I was playing golf against the Cabinet secretary. As you do! It was the annual Whitehall v. Press match on 18 July 2003, and we were on the Old Course at the RAC Club in Epsom, Surrey, close to the Epsom Downs Racecourse. On the green of the twelfth hole, Andrew Turnbull’s phone rang. Aware that such devices were banned, he grabbed it from his golf bag and disappeared into a bunker. As he emerged, the genial and ultra-calm Turnbull looked shocked. ‘David Kelly is dead,’ he told me.
Kelly, the man at the centre of a ferocious row between Downing Street and the BBC, had gone missing from his home in Oxfordshire the previous day and had been found dead early that morning in an area of woodlands about a mile away. Tony Blair was travelling in the Far East and I, for once, was not with him, possibly because I did not want to miss the golf. As the senior civil servant in the Government, Turnbull was one of the handful first to be told.
That was the end of the golf. As we returned to the clubhouse, other matches were finishing early as the news spread. It was back to Westminster and Whitehall for reporters and opposition. Kelly’s death was the tragic outcome to a story that began on 29 May, when Andrew Gilligan, the BBC journalist, accused the Government of sexing-up the Iraq war dossier by inserting the claim that WMDs could be fired within forty-five minutes, even though it knew it to be dubious. Later he claimed Alastair Campbell was responsible.
I have to enter an apology here to readers because I seem to be giving the impression that whatever was happening, I was there. Of course I was not everywhere but let me add now, to get it out of the way, that I was with Campbell and Blair in Basra, Iraq, when they learnt of the Gilligan broadcast, and I had spent the day at Wimbledon with Campbell, by chance, when on 27 June he – in the classic words of one of his distinguished predecessors – ‘flipped his lid’. He had raced from the Centre Court to the Channel 4 studios in central London, and unleashed a fierce live attack on the BBC in front of an astonished Jon Snow.
Kelly, a ministry of defence expert on Iraqi weapons, had proofread the war dossier and been unhappy with parts of it, including the forty-five-minute claim. In May he met Gilligan and they spoke on a non-attributable basis. He told of his concerns about that claim. Gilligan presented his report on Today at the end of the month. Blair, his team, and the press were walking around what had until recently been Saddam Hussein’s opulent summer palace on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab waterway in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.
The Prime Minister was visiting the 7th Armoured Brigade – the Desert Rats – who had made it their headquarters, and he used it as his platform to thank the British troops who had helped depose Saddam. We were several hours ahead of the UK, and Campbell and his colleagues were getting frantic calls from London telling them about the Gilligan broadcast. By now Campbell had moved away from front-line briefing and his PM’s spokesman duties were shared between Tom Kelly and Godric Smith.
Gilligan had set off a huge storm and the next day the papers were full of demands that Blair and Bush publish evidence of the weapons of mass destruction that they had used to justify going to war, and on the row over the forty-five-minute claim. No one knew at this stage who had been a source, or THE source, for Gilligan’s report.
A military war was succeeded by a war of words as Campbell accused the BBC of lying with the assertion that Downing Street had swept aside the concerns of the intelligence community to insert the forty-five-minute claim into the dossier. Number 10 demanded an apology but the BBC went on the attack and responded to Campbell’s request for answers to twelve questions about the Gilligan report by accusing him of pursuing a personal vendetta against the reporter. The corporation launched a point-by-point rejection of Campbell’s criticism and stood by its story. The response from Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s director of news, reached Campbell at Wimbledon.
I had been invited there by Gavin Partington, the former GMTV political correspondent, who was now communications chief for the Lawn Tennis Association. I was surprised as we gathered for lunch before the tennis that Alastair, his son Calum and his best mate Charlie were there, as well as several others from the world of politics, including Julie Kirkbride, the Tory MP.
I sat to the right of Alastair in the Centre Court, with Calum to his left. We watched wins by Andy Roddick and Venus Williams but Alastair was not with us in spirit. He spent almost the entire afternoon furiously tapping on his phone, and occasionally disappearing to make calls. His son’s entreaties to concentrate on the tennis went unheeded.
At around 5.45 p.m. it began to rain and further play looked doubtful. Alastair and Calum left smartly. I thought no more of it until, when I was returning to Wapping for an evening function, the news desk called me and asked if I knew that ‘Campbell had just flayed the BBC’ on Channel 4. I had to admit that I had been with him an hour before.
I learnt that on his way back to town, Campbell decided he had to respond after listening to the way the BBC had presented the story. He went back to Number 10 and, after a discussion with colleagues including Blair, headed straight to Channel 4. The office had been divided on whether he should do it. Blair told him not to go over the top.
His appearance was a surprise to Snow, who thought Campbell had turned down the chance of an interview – as he had, twice. ‘The first I knew about it was when I was told through my earpiece “Alastair Campbell is in the building”,’ said Snow. Within seconds he was on the set, railing at the state of BBC journalism and attacking its refusal to respond to his call for an apology:
This is an attempt by the Government to get the BBC to admit that a fundamental attack on the integrity of the Government and the Prime Minister and the intelligence agencies, let alone people – the evil spin-doctors in the dark who do their dirty work in the minds of a lot of journalists – let them accept for once that they have got it wrong.
It all spilled out, Campbell’s frustration left him less fluent than usual. ‘I have never met Andrew Gilligan. I don’t have a vendetta against him,’ he insisted. It was an outspoken performance, and the spin doctor had truly emerged from the shadows.
The next day, Sir Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, opined: ‘There are only one or two explanations for his behaviour. One is he has flipped his lid, or he is demob happy. And if he is not demob happy someone should give him cause to be.’ Campbell himself admitted in his diaries that he got too angry, although the clips used in later bulletins were good, he thought. Blair felt he was too angry and Fiona Millar, Campbell’s partner, was livid he had done it at all. ‘But we kept going and I was sure we were going to win,’ noted Campbell in his diaries.
In July, David Kelly was rebuked by the ministry of defence for an unauthorized meeting with a journalist. His name emerged into the public domain after reporters rang the MoD press office with different names and kept going until they got the right one. It would probably have come out anyway but Downing Street and the ministry wanted the name out there, mainly to show that Kelly was not an intelligence official but a weapons expert. On 15 and 16 July, he gave evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee and the intelligence and security committee. At the former he was given a tough time, being dismissed as ‘chaff’ by one MP. The next day he went for his afternoon walk, never to be seen alive again.
Blair set up the Hutton Inquiry into the circumstances leading to Kelly’s death. A journalist friend, Tom Mangold, said: ‘I guess he could not cope with the firestorm that developed after he gave what he regarded as a routine briefing to Gilligan.’ Alastair Campbell, by his outspoken appearance on live television, had become part of the story, something that spin doctors before and since knew they could not afford to allow to happen.
Midway through the Hutton Inquiry in August, Campbell announced that he and Fiona Millar were leaving Downing Street, a move he had contemplated a year before. By now, Blair was ready for him to go, as he had not been earlier. His nine years at Blair’s side came to an end. For people like me, who had known him as a friend since his days at the Mirror, his departure was sad but probably inevitable. The death of David Kelly was one of the blackest moments in Blair’s and Campbell’s careers.
It was inevitable, given the vehemence of their denials of Gilligan’s report and their pursuit of the BBC thereafter, that one way or another Kelly’s name would come out. A good man who until then had pursued an anonymous, middle-ranking career was suddenly across the front pages and in front of a senior Commons committee, something for which he was clearly ill-equipped. The threat of disciplinary action by the ministry of defence for talking to a journalist weighed heavily. He became the tragic victim of a fight in which he was not a contestant; and his death left Campbell, Blair, the intelligence community and the defence ministry shattered.
In a splash on 16 January, I wrote that Blair was facing a tumultuous twenty-four hours that would decide whether he was prime minister at the time of the next election. It was not hyperbole, although I’ve been guilty of that many a time, I’m sure. The Hutton report was due the day after the second reading vote on tuition fees, the most important in his years in power. Again it showed the burdens on any prime minister; often they are fighting two, three, four critical battles at the same time, and you wonder how they can possibly concentrate on all of them.
At the end of January 2004, Lord Hutton reported, clearing Blair of any ‘dishonourable, underhand or duplicitous’ conduct in the lead-up to the death of Kelly. He also concluded that the Government had not ‘sexed up’ intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to war. He said the allegation that the Government knew that the forty-five-minute claim was false was ‘unfounded’. He also found that no one could have anticipated that Kelly would take his own life.
The report was slammed in many quarters as a whitewash but Blair had come through the most perilous period of his premiership. However, he no longer had his closest aide and friend by his side. And the death of David Kelly and the repercussions of the war would stay with him forever.