Global Policy Forum

How the King of Spin
Won the Day but Lost the Plot

By Patrick Cockburn and Andy McSmith

Iraq is in chaos, British soldiers are being killed, no weapons of mass destruction have been found. Meanwhile the Prime Minister's director of communications has launched an attack on the BBC. Alastair Campbell's extraordinary one-man war on the Corporation diverted attention away from the real question of whether Tony Blair lied or was misled about the reasons for going to war. The Independent on Sunday has consistently questioned the existence of the alleged weapons that the Prime Minister gave as a reason for invading Iraq. This newspaper's reports helped bring about Mr Campbell's unprecedented appearance before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. But what have we learnt? In this special four-page report an expert asks the unanswered questions about those WMD, and our award-winning correspondent Patrick Cockburn describes the escalating violence of post-war Iraq, where British troops face a new enemy. Our political editor Andy McSmith begins with the story of a remarkable week in Westminster.

Spin doctors are like poisoners", according to a joke that the former secretary of state for health, Frank Dobson, was fond of repeating. "There are famous poisoners and there are successful poisoners, but there are no famous, successful poisoners."

Alastair Campbell is indisputably the country's most famous spin doctor, with television crews on permanent duty outside his Hampstead home yesterday, as they have been most of the week. Two years ago, however, after a fly- on-the-wall documentary about life inside Downing Street had provided rich source material for satirists, Mr Campbell seemed to take to heart the idea that he could do his job better if the public saw less of him. He stopped giving daily briefings to political journalists, handing that task over to career civil servants, and vanished, to emerge only once in the benign role of a marathon runner for charity.

Now that shy, retiring Mr Campbell is no more. His three-hour appearance in front of a Commons select committee dominated the political news on Wednesday and Thursday. It was followed on Friday by his extraordinary appearance in the Channel 4 studios, where he turned up after the 7pm news bulletin had begun, demanding to be interviewed live.

At Westminster there are dazed-looking political correspondents whose ears are red and ear drums tender from a sudden outbreak of off-the-record briefings.

What finally drove the Prime Minister's director of communications to emerge from his lair was something he read a week ago in The Independent on Sunday. The Government had been keeping a nervous eye on the proceedings of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, which was holding public hearings into the origins of the war with Iraq.

There are, in fact, two Commons inquiries into the same subject, running parallel. It is possible that the most interesting evidence has gone to another committee, the Intelligence and Security Committee, which has been interrogating the heads of the intelligence services. It is impossible to be more definite, because the committee meets in secret. Even the dates and times of its meetings are secret. Its chair, the former chief whip Ann Taylor, and all its members are chosen by the Prime Minister, and his office has first sight of its reports and can remove anything that it interprets as a breach of security.

The Foreign Affairs Committee, by contrast, is owned and controlled by the House of Commons. This point was rammed home after the last general election, when the government whips made a vain effort to remove the committee's long-serving chairman, Donald Anderson, a former diplomat who will be retiring at the next election.

That move, coinciding with an equally crude attempt to axe the chairman of the Transport Committee, provoked one of the rare instances of a revolt by backbench MPs, which forced the Government to climb down.

The first witness in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee hearing was the former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who suggested the entire legal basis for going to war with Iraq could be collapsing, because the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein was alleged to possess had not materialised.

After him came the former international development secretary, Clare Short, who made the memorable comment that part of the Government's case for going to war had been built on "honourable deception".

The committee also heard from the BBC's defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, who is the clearly the current holder of the title of Downing Street's least favourite journalist. Mr Gilligan repeated his well-known allegation that the intelligence chiefs were unhappy with the way the government propaganda machine had used intelligence information to present the case for going to war. Mr Gilligan claimed that when he asked his source how this problem came about "the answer was a single word, which was 'Campbell'."

Downing Street knew all this over a week ago, when it rejected a second request from Mr Anderson for Mr Campbell to appear before his committee. But then Mr Campbell read a report in The Independent on Sunday that the committee was going to hold him personally to blame for the way the case for the Iraq war had been presented.

At this point, Mr Campbell persuaded Tony Blair that if he was going to be attacked he should have the opportunity to defend himself. When he appeared before the committee on Wednesday he clearly had his strategy worked out in advance. On the one hand, he apologised for the now notorious "dodgy dossier" put out by Downing Street in January, plagiarising the work of an Iraqi academic, Ibrahim al-Marashi. What Mr Campbell did not know was that Dr Marashi was sitting directly behind him as he apologised.

The other part of Campbell's strategy was an astonishingly direct attack on the BBC's defence correspondent. Banging the table he said: "I find it incredible, and I mean incredible, that people can report - based on one single anonymous uncorroborated source - that the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, the intelligence agencies [and] people like myself connived to persuade Parliament to send British forces into action on a lie. That is the allegation. I tell you, until the BBC acknowledge that is a lie, I will keep banging on - and they had better issue an apology pretty quickly."

Two days later, he was hammering out the same point during his unscheduled appearance on Channel 4 News, that nothing less than a public, humiliating apology from the BBC would do.

In the long history of public rows between the BBC and successive governments, there has never been a spat quite so public as this one. It seems that it can only end in humiliation, either for the Corporation or for Mr Blair's most powerful adviser.

One theory aired yesterday is that Mr Campbell has finally lost his grip on himself. Sir Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary, suggested that he had "flipped his lid, completely gone crackers, or is demob happy". Alan Duncan, the Tory MP who briefly acted as a spin doctor for William Hague, similarly suggested that "he has completely lost the plot and is now in a vicious personal vendetta against the BBC".

On the other side, there are a lot of people in Parliament, including several in the Cabinet, who think it is time the Government gave the BBC a kicking. Mr Campbell has even had supportive phone calls from Tory MPs who do not agree that he "lost the plot" at all.

Privately, Mr Campbell sees himself as the victim not the aggressor in this particular spat, a man who endures a great deal of criticism from newspapers and broadcasters and very rarely hits back. He claims to have tried to have his differences with the BBC settled quietly, through a private exchange of letters, which he hoped would produce a brief correction read out on the Today programme.

Instead, he encountered BBC executives determined to stand by their defence correspondent, and faced the prospect of being censured in a report by a Commons committee for something he adamantly insists he did not do. It appears that he has the backing not just of Mr Blair, but of the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, and other senior intelligence figures.

The conclusion of this extraordinary story will probably be provided by one or both of the reports from Commons committees. The Foreign Affairs Committee looks likely to give a definitive verdict on whether Downing Street did or did not "sex up" intelligence reports, based on what it was told by Mr Straw, even though it has been denied access to the original intelligence documents on which the Government's published dossiers were based.

The Intelligence Committee, because it meets in secret, will probably have access to more sensitive material, and will therefore be in a better position to pass judgement. In the unlikely event that either committee endorses the BBC's allegations, Mr Campbell would have to resign. Indeed, it would be difficult to see how the Prime Minister himself could survive a scandal of that magnitude.

In the more probable event that the committees come down on Mr Campbell's side, that will be enough to satisfy most of the House of Commons, and will put the BBC in a difficult position, although whether it will issue the apology demanded of it remains to be seen.

There is, however, a third way of looking at the whole debacle, which could be called "the Robin Cook way". Mr Cook, who has established himself as the most incisive critic of the Iraq war, has had nothing to say in public about the more entertaining but less significant war, between Mr Campbell and the broadcasters. He is said to be privately irritated with the BBC for making too much out of something that may not be true and is not the main issue. "For me, the real issue is that we were told things as a justification for war which have plainly turned out to be wrong since the war was over," Mr Cook said on Friday.

He has compiled a list of claims made by the Government before it went to war, all of which remained unproven, including that Iraq had rebuilt its chemical weapons factories, was developing nuclear weapons, and was trying to buy uranium from Africa. All were in the definitive government document of last September, which Mr Blair and his communications director still insist was accurate, which was based on what the intelligence services said, and which provided the justification for war. "All of those were in the September dossier," said Mr Cook. "All of them were wrong."

The arguments: They cannot all be right, surely?

In respect of that [second] dossier and the first dossier, not a single fact in them is actually disputed.

Tony Blair, Prime Minister

The mistake that was made there was it was a briefing paper which then included intelligence and it was not subject to proper procedures or proper checking ... Notwithstanding the very substantial error that the sources of the document were not attributed at all, and that there were changes made, for example "opposition groups" to "terrorist organisations", the accuracy of the document I do not think is seriously at issue. But of course it has been an embarrassment to the Government and lessons have been learnt ... to put it in the vernacular, it was a complete Horlicks in the way it was produced.

Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary and MP for Blackburn

I certainly accept it was a mistake. You and he both support Blackburn and maybe you drink Horlicks down there, but I think down the road, in the rather less effete Burnley, they will probably say it is a storm in a teacup.

Alastair Campbell, Downing Street's director of communications

The clear inadequacy of your briefing led the Prime Minister to, I am sure inadvertently, very seriously mislead the House of Commons on 3 February ... The House of Commons a few weeks later took a decision on whether or not to go to war and this particular document was an element in that decision. That was a very, very grave failure of briefing of the Prime Minister by yourself.

Sir John Stanley, Conservative member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee

I think that is a very, very grave charge and I think it is one that I reject ... the Secret Intelligence Service, the lead agency on this, volunteered the information for public use.

Alastair Campbell

The real charge against the Government is not academic plagiarism but that its claims that Saddam had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction ... have turned out to be wildly out of touch with reality.

Robin Cook, former leader of the Commons

Did I hear the Prime Minister correctly when he described a plagiarised document with words and meanings altered as "factually accurate"? When exactly did he first realise that the dodgy dossier was a complete Horlicks? Was it after Colin Powell told the Security Council it was a fine document with "exquisite detail" of Iraqi deception? Why did he not tell the rest of us before taking this country to war?

Alex Salmond MP at Prime Minister's Questions

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