On 3 July, Geoff Hoon rang Number 10 with intriguing news: a Government scientist had come forward to volunteer to his superiors that he had met Gilligan the week before the Today broadcast. To this development, Blair initially reacted with caution, telling Jonathan Powell that they should ‘keep the information to ourselves’ for now.44 They tried to keep it secret from Campbell because ‘Tony had lost confidence in Alastair’s objectivity and didn’t trust him.’ It was Geoff Hoon, who thought Campbell ought to know, who informed him.45
The revelation made Campbell explosive with excitement. He knew the scientist, Dr David Kelly, was a WMD expert, but initially mistook him to be much more junior than he actually was. Kelly had not been directly involved in the drafting of the dossier. His account of his meeting with Gilligan did not appear to tally with the reporter’s claims. Campbell was euphoric with a ‘gotcha’ moment. If they exposed Kelly as the BBC reporter’s source, so a gleeful Campbell told Hoon, ‘it would fuck Gilligan.’46
For the next few days, Number 10 was almost wholly consumed by the question of how to handle Kelly. That weekend there were triangular telephone conversations between Blair, at Chequers, and Campbell and Hoon. The trio intensively discussed how they might best exploit this development. Campbell told his diary that the Defence Secretary shared his desire ‘to get it out that the source had broken cover’,47 though Hoon says he wanted to privately tell the BBC Governors that they had a name.48 Blair was now more aggressive about winning the battle with the BBC, not least because he was made frantic by reports from MI6 that the search for WMD in Iraq was still coming up empty-handed.
The Prime Minister got temporarily cold feet when Sir David Omand, the security co-ordinator at the Cabinet Office, warned him that they would have to tread carefully because they had a duty of care towards the civil servant. When Blair returned from the Chilterns to London, he was looking for official cover so that no-one could later accuse him of not playing it by the book. On Monday, 7 July, he presided over a ‘running meeting’ in his study, a meeting that ‘gets smaller and bigger and bigger and smaller’49 as a remarkable gallery of characters surged in and out of his den. The fluctuating cast included Sir David Manning, Sir Kevin Tebbit, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, Sir David Omand and John Scarlett. Jack Straw dropped in to discuss whether they should produce Kelly for one of the parliamentary committees looking into the war. Blair pressed the officials to find out whether Kelly would back the Government’s story on the dossier or not.50
Scarlett emerged from the den to dictate a note that the scientist should be subject to a ‘proper security-style interview’.51
Blair remained leery at this stage about exposing Kelly in public. He still hoped that a compromise might be struck with the BBC. That morning, he rang Gavyn Davies, the Chairman of the BBC. Ignoring the advice of the civil servants not to do so, Blair revealed to Davies that someone had come forward whom they suspected to be Gilligan’s source. The BBC was still not budging. The more aggressive Downing Street became, the more the corporation treated the Government’s complaints as an assault on its integrity. Greg Dyke, the Director-General, interpreted it as another manifestation of the ‘systematic bullying’ and ‘war of attrition’ that Campbell waged on the BBC.52 Dyke and Blair had known each other for years. When they were first introduced, Dyke jokingly groaned: ‘Not another bloody Labour lawyer.’ But Dyke was a Labour man. So was Davies. He was married to Sue Nye, Gordon Brown’s most long-standing personal aide. The more paranoid element in Blair’s entourage even detected the Chancellor’s hidden hand. There was no evidence for that, though Brown did display evident relish for Blair’s discomfort. The Chancellor cracked jokes in the Commons that a document on health ‘has not been sexed up’.53
Both Chairman and Director-General of the BBC donated to Labour in the past, which had made their appointments highly controversial. This introduced a flavour of the family feud to the battle which made it even more inflamed. In his phone conversation with Blair, Davies said the BBC was standing by Gilligan and would be neither retracting the story nor apologising for it.
‘The whole thing spiralled out of control. The tragedy was that neither side could find a way of finessing this and finding a solution,’ observes the Cabinet Secretary, Andrew Turnbull.54 It was ‘almost a constitutional crisis’, reflects Peter Mandelson.55
The possessed Campbell was not interested in a compromise anyway. He wanted ‘a clear win’ over the BBC, ‘not a messy draw’.56 At around six o’clock that evening, Godric Smith came into Campbell’s office to find him on the speakerphone to Hoon. Campbell was in the middle of suggesting to the Defence Secretary that news that the source had come forward should be leaked to a friendly journalist that evening.57 An alarmed Smith discussed this with Tom Kelly. Both cautioned Campbell that a crude leak would be a bad idea because it would be much too obvious that it had come from Number 10.58
On Tuesday, 8 July, another meeting assembled in the Prime Minister’s study. Of the four sessions in the space of two days devoted to Kelly, this was the critical one. It put Tony Blair at the heart of a devious strategy which would lead to David Kelly being outed less than forty-eight hours later. This meeting was the ‘decisive’ one59 which set in train the events that turned a nasty affair into a tragic one. Jonathan Powell was among those who were ‘surprised it had not already become public’ who Kelly was.60 David Manning also thought it ‘almost inevitable that his name would become known’.61
Blair now sanctioned a ‘naming strategy’ which would indeed make Kelly’s exposure inevitable. The strategy guaranteed that the scientist’s identity got out while making it hard to prove that Downing Street had done the deed itself. It was at this crucial meeting that the ‘policy decision’ was taken that the Ministry of Defence would issue a statement revealing that one of its officials had admitted speaking to Gilligan. Blair further authorised the department to release biographical details about Kelly, making it more likely that he could be identified.62
Though the statement would go out in the name of the MoD, it was actually composed in Number 10 by Godric Smith. Huddled around the Number 10 spokesman’s computer screen at various points that day were Campbell, Powell, Tom Kelly and Sir Kevin Tebbit. The statement was finished at around 2.30 p.m., shown to Blair and then Powell told Sir Kevin to take it over to his department.63 The statement went out to the media at a quarter to six that evening. The MoD also made a very untypically generous offer to the media: it would confirm the identity of the person to any journalist who managed to guess it correctly.
That was red meat for the many reporters ravenous to unmask the mystery source at the heart of the consuming battle between the Government and the BBC. The strength of the clues scattered into the media meant that competent journalists who knew their subject area could get there very quickly.
Richard Norton-Taylor, a specialist in defence and intelligence for the Guardian, knew from the MoD that the mystery man had been a UN weapons inspector in Iraq. This reporter fed the clues ‘Britain’ and ‘Unscom’ into an internet search engine. Up popped Kelly.64 Michael Evans, Defence Editor of The Times, was allowed to put twenty-one names to the MoD in order to be told that it was Kelly.65 The Financial Times got the name too. Kelly was outed the next morning.66
The atmosphere inside Number 10 is captured by an e-mail to Jonathan Powell from Tom Kelly which reads: ‘This is now a game of chicken with the Beeb.’67
Geoff Hoon would later tell friends that there was nothing in his political career that he regretted more than this affair. He suffered enduring remorse that he had not argued more strongly with Blair and Campbell when he discussed Kelly with them the weekend before the scientist was exposed. Three years later, Hoon was stripped of his Cabinet rank. Furious, he came close to resigning. Before he changed his mind about quitting, he planned to make a resignation speech fully exposing the process by which Kelly was outed and the extent of Blair’s complicity in it. Hoon told friends th
at he could reveal things so devastating to Blair’s reputation that ‘Tony could not have remained as Prime Minister.’68
David Kelly was now exposed to the world, dragging the shy and introverted scientist out of the shadows and into the furnace heat of a battle between politicians and the media. The Permanent Secretary, Sir Kevin Tebbit, tried to give the scientist some protection. He argued that they should let Kelly appear before a closed session of the Intelligence and Security Committee, but spare him a televised grilling by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee ‘to show some regard for the man himself. He has come forward voluntarily; he is not used to being thrust into the public eye, and is not on trial.’69 Hoon overruled his most senior official because ‘presentationally, it would be difficult to defend.’70
On 15 July, Kelly was thrust in front of the Foreign Affairs committee for an interrogation which was as long as it was clumsy. The scientist was clearly troubled to find himself caught in the middle of a titanic clash between forces much mightier than himself. The undistinguished and blundering committee managed to grasp the wrong end of several sticks. The Labour MP Andrew Mackinlay dismissed the scientist as a ‘fall-guy’ and ‘chaff’. Evidently disconcerted, Kelly claimed he could not believe that he was Gilligan’s ‘main source’, though he was. He was further thrown when David Chidgey, a Lib Dem MP who had been secretly briefed by Gilligan, asked whether Kelly was the source of a report by Susan Watts, Newsnight’s science editor. Kelly denied it, a lie which would increasingly prey on his mind in the days to come.71
Campbell, who had been doubtful about letting Kelly go before the committee, regarded the scientist’s appearance as ‘a disaster’.72 It only muddied the waters and brought him no closer to winning his battle with the BBC. The exposure of Kelly did not have the result he craved. It did not ‘fuck Gilligan’. Even Campbell was becoming exhausted by this destructive struggle which was only adding to the Government’s many troubles. He concluded: ‘This was something which we were going to have to sort of put behind us and forget.’73
On 17 July, Tony Blair crossed the Atlantic, his mind now on a much grander stage than the bitter battle with the BBC and the cynical outing of David Kelly. The Prime Minister was to address a joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate, a rare accolade bestowed on only three of his predecessors, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. His star might be dimmed in his own country, but in America he still shone bright.
Acutely conscious of the scale of the honour and the size of the occasion, he was both thrilled and fretful. He spent more time on the 32-minute address to Congress than he would even on a party conference speech. On the flight over in a Boeing 777, he took his habitual place in seat A1 up in the first-class cabin. ‘He always liked to sit there.’74 He sat refining his speech as they crossed the Atlantic and displayed his nerves by constantly fussing about what suit and tie he should wear.75
As the Prime Minister worried about his clothing, an even more anxious man was hiding at his home in Oxfordshire, sliding into despair under the scorching pressure from the media, MPs and his superiors which menaced every aspect of his life. In David Kelly’s briefcase lay an unopened letter from the MoD containing an official reprimand.
A lengthy cavalcade of Lincoln limousines whisked the Prime Minister, his wife and their party from Andrews Air Force Base to Capitol Hill. They were allowed to take several guests so his wife had invited along two of her half-sisters who lived in America. Cherie was excited by the great occasion. ‘After all the negativity, it made my heart sing.’76
In Oxfordshire, the wife of David Kelly was increasingly troubled: ‘He looked dejected. He had a broken heart. He had shrunk into himself. He could not put two sentences together. He could not talk at all.’77
Tony Blair had not opened his mouth when he received his first standing ovation from the assembled Senators and Congressmen, who rose to applaud him the moment he appeared on the podium. The Prime Minister immediately had his audience charmed with a typically deft Blair joke. He remarked that one of the Senators had just been reminding him that the British burnt down Washington in 1812. ‘I know it’s kinda late,’ he quipped. ‘But sorry.’ His audience was rapturous.
After a sandwich lunch, at just past three o’clock in Oxfordshire, Dr David Kelly left his house telling his wife he was going for a walk. He bumped into a neighbour. ‘Hello, Ruth,’ he said. ‘Oh hello, David. How are things?’ ‘Not too bad,’ he said.78 He had in his pockets his mobile phone, a small bottle of mineral water, a packet of thirty powerful painkillers and an old knife.
Before Congress, Blair offered his audience mutual therapy about Iraq. He told them what both he and they most wanted to believe: history would judge them well, even if their contemporaries did not.
Talking about it later, he would say that he regarded his speech to Congress that day as one of the highlights of his premiership.79 In the most impressive section of the address, he elegantly affirmed his conviction in the transatlantic alliance while also reasserting his belief in multilateralism. The speech contained a strong message to the unilateralists around Bush who had made working with the Americans such agony and left Iraq in such a bloody mess.
‘The world’s security cannot be protected without the world’s heart being won. America must listen as well as lead,’ he told Congress, an unusually blunt message from him and one that he should have delivered much earlier.80
Donald Rumsfeld, one of the people at whom that was directed, gave a painful smile. Also watching in some agony was the Shadow Chancellor and future Tory leader Michael Howard, who had been invited to join the audience and now had to endure the misery of being forced to rise to join each of the nineteen standing ovations that Congress bestowed on Tony Blair. That hugely amused the Prime Minister’s party.81
To a final massive ovation, Blair left the podium ‘very excited’ by his rapturous reception.82 He then had a news conference with George Bush and a celebratory dinner at the White House. Noting how Bush’s staff deferred to him as ‘Mr President’, Blair joked to his aides: ‘Why can’t you be like them?’83
Dr David Kelly had clambered through some brambles to get to a secluded glade. He used the mineral water to swallow down twenty-nine of the painkillers, sat on the ground, took off his wristwatch and slit his left wrist.
His tragedy was over; for the Prime Minister, it had only just begun.
Tony Blair was still on a post-ovation high as the 777 took off from Andrews Air Force Base on a fourteen-hour flight to Tokyo. Pleased with his speech, pleased with its fabulous reception, pleased with himself, he settled into A1, had a couple of drinks and chatted and laughed with Cherie about what a wonderful day it had been. The applause of Congress still tingling in his ears, he and his wife had settled down to sleep when Godric Smith came through the curtains into the first-class cabin. He was carrying a satellite phone. It was Number 10: David Kelly had gone missing.84 Blair’s ears began to ring with a sound which wasn’t applause.
As the 777 continued its progress round the rim of the world, a few hours later the sun could be seen setting over the Bering Strait. The plane was jolted by severe turbulence. There was another call from Downing Street for the Prime Minister. As he handed the phone back to Smith, Blair slumped into his seat. From sitting upright, he just crashed. He spoke to his wife: ‘David Kelly is dead.’ She had ‘never seen Tony so distraught’.85 To David Manning, who was also in the cabin, he looked ‘shocked, upset and very disturbed’.86
He grasped at once that the Government was going to be accused of driving the scientist to suicide by allowing him to be exposed. Spin kills. That would be the charge. He saw that so quickly not least because he had presided over the ‘naming strategy’ meeting which had made his exposure inevitable. For the remainder of the flight, Blair made a string of calls on the satellite phone. One was to Alastair Campbell. He and Sally Morgan had left the Prime Minister’s party in Washington to fly back to London. As they were queuing
to disembark from the plane at Heathrow, Campbell received a text. His face went white. ‘Fuck,’ he groaned to Morgan. ‘I don’t believe it. Kelly’s dead.’87 Campbell, now in a very bad way, told Blair on the phone that he couldn’t handle it any more. He ‘felt the juggernaut coming my way’. He told Blair ‘he wanted out.’88 Blair placed other important calls to Jonathan Powell and to his old friend and new Lord Chancellor, Charlie Falconer. They rapidly agreed that it would not be enough simply to say that the death should be left to the police and the coroner. They would have to announce a judicial inquiry as the best hope of containing the fall-out. Blair believed he had no option but to surrender himself to a judge. By doing so, he accepted that his moral authority in the eyes of the public was so threadbare there was nowhere else to go. ‘If he hadn’t held the inquiry, for ever after Tony would have been accused of murdering David Kelly.’89
The Cabinet Secretary had taken that Friday off to play in the annual golf tournament between Whitehall and Westminster at the RAC course. His mobile rang with news that Kelly was dead as Sir Andrew Turnbull was about to play the thirteenth hole. ‘Like everyone, I was shocked rigid.’90 Turnbull’s mobile then didn’t stop ringing. He was soon in receipt of a message sent from over the Pacific by the frantic Prime Minister: ‘By the time I get off the plane, I have to be able to say what we are going to do about it.’
As Turnbull urgently consulted with other senior officials, the Cabinet Secretary was interrupted by one of the golf club’s staff. ‘You can’t use your mobile here,’ he said. ‘Believe me, it’s very important,’ replied Britain’s most senior civil servant. ‘I don’t care,’ said the jobsworth. ‘What’s more – tuck your shirt in.’91
Falconer rang Thomas Bingham, the senior Law Lord, to get some ideas about who would be a suitable judge to preside over the inquiry. He told Bingham that their ‘over-riding concern was to get someone with credibility’. The name that emerged was Brian Hutton, a septuagenarian Law Lord on the point of retirement with an impeccable reputation for being immune to political pressure. Falconer rang Blair in the Far East to say that Hutton sounded like a reasonable bet.92 A former Chief Justice in Northern Ireland, Lord Hutton was no radical. He had a reputation as a conservative and cautious judge. He could be relied on to interpret his mandate narrowly and investigate only the death of Dr Kelly, not the wider controversies about the war. He could also be expected to be sympathetic to arguments about the need to protect national security.
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