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Reporting on the workings of Britain's government
Contemporary Review, May, 2005 by Richard Gaunt
IN July 2004 the British Academy assembled a panel of distinguished public commentators--William Twining, Peter Hennessy and Onora O'Neill--to consider the outcome of Lord Hutton's inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly and also the report of a committee of Privy Counsellors, chaired by Lord Butler, reviewing the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Their reflections on these two reports have now been brought together in a book. Hutton and Butler: Lifting the Lid on the Workings of Power, edited and introduced by the Academy's President, W.G. Runciman, together with three discussions or interpretive 'glosses' on the main contributions, written by Michael Beloff, Richard Wilson and John Lloyd, with a concluding essay by Michael Quinlan.
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Though the Blair Government's decision to commit British military forces to the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 remains a matter of pressing--and partisan--political disagreement in the present, especially in the election on 5 May, the issues which Lords Hutton and Butler addressed are already becoming matters of history. As William Twining comments, 'once they have performed a short-term political function, reports of this kind tend to survive mainly as fodder for academic specialists to pick over at leisure'. It is clear, in retrospect, how complementary both the Butler and Hutton reports are, the one informing and enlarging upon the other. Yet this was far from conscious design. Indeed, it is worth remembering that it took the tragic suicide of Britain's leading authority on WMD, Dr David Kelly, and the decision by President George W. Bush to institute an inquiry into the American intelligence about WMD (itself provoked by the public comments of David Kaye, a former US Chief Weapons Inspector) to stimulate the formation of both inquiries.
Lord Hutton's precise and possibly over-nice legal definition of his terms of reference disappointed a public (and media) hungry to uncover more about issues which he regarded as tangential to the inquiry's principal focus--the death of Dr Kelly. This demand was partly met by the Butler inquiry--yet only as an inevitable and essentially pragmatic response to President Bush's decision, rather than from a desire to sate the public's appetite for apportioning and attributing blame. Indeed, an intriguing under-current brought out by the book is the sense of disappointed expectations raised by both inquiries, with the prevailing perception being that whilst the public's erstwhile villains (in the Government and, to a lesser extent, intelligence community) were almost entirely exonerated, its champions (not least the BBC) stood implicated or condemned. Yet as Michael Quinlan comments, 'the more salient the "blame" theme is made within an inquiry, the stronger the pressures become for careful lawyerly process, with all its costs in time and money'.
Little wonder, perhaps, that the first part of the book considers the double-edged nature of inquiries of this kind. There is much relevant discussion in William Twining and Michael Beloff's essays about the 'peculiarly British practice of using senior judges to conduct quasi-judicial inquiries into politically significant events' and some marked difference of opinion between them about the wisdom of serving members of the judiciary being offered, and subsequently accepting, such invitations. Unlike William Twining, Mr Beloff firmly believes that judges should not perform tasks which are 'properly those of our elected representatives'. He fears that judges might lose 'that appearance of being above the fray, which is essential to public confidence in the independence and impartiality of the judiciary' and contrasts the British situation with the American system, in which the concept of the separation of powers between the political and the judicial is more deeply entrenched. In this context, however, some of Michael Beloff's concern may be vitiated by two important observations. In the first place, as Peter Hennessy notes in his essay, the 'detailed revelations and judgements' which emerged from these inquiries exposed a 'yawning gap between the [skill and professionalism of the] Hutton hearings and both the reach and the forensic powers of the [House of] Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee', which had published its own findings on the decision to go to war in Iraq in June 2003. This has led to new guidance in respect of select committees, including the suggestion that MPs improve their questioning and forensic training or consider the employment of counsel. Put simply, inquiries like those chaired by Lords Hutton and Butler enjoy a level of authority, respect and access (as well as government co-operation) which is beyond the current resources of Parliamentary inquiry. Whether this is democratically healthy is another matter.
Similarly contrary to Michael Beloff's concerns is the fact that Lord Hutton retired immediately after his report was published, in much the same way that Lord Butler, when asked to chair the WMD inquiry, did so as a retired civil servant rather than an aspirant to further career opportunities. That said, Mr Beloff's wider point remains valid in a more important sense, also borne out by events leading up to the second Gulf war. As W.G. Runciman points out, Butler's report clearly suggested that the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee or JIC (who played a crucial role in the compilation of what popularly came to be known as the 'dodgy dossier' of WMD intelligence) should, in future, be someone '"who is demonstrably beyond influence, and thus probably in his last post"--an unmistakable hint that John Scarlett [Chairman of the JIC at the time] could have been all too consciously influenced by an awareness that compliance with the Prime Minister's known wishes might not be unhelpful to his subsequent career'. The fact that John Scarlett was subsequently (and in the controversial circumstances of the time, perhaps, overhastily) promoted to another high-ranking position--Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service--seems to bear out the wisdom of insulating, so far as anybody reasonably can, such politically sensitive positions.
