Despite the release of the John Williams draft of the dossier, which includes a series of bullet points that found their way into the next draft - attributed to Joint Intelligence Committee Chairman John Scarlett and the published dossier, the government continues to deny that the draft played any part in the drafting process. Or does it?

Foreign Office minister Kim Howells again has again answered a question from Tory MP John Baron with a stonewall insistence that:

The document produced by John Williams was not used as the basis for the dossier the Government subsequently published.

In the recent Iraq inquiry debate, Labour MP Lynne Jones flummoxed Foreign Secretary David Miliband with a question about their former colleague Ann (now Baroness) Taylor. Jones pointed out, as I have done, that Taylor made partisan presentational suggestions on the September 2002 dossier before taking part in two inquiries that looked into that very document. She has also asked Miliband’s younger brother Ed what role Taylor played in sexing-up the case for war, but he isn’t saying.

When she was chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), Taylor was invited in this oversight role to look at a draft of the dossier. Documents on the Hutton Inquiry website show that she gave advice on how the dossier and Tony Blair could make a better case for the war that she supported. But it is also clear that Taylor “passed on some detailed comments to John Scarlett” during a meeting with the then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and nominal author of the dossier.

Jones wants to know what those comments were and asked the Cabinet Office via a parliamentary question. A couple of weeks ago Ed Miliband issued one of those carefully worded non-denials that ministers issue when they are hiding something.

“The Cabinet Office has no record of any written comments passed on by Ann Taylor to John Scarlett on the draft dossier.”

Knowing that the comments were likely to have been oral when they were passed on, Jones asked what form they took and whether anyone may have recorded them. But Ed Miliband referred her back to the earlier answer

When Jones brought up the issue last week during David Miliband’s defence of the government’s preposterously indefensible refusal to hold an Iraq inquiry, he didn’t have the benefit of a carefully prepared non-answer. Already looking badly out of his depth, he floundered around, claiming that:

“I have never heard the credibility or the good sense of the Butler inquiry called into question.”

Although Labour MP Alan Simpson heckled:

“What the Butler saw was as little as possible.”

After the Liberal Democrats refused to take part and the Tories withdrew support, the Butler Inquiry let Blair off the hook and now has little credibility. As it argued over its conclusions, it was reported that Ann Taylor, representing Labour, was arguing for its criticism of her friend John Scarlett to be toned down.

But perhaps the greater scandal is that Taylor herself chaired the 2003 ISC inquiry, which even let off Geoff Hoon, although he blatantly misled it.

So will the truth about how Taylor helped sex up the dossier show exactly why both the ISC and Butler let Blair off the hook?

Yesterday, I got some information from the Cabinet Office under the Freedom of Information Act.

Having fallen off my chair. I realised that the document was a record of the first meeting on the "Public Handling and and Briefing" on the dossier. The document was sent to the Hutton Inquiry at the same time as the "John Williams Draft" of the dossier. Because it arrived late, it was not posted on the Hutton Website, although the record of the second and subsequent meetings are on the site.

Read the document

The document is as it was sent to Hutton. It is most interesting because of the redacted (blacked out) names of some of the attendees. The Cabinet Office has told me that three of the four concealed names are: Charles Gray (Foreign Office); Jim Poston (Foreign Office/CIC) and Jim Drummond (Cabinet Office/OD Sec). The other name is being withheld under Section 23(1) of the FOIA, which means that it is a member of the security services or similar.

This is another case of the government withholding from Hutton evidence of the involvement of the Coalition Information Centre in the dossier process. It also shows that while spin doctors attended meetings about intelligence, spies attended meetings about public presentation. No-one seems to have worried about conflicts of interest either way.

The Tribunal has now issued its ruling (pdf) in a case in which I challenged the Information Commissioner's acceptance of a claim by the Cabinet Office that it had no record of who drafted the dossier's executive summary at the time that the worst sexing up happened. The Tribunal partially held in my favour, while siding with the Commissioner and government on the substantive point. However, it did criticise the Cabinet Office for the lack of any audit trail.

In this sense, the ruling represents a good outcome. the Tribunal said:

"we are not very impressed by the quality of the record keeping… this was on any view an extremely important document and we would have expected, or hoped for, some audit trail revealing who had drafted what."

Having conceded that its spin doctors may have contributed to the key changes at this time, which included the fabrication of a number of highly disupted judgements such as the 45 minutes claim, the government cannot now prove that it did not sex the dossier up.

New Statesman article