The Sexed Up Dossier | The Legacy of Iraq Today - Interview with Steve Richards | 4
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From Wondery, I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. And this is British Scandal. MUSIC

And today we're concluding our series on the death of David Kelly. I remember finding this so dense and hard to access at the time. There were all these claims and counterclaims being made about the war. But what's been clear since we've been doing this series is there's this really tragic story at the heart of it. Somebody who gets caught up in the middle of these tragedies.

two huge institutions. That's right. It is very complicated. So just to remind you of some of the key points, in 2003, the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan made a claim on the BBC that the government sexed up a dossier about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. That creates a huge row with the government, especially Alistair Campbell, who denied he did any such thing. And that's when UN weapons expert David Kelly comes in.

So he turns out to be the source of that report. He gets dragged over the coals in hearings before Parliament. Then days later, he's found dead near his Oxfordshire home. Yes, and that transforms this whole story from a political row into this huge reckoning. The government holds a public inquiry into what happened, led by a judge called Lord Hutton.

He rules that David Kelly's death was suicide, but he also comes back with some judgments that were seen as a surprise at the time. He concludes that the BBC's reporter Andrew Gilligan's allegations that the dossier was exaggerated were unfounded. He also finds that the BBC is at fault and that the government is effectively in the clear.

So the government might have been cleared by Hutton, but meanwhile, weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq and opposition to Britain's involvement in the war just grew and grew. It is a complicated picture, exactly. So what impact did the scandal of David Kelly have on the relationship between the British people and their politicians? One man who's really thought a lot about this is the writer Steve Richards.

He covered the Blair Premiership as a political journalist at the time and has written about Tony Blair in his new book, The Prime Ministers, which came out last year. He also presents a fantastic podcast called Rock and Roll Politics. Podcasts will never take off. Steve says the death of David Kelly started a debate over whether Blair had lied to go to war, but actually it's a lot more interesting than that. We'll ask him how the controversy has affected Britain ever since.

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Steve, so much of the focus is on the so-called sexed-up dossier. Do you think the government could have made the case for intervention on humanitarian grounds and effectively avoided any controversy at all? No, because Tony Blair, from the beginning...

assumed that there would be what he would call a third way in dealing with Iraq, which was, yes, he wanted to back the United States and the Bush administration, but he wanted to get as much of the Labour Party behind him

that particular mission. And the only way he could was to go into the UN and try and get some UN resolution. And that would only involve the weapons of mass destruction, so-called. And so you had to get evidence and proof

that Saddam was ignoring previous UN resolutions and was still carrying on with his WMD programme. So there needed to be an act of persuasion about all of this. And this is where Tony Blair started embarking on a dark route. As part of the act of persuasion, they produced this dossier. And at the time when it was launched...

It was part of an act of persuasion about the case he was making in effect to go to war with the United States. It became afterwards a sort of object of absolute feverish contention and plucked out of context in ways that were just bizarre, sinister,

weird and quite typical of the way British politics is conducted. It became the subject of hysteria, frankly. Because just a few years previously, the United Kingdom, the United States and others had intervened in Kosovo without having to make the case for weapons of mass destruction. Obviously, Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, two very different leaders in very different situations. But Blair had already set a context for intervention. Why didn't he just follow the Kosovo playbook?

This was too highly charged. It was partly to do with the view of the Bush administration in the United Kingdom. It's forgotten now because we've had Trump since, but the Bush administration was viewed with horror by large sections, especially of the Labour Party, including significant sections of his government.

Now, Blair believed that he had to show the electorate, the media, particularly the Murdoch media, that he could work with a Republican president as well as he did with a Democrat president, his mate Bill Clinton. So he was up for this alliance, but he knew the likes of Robin Cook would only be the cabinet minister who ultimately resigned, would only be up for this if he could find a route through the U.N.,

And so that was the difference. I mean, it was the scale of it as well and the risks involved in invading Iraq. But the Bush administration at the time aroused huge amounts of emotion within the Labour Party. Which brings us round to the start of our story, Andrew Gilligan. Now,

Big question. Did Andrew Gilligan accurately report what he was told? Well, he might have reported what he was told.

But the way it was reported suggests he was told quite a lot by more than one person. And it was very interesting when the Gilligan report came out. Again, this has become mythologised. One two-way at sort of six in the morning between John Humphreys and Andrew Gilligan. It was a lot more than that. It was headlines repeated throughout the day. And the essence of...

The Gilligan story was that this dossier, this so-called sexed-up dossier, had been signed off against the wishes of senior intelligence sources. Now, the problem with that story from the word go was that the dossier had literally been signed off by the senior figures in the Joint Intelligence Committee. So it didn't quite add up.

And I remember bumping into Robin Cook, who was opposed to the war, resigned famously from the government over the war, on the day of the Gilligan Report. And he said, this is a complete disaster for those of us against the war. We've got a strong case, but this doesn't make it. This report is all over the place. And then Gilligan followed it up with an article in the Mail on Sunday,

I bet the BBC wouldn't have allowed a report in The Guardian, but the Mail on Sunday got the full go-ahead, sort of in a very imprecise way, blaming Alastair Campbell and Blair. But if you read the article, it's not quite clear what he's alleging. And at the time, although this triggered a war between the BBC and the government, it was a sort of...

I remember speaking to a very senior BBC manager involved in the battle with Alastair Campbell, and he described it as, this has been good fun, we're enjoying this. Now, of course, when David Kelly died, it absolutely changed the context in which this dossier was being held.

fought over, it became a tragedy and it raised the political temperature another thousand degrees. But no one in advance could have anticipated that. So the Gilligan story wasn't a kind of accurate portrayal of, in full if you read it. There were elements of truth there and he had clearly spoken to David Kelly.

And he, Kelly, reflected quite a lot of doubts within the intelligence community. But the impression was given that he had spoken to figures far more senior than Kelly. And as I say, it didn't quite make sense in that context because they had signed this thing off. So much of the post-Iraq narrative, and you alluded to it earlier, has been...

hysterical, has been so overblown and a lot of it focuses on Tony Blair's personal character. Do you think had Tony Blair not initially sold himself as being whiter than white and all things like that in the run-up to the 1997 election that this opposing reaction on the other end might not have been as ferocious? Had he perhaps had a more modest selling of himself when he first got elected, people might not have been so outraged over Iraq.

Well, I think in general terms, he made a mistake, and I think he has said this himself, in going on and on about sleaze in opposition, because he then was hoist with his own petard in government. And as you say, I think at one point he said, if anyone was perceived in his government not to be purer than pure or whiter than white, they would lose their job. Well, you know, that means any allegation and you're sacked. So it was ridiculous.

But what's interesting about Iraq is so many people, and including people, commentators who know him quite well, have said, what a weird aberration from this pragmatic, expedient figure to this crusading evangelist who would do anything to go to war in Iraq.

And I don't think that adds up either. I mean, for those who are, you know, saying he's a war criminal, kind of almost loved the bloody battle that ensued. How do they make sense of other things like the Northern Ireland peace process? If he was this maniac, you know, out to sort of kill people. Doesn't make sense. But equally, this leap from pragmatist to evangelist

also doesn't quite add up. And I think, as I said earlier, that in fact, what Blair did was wholly in character. He sat there and thought, right, Bush is going to go to war in Iraq. I want to support it for lots of different reasons, partly pragmatic ones. He didn't want to break with America. He thought when Labour were anti-America, they lost Middle England, they lost the newspapers.

up to the point, as you've said earlier. It worked in Kosovo. It will work again now. But he knew he couldn't just back Bush. His opponent at the time, the leader of the opposition, Ian Duncan Smith, said he would back Bush without, he wasn't bothered about the UN. He would just back him. Blair knew he couldn't do that. So he found a third way in which he persuaded Bush to go to the UN in advance of the war.

But this third way didn't work for him. Blair became trapped. There was no way he was going to get this resolution. And so he moved on a path towards darkness, but it wasn't out of character at all. And he found himself in a place, by the end of it all, where he had no choice but to be evangelical. There's no way he was going to

withdraw from the mission. Bush gave him the chance to do it. That would have been utterly humiliating. And just to extend that thought a second, do you think he lied to go to war? No. Well, this is where terms become pretty useless and too emotive. He put a case...

He was a lawyer putting a case. If you remember when he knew where this was going, which is when Bush gave his axis of evil speech, Jack Straw told me, Jack Straw was foreign secretary by then, he said, we knew then that America was going to invade Iraq and we had to decide what to do.

And Blair knew he was not going to move away from the US over this. So he had to find a way through. And part of that was to put a case about the WMD, which we all know the intelligence was speculative, to quote one of the endless reviews into this. But he was putting a case, and he could have put other cases. Blair had a sharp enough mind to...

To analyze the Middle East and to realize the consequences of war would be in many ways catastrophic. It was a deeply divided country and it could lead to civil war. His loyalty mind did not go in that direction because it wouldn't help the case he was going to put.

So he did put a case. He missed out all the doubts because if he had expressed them, he wouldn't have won the case in the House of Commons, in his party and in the public. It's forgotten now, but once the war started, as ever in Britain, public opinion moved towards him. So it was a one-sided argument that he put. But I think lying is too emotive. This was a debate going on.

and a highly charged debate in which he put one particular sequence of events. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the f*** are you talking about, you insane Hollywood a**hole?

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No, I think that he chose to read the intelligence in the way that would help him move towards his goal, which was to back Trump.

He saw the material. He's not daft. He knew some of it was unreliable. And indeed, one of the more interesting questions about this whole thing, instead of in Britain as ever, immediately it was, is Blair a liar? Did he lie? And so why was the intelligence so inaccurate? That question has not really been posed and never answered, but he knew some of it was speculative.

But he needed it to put the case. He said to me on several occasions, though, that he now regretted that dossier and he wished they'd just published the intelligence roars to avoid the whole sexed-up debate. And he said if you saw that intelligence roar, you would have been terrified.

There are so many tragedies involved in this story, in the wider Iraq narrative, but particularly the suicide of David Kelly is so difficult and so sad. What was the impact of his suicide on Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell?

It completely changed the context in which this kind of nightmarish battle was going on with the media. I know Alistair Campbell was utterly traumatised by it. And I spoke to him a few days afterwards and he said to me, you know, obviously I'm going to go soon. You know, I'm not going to carry on with all of this. And he left that

summer, I think, and left number 10. It was a manageable row between the government and the BBC, of which there had been many. In my view, the BBC wholly misjudged the nature of that row, but it was still manageable. They thought Campbell and others were playing games to intimidate the BBC. I knew Campbell and Blair were genuinely furious by Gilligan's reporting.

But anyway, these kind of things happen. When you got the key figure, the source, David Kelly, committing suicide, it absolutely ramped up the nature of this battle. And you say it was a tragedy. And I think it had a big impact on Blair and Campbell in that context. But also the row with the BBC became more intense. There were times when...

Blair contemplated reforming the BBC on the basis of its reporting of Iraq. He never did in the end. But you cannot underestimate the scale of fury in Number 10 with the BBC original reporting of Gilligan and then at first the wholehearted 100% defence of that reporting. And in the BBC, as I say, they misjudged it at first and thought it was a bit of a game.

But after the Kelly death, they too were freaked out, and rightly so, because suddenly there was a very accessible personal tragedy mixed in with all the other intense rows going on around all of this. The noise around Dr Kelly's death was overwhelming. What do you think of the conspiracy theories that grew around it? There have been questions asked over the circumstances. Complete rubbish. None of them...

So many of the things swirling around, the sort of poster-out thing, just don't add up when you stand back from them. This was a terrible, terrible tragedy of a figure who had largely functioned behind the scenes, suddenly emerging.

at the front of the political stage and being, you know, kind of interrogated by select committees and all the rest of it. And he obviously found it unbearable. And it is terrible, terrible, terrible. But there isn't a single conspiracy theory which stands up when you scrutinise it for more than a second or two.

And at its crudest, it wasn't to anyone's benefit that David Kelly's body was found in those tragic circumstances. Let's say it made the life in Number 10 more hellish. It made the life of the BBC more hellish. Kelly had already spoken, so there was nothing else he had to say. He had said it to Gilligan privately.

And so it's just crazy, these conspiracies. I mean, there's enough fascinating stuff about Iraq and Blair's thinking and, you know, what happened then between the BBC and the government without having to imagine a load of madness to go with it. As we found out. Yeah.

What about the way that the government and the state, or indeed just the powerful, treat people like David Kelly in scenarios like this? Do you think enough thought was given perhaps to his protection, even though he'd effectively implicated himself? He finds himself in this middle of this incredible storm, which obviously doesn't help him.

Do you think governments and the powerful have more responsibility to people like David Kelly, even if they do implicate themselves, to offer them some sort of shield? Yeah, I think in an ideal world, definitely. And of course, retrospectively, 100%, because we know what happened to him. But it's difficult to imagine what it was like at the time, before this terrible event. They were both sites, especially Number 10, are...

gripped by their anger, their desire to prove that the Gilligan story was not right, and also to expose the source. Because, as I said at the time, people assumed Gilligan, I think he used the plural sources, that the sources were those involved in compiling the so-called sexed-up dossier.

And they knew that couldn't be the case in number 10 because they had checked with Scarlett and others. Now, you could condemn Scarlett for signing off this thing, but he did sign it off. And therefore, the story didn't add up. So they were so determined to expose who the source was.

that I think everybody neglected the sheer pressures that might arise when the source was exposed. You've touched on this a little bit, Steve. I mean, the impact of how those events unfolded had a fundamental impact on the BBC. What do you think it meant for an institution whose reputation was based on integrity?

Well, they took a hit, although I have to say I don't think they took the hit they should have taken. In this sense, a lot of the newspapers who normally go for the BBC act the BBC because they were so, by then, anti-Blair and anti-the Labour government. And the BBC felt protected a bit by that. And so, on one level, I think the BBC got away with it. And there are many lessons for the BBC in this. So, for example...

The day after the Gilligan report, when all hell broke loose, or a few days after, the then head of news and current affairs came out and said, we defend every word of these reports. And as I said, they shouldn't have done. They clearly hadn't read them, the transcripts. And then you got Greg Dyke, the then director general, defending everything without reading a word. He had been on holiday.

And I'm afraid this is part of a pattern with the BBC. We've seen it recently with Bashir that senior managers, and there are many of them, and highly paid, do not pay enough attention to the detail. Tony Hall, for example, is not dodgy. But in his dealings with Bashir, he would have been complacent and lazy, frankly.

And so it was with this. And so there's a theory that the BBC was cowed by it all. And that wasn't the case. They carried on doing quite a lot of stuff which was very critical of Blair. In some ways, the battle carried on. And, you know, there was one case where Blair got this whole load of senior BBC managers in to discuss it well after the Kelly tragedy.

And the BBC manager said to Blair, yeah, yeah, we're aware of this and the imbalance and so on. And Blair said to his then new press secretary, David Hill, well, you know, these guys seem to have got it. And David Hill said it won't change anything, and it didn't. So I don't think they were cowed in quite the way, again, the sort of caricature narrative of all of this has developed.

And on the Hutton report, it's seen as exonerating the government and damning the BBC. It was seen by some at the time as a whitewash and still in retrospect. Is it fair that it's seen as a whitewash? No. You know, he looked at all the evidence and I... You see, everyone following the Hutton inquiry followed it with their own prejudices. They had already decided. And during it, you know, those who thought...

he was going to damn the government or Blair and Campbell, praised Hutton for his forensic questioning and all the rest of it, and then couldn't believe it when he came up with this verdict. Now, Blair said when it came up, this is too good. And he was right in the sense that the media didn't accept it because it didn't, you know, match their narratives that they had already decided upon.

But it was a very narrow remit. It wasn't, was it right to go to war? That is a different question. And by the way, on that, I'm wholly on the side of those who think it was wrong to go to war. But to go back to Hutton, he had a very narrow remit to look at the circumstances that led to the death of David Kelly.

And on that, his report was much fairer than mythology allows. The BBC did make a series of errors. And I remember discussing it with BBC managers at the time. They were, I was, say, writing columns. And they didn't like the fact that I was not with them on this. I had opposed the war but backed number 10 in this particular battle...

because I knew that the reporting that had triggered it was not wholly accurate. We need to look at the legacy of these events. And in the months and years that followed, how would you summarise the effect on Blair? The effect on Blair, I think, is huge. You can't be a human being and not for it to have had a huge effect. The...

There are different ways of looking at it. In terms of the electoral impact, it was limited. It's worth remembering that he went on to win another election after Iraq, as did Bush and as did quite a few of the other leaders who backed the war.

But I know that election, it was the 2005 election, he found quite dark. I interviewed him during it at one point. And it was all about wherever he went, you know, there were protests, liar, war criminal. And a lot of it was about integrity and trust, which, as we discussed at the beginning, is so ironic given that he made those two of his tests before becoming prime minister.

But anyway, he won a third election. So the electoral impact kind of followed his calculations because part of his calculation was expediency. You know, where would this leave me politically? And it left him in a position where he won another election. And by the way, the Sun backed Labour in 2005 solely because of Blair's foreign policy, including his backing of Bush in Iraq. Now, you know, say there were many calculations in his mind, but that was one of them.

And he got the backing. But personally, I think it was absolutely dark for him. You know, it went badly wrong. He now says, somewhat disingenuously, if we knew then what we now know about the divisions in Iraq and the potential for war,

civil war, in effect, in parts of Iraq. We might have approached things differently. Well, loads of people were warning him about this. But of course, he had a case to make, and that wouldn't help him make that case. So he ignored it. And he found all of that difficult. There was

a growing reaction within the Labour Party and in the media, many of whom had supported the war, turning against it as some of the horrors surfaced. And although he always insists, and will have to insist for the rest of his life, that it was the right thing to do, uh, to that kind of rather generalized phrase, um,

I'm guessing here, but of course he would have had doubts about that because you wouldn't be human if you didn't have some doubts about that. So, on many levels, I think it has impacted on him. And it's made his sort of, certainly the early phase of his post-prime ministerial life hellish. It's very interesting if you read Alistair Campbell's diaries in the early years after he left Number 10.

And he says to Campbell, I mean, what a narrative art from the most popular prime minister ever to this. He says to Campbell, you know, I actually prefer to spend most of my time outside of Britain. It's just unbearable for me there. And when he launched his memoir, he couldn't hold any events because of the security risks and so on.

I mean, this is an astonishing turnaround from someone who was walking on water in 1997 to someone who actually almost has to be in exile from his country. I mean, it's a Shakespearean arc. I think things have calmed down now and he's found a role with Brexit, COVID, and he spends most of his time here now. But, oh God, the repercussions for him were immense. ♪

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I think that the ramifications continue to this very day. For the Labour Party, he just about persuaded certainly enough Labour MPs that it was, again, to use that terrible phrase, the right thing to do in that famous Commons vote just before the war started.

Most of them now, if you speak to them, would say it was a disaster, incidentally, including some who adore Tony Blair, like David Miliband, who now says the whole thing was a disaster. So one of the things it's done is, for good or for bad, and we might differ on this, it's made the Labour Party absolutely wary of any other equivalent forms of military action, most famously with

Syria when Ed Miliband voted against action in Syria when Cameron was prime minister. I think there was, pre-Iraq, an assumption that politically, when Britain went to war, the governing party benefited. Robin Cook always used to say to me, one of the factors in Blair's many, many calculations

was that he, after Thatcher's victory in the Falklands War, the next by-election was in Beaconsfield, and he was the Labour candidate. And Cook went to visit him to campaign, and Blair, they didn't know each other, Blair said, it's unbelievable. Everywhere I go, they just praise her for the Falklands. And after Iraq, even though I say he won another election,

And there was at a time a hope when Saddam fell that there would be, they called it something, I can't remember, something like the Iraq booster, like the Falklands Factor. Oh, it was the Baghdad Bounce. The Baghdad Bounce. They thought there was going to be this bounce. Instead, there was months, years of hell about the consequences.

and voters, even those who had backed it, turning away. So I think now there is an assumption that politically military action in Britain is a risk, as well as all the other calculations you have to make. You mentioned Syria. Are there any other recent events that we can trace back to the Iraq war and to Blair's decision? One of the several reasons why Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party was

can be related to Iraq. There are many other explanations for the most astonishing rise of any leader of any party in British politics ever. The Corbyn landslide victory to win a leadership contest, which he didn't even want to stand in at first.

And Iraq was one of them. Because while all the other candidates could say things like, well, you know, we now recognize it was a mistake and all the rest of it, he campaigned against it at the time and could claim a form of vindication on that basis.

It's very easy in retrospect to look back and say, if Blair doesn't go into Iraq, history would have been so much better. But what would the consequences of inaction been for him personally, for the Labour Party electorally, and for British foreign policy? That's a brilliant question and was never explored at the time and has hardly ever been explored since. And what would have happened would be this. First of all, and most fundamentally, the war would still have taken place.

The Bush administration had decided they wanted to do this and were going to do it with or without the UK. So he wouldn't have stopped the war. I'm 100% sure of that. Also, he would have split the Labour Party in a different way. There was, less so now but it's still there, a very strong Atlanticist wing of the Labour Party. And they would have been opposed to him opposing Trump.

America on what appeared to be a valid mandate at the time, which is to sort of get rid of the weapons of mass destruction, etc. So he would have faced a split in the Labour Party that way.

The newspapers, for sure, although they all turned against him because of what happened in Iraq, if he had said, right, I'm not backing Bush on that, they would have gone for him. He would have lost the Murdoch newspapers, for sure. So he would have walked a different path towards a different kind of hell. But it's a very valid question because it recognises that

that he faced a nightmarish dilemma here. Now, he couldn't describe it in those terms, and he wouldn't now, but it was. You've written a brilliant book called The Prime Ministers, which charts the office holders from Wilson to Boris Johnson. Knowing what you know about how history judges the individuals that have been Prime Minister, is there any hope for Tony Blair that he might be remembered for anything other than Iraq?

Yeah, I'm sure of it. We are still so close to Iraq, and as we've discussed the ongoing consequences, over time people will come to recognise that he faced impossible dilemmas in the build-up to Iraq. And then afterwards, he's not free to explore those dilemmas. He just has to assert again and again that it was the right thing to do, which makes people even more angry.

because it implies he doesn't see some of the dark consequences, when of course he does. But he can't say, look, you know, there were other ways this could have been done, because, you know, British soldiers died, and he's responsible for that. So he will always be trapped by Iraq. But no, I mean, he was a Labour leader from 1994, got in in 1997, won three elections, which incidentally, in the light of what followed, is an epic achievement in itself.

but would be empty if they didn't do things with that space and power, which they did. But yeah, no, he'll be remembered for much, much more than Iraq. And I think over time, some of the dilemmas he faced in relation to Iraq will be recognised. But that won't let him off the hook. I mean, there were many, I don't call them wrong decisions because it was all too nuanced and complex. But I think he made big,

misjudgments en route personally. Steve, this has been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for giving us such a fantastic interview about the events surrounding the dossier and the legacy of the invasion of Iraq.

I could listen to Steve Richards talk all day. That was absolutely superb. Next week, we've got a new story and it's your turn, Alice. Yes, we are going back to another big story, the phone hacking scandal. We've got your royals. We've got your custard pies. We've got your orgies. Just a regular Tuesday night. Speak for yourself. This is the fourth episode in our series, The Sexed Up Dolls.

I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford.

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