrations, and, it is to be hoped, now that Campbell has gone, will be conducted in future.