An exercise in spin

The truth about the dossier is that it was sexed-up because the government’s spin doctors were inside the process and actually drafting the dossier as well as requesting changes from slightly outside. To cover this up, the government – most notably Alastair Campbell – simply engaged in another exercise in spin.

Hiding behind the JIC

The main part of the government’s strategy was its belated attribution of the dossier to the JIC. This provided it with two shields to hide behind. In the first place, it would try to conceal the role of its spin doctors. But creating the myth that the dossier was "the work of the JIC" would provide a second line of defence if it did emerge - as it did - that the dossier expressed its claims more strongly than the parallel JIC assessments By definition, if the JIC had made or approved the changes, this could not be sexing-up.

Blair set the tone for this at Prime Minister’s Questions on 4 June 2003. In spite of having been told directly that day that the government’s spin doctors were involved in drafting the dossier, he asserted that the 45 minutes claim:

"was a judgement made by the Joint Intelligence Committee and by that committee alone." (Column 148)

Facing inquiries by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) and the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), the government created an elaborate story around the inclusion of the 45 minutes claim in the dossier. The truth was that the claim was not in early drafts of the dossier, as Andrew Gilligan’s original report had alleged. But the government had no intention of letting the FAC have the early drafts and this left Campbell free to assert that the claim was in "the very first draft" (Q987), while Jack Straw insisted that was "in the first draft after the intelligence was received" (Q1216), which was equally untrue.

The other part of government’s story about the inclusion of the claim – that it first appeared in JIC Chairman John Scarlett’s "first draft" of the dossier on 10 September 2002, before any involvement from the spin doctors – was also a fabrication. As Chris Ames pointed out in a New Statesman article in July 2003, Campbell actually chaired a meeting on the dossier a day earlier. It has since emerged that there was an earlier draft and that Campbell and other spin doctors had plenty of opportunity that day and before it to insert the claim and almost certainly did so.

When the exposure and subsequent suicide of Dr David Kelly led to the Hutton Inquiry, the situation should have changed entirely. Hutton wrote to the parties to his Inquiry asking for all relevant documents to be disclosed. The government was now obliged to provide copies of all drafts of the dossier and all emails, memos and other records showing how the drafting took place. Of course it did no such thing. Not only did it withhold the first full draft of the dossier, written by one of its top spin doctors, as well as other drafts and numerous other documents, it strategically delayed releasing key documents and blatantly blacked out from others the names of the spin doctors and other embarrassing details.

But when evidence of the spin doctors’ involvement and blatant sexing-up slipped through the net, government witnesses at the Inquiry simply lied and spun to counter it. Time after time Campbell and others simply asserted that whatever contemporaneous documents showed, the opposite was true. His strategy was to stick to a simple message; only he, Blair and Jonathan Powell were entitled to discuss the dossier with Scarlett. Anyone else was chipping in from outside the process.

When Daniel Pruce’s email revealed the existence of John Williams "missing" draft of 9 September, Campbell was asked whether there was a dossier on that date. He answered unequivocally "No, there was not" (Section 25). He also famously described Pruce as "making contributions effectively above his pay grade" (Section 36). The putdown worked perfectly with both the Inquiry and the media. It seemed to occur to no-one that for someone as skilled as Campbell to deploy such a well-honed phrase probably indicated that he was hiding something significant.

And when it emerged that Campbell had arranged a meeting with Scarlett to discuss the latter’s first draft and invited the spin doctors who had that same day expressed the view that the government was in "a lot of trouble" with the document as it stood, Campbell’s claims went from the incredible to the surreal. He first claimed that he did not know anything about the meeting (Section 156) but then recovered his memory to make the bizarre claim that the spin doctors had not expressed views of this sort but even if they had, did not matter because Scarlett did not take any notice. "the discussion that mattered was the discussion that I was having with John Scarlett" (Section 159). But if he had not intended Scarlett to listen to the spin doctors’ views, why had he invited them all to the same meeting?

Next: How the Williams draft was covered-up