Robert Lewis's 'Dark Actors'

After Dr David Kelly, the government scientist, died in 2003, Lord Hutton was asked to investigate the surrounding circumstances, his report appearing in January 2004. Hutton concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life. In 2007, Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who has since become Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport in the coalition government, published The Strange Death of David Kelly and concluded that Kelly’s death was due to hands other than his own. David Aaronovitch in his 2009 book, Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History, devoted a chapter to debunking Baker, Mr Pooter Forms a Theory, which ends:

In conclusion, it is worth referring to the preface to the English edition of Fritz Tobias’s book on the Reichstag fire, in which one great British historian, A.J.P. Taylor, quotes another, Sir Lewis Namier: ‘There would be little to say on this subject, were it not for the nonsense that has been talked about it’.

Now, 10 years after the tragedy, Dark Actors, The Life and Death of Dr David Kelly by Robert Lewis has appeared. Is it worth reading? The opening chapter describes the events of the day of Kelly's death. The choice of its title, An Inspector Falls*, sets the tone. To establish the reader's enthusiasm for ploughing through what follows, or even to induce the book’s purchase in the first place, Lewis sets about raising expectations, eg on page 5:

And then the official account turns abruptly hysterical.  

If there was anything more substantial than her husband’s suddenly stricken visage that caused her to become ill with worry, she has never revealed what it was.  

So some nameless, unspoken crisis appears to have quickly descended.

but gives the impression that his heart isn’t in it:

So the scene of death was demonstrably disturbed by individuals that [sic] had nothing to do with Thames Valley Police, for reasons that remain unclear, one of whom was very likely an unaccountable intelligence officer whose very existence has been denied – to the extent that several witnesses claimed he was a uniformed police officer, while his Special Branch liaison, DC Coe, maintained for seven years he was never there at all. (page 14)

The next eight chapters are chronological, most of them concerned with Kelly’s professional life after joining the Ministry of Defence at Porton Down. Then, despite the attempt to pick loose ends at the start, in the final chapter Lewis concludes that his subject did indeed commit suicide. Any value that the book may possess therefore largely depends on the quality of its account of Kelly’s life. To be fair, the reader has to recognise the problem presented to Lewis by the confidentiality surrounding much of Kelly’s government work. But remembering that it was said of Kelly that “he had such an eye for detail that nothing got past him” (page 39), at least one can try to assess how Lewis dealt with those matters of detail which he could be expected to get right. With a far from expert eye, I came across the following:

Page 37: Terence Taylor is described as “… a former weapons inspector who went on to direct the Institute of Strategic Studies” – he was an Assistant Director at the International Institute of Strategic Studies.  

Page 184: The same individual is referred to as Lantos, Santos and Lantos within seven lines of text.  

Page 249: “The new UNSCOM … with its own (foot high) communications mast …”.  

Page 379: “Harris, Robert and Jeremy, Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing London 1982”.

which could all be dismissed as trivia. But more disconcertingly from a writer who expects to be taken seriously:

Page 282: “Bill Clinton f****d a 22-year-old White House intern …” [the asterisks are mine].

and there are digressions like the one on page 189 about the controversial book Bravo Two Zero by Chris Ryan (aka Colin Armstrong) from which Lewis has to return to topic with a crashing non sequitur:

Desperate to extricate himself from Iraq, Colin Armstrong would cross one hundred and eighty miles of hostile terrain. And years later David Kelly would walk three thousand yards of Oxfordshire countryside.

not to mention his proneness to off-the-point platitudinising:

All the members of the household have gone their separate ways, as modern families generally must, if they are to live the life that is due to them. (page 338)

Rather more worrying is the way Lewis uses notes and references. It can be argued that a non-academic work has no need for them, or that they should be kept to a bare minimum. In the case of this book, it’s their unevenness which is the problem. The second chapter, Dai, which takes Kelly from birth to the age of 40, is supported by just three notes whereas Chapter 8 has 120, nearly two per page. To see why this matters, take the following example from Chapter 2:

Another contemporary of Kelly’s at Leeds was Jack Straw [**], who was elected chair of the university’s Labour Society in 1966, whereupon he rebranded it the Socialist Society and then withdrew its support for Labour because the party was insufficiently left-wing. Straw gained further notoriety on campus when the British Council selected him to go on a student trip to Chile, where, instead of building a youth club, he spent his time quarrelling with his colleagues, posturing as an insurgent communist, and demanding an audience with the opposition leader Salvador Allende. All of which he made up for in later life, when as Foreign Secretary of the Thatcherite New Labour party he helped ensure safe passage home for Allende's murderer Augusto Pinochet at a time when Spanish relatives of the Chilean 'disappeared' were demanding he be tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity.  

To his credit, Kelly had as little to do with Straw as possible.  

‘He won't remember me; he later told his half-sister, 'because I wasn't a political animal, but I remember him.'  

And so it proved. Kelly and Straw met professionally for the first time in 2002, when the former supported the latter in a hearing before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. The Foreign Secretary made a point of complaining to his department that they had sent a nobody along to accompany him. The following year, when Kelly became drawn into the farrago over the government's claims of an Iraqi WMD arsenal, Straw was a part of the Downing Street cabal that secretly exposed him to the press and then belittled him in public.

There are various assertions about Straw here, none of them ascribed to a source. This, in itself, doesn’t mean that they aren’t true, but they present a problem for the reader, particularly when Lewis could have made reference to Straw’s autobiography, Last Man Standing, published (and posted about here) last year. One has to accept that Straw, a lawyer turned politician, may well have been economical with the truth about his student days, and he wouldn’t have been the first person to have moved to the political centre after graduating. Straw makes no mention of rebranding Leeds University’s Labour Society as the Socialist Society, but does state:

The Labour left at Leeds University worked as part of a broad front with the CP [Communist Party] and we spent much of our time fighting the destructive politics of the various active Trotskyist groups.*  

*These included the Socialist Labour League, led locally by lecturer Cliff Slaughter, and Tory Cliff of the International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers' Party). (LMS, page 65)

Straw also provides an account of the NUS delegation to Chile which is somewhat at odds with Lewis’s (LMS page 69). He devotes a whole chapter to the Pinochet affair during his Home Secretaryship (A Dictator Calls – Straw, too, could have done better) and reveals that he:

might have met Allende at a reception in Santiago de Chile, perhaps even shaken his hand, but I’d had no other dealings with him whatever. (LMS, page 255-6).

But these are not particularly significant issues, unlike the following:

If I was asked which single individual most influenced my view that Saddam did pose a serious threat to international peace and security, my answer would be unambiguous: Dr David Kelly, who tragically died in July 2003.  

Dr Kelly was a microbiologist who started his career at the UK’s Biological Weapons Establishment at Porton Down, and later became a weapons inspector. As a member of UNSCOM's staff, he made thirty-seven trips to Iraq during the nineties. I met him just once, in September 2002, when he accompanied me to give evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee. At the hour long 'pre-brief' I was struck both by Dr Kelly's depth of knowledge and understanding, and by the clarity of his belief that, if diplomacy failed, then military action would have to follow. (LMS, page 368)

The reader with sight of both accounts is forced to conclude that either Straw is breathtakingly hypocritical or that Lewis’s unsourced version (‘The Foreign Secretary made a point of complaining to his department that they had sent a nobody along to accompany him’) is wrong. I’m afraid that I’m inclined to the latter view. Lewis never goes on to mention Kelly’s appearance at the Select Committee in 2002, a fairly important and public event. But then he makes no reference to Kelly’s being awarded the CMG in 1996. He also informs us that:

The debate over why we invaded and occupied Iraq has rumbled on for over ten years. Unless Tony Blair can deliver a plausible answer, which would require him to experience an actual spiritual [sic] journey, unlike the pathological levels of self-justification that comprise his autobiography, it will be argued over for the rest of my life.

but omits any mention of the Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry (report forthcoming) or Lord Butler ‘s 2004 Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction. There are no links (ie URLs), by the way, in Dark Actors, to Lord Hutton’s Inquiry (as in the opening sentence of this post) or to anything else. This seems rather old-fashioned given the age of its author. Blair’s A Journey is not in the Bibliography.

Given that Lewis doesn’t challenge Lord Hutton’s conclusion that David Kelly committed suicide, it is legitimate to ask what his book has to offer - “Is it worth reading?” If someone is looking for an insight into the lives of weapons inspectors operating inside a hostile Middle Eastern regime, it may be. As a source of information about the career of Dr David Kelly in particular, I’m doubtful. The errors and weaknesses in Dark Actors, apparent even to a casual reader, undermine its authority. Judged by Kelly’s own standards it isn’t the book he deserved but, perhaps more than anything else, he and his family deserve to be left in peace.

*Kelly was a weapons inspector who committed suicide. In JB Priestley’s play, An Inspector Calls, a mysterious ‘inspector’ interrogates a wealthy English family about their responsibility for the suicide of a young working class factory girl. An Inspector Falls seems a facile and misleading title for the content of the chapter concerned.

** Straw, born in August 1946, was an undergraduate at Leeds from 1964 to 1967 (LMS, pages 9, 62 and 69). Kelly, born in May 1944, was an undergraduate from 1963 to 1967 (DA, pages 26, 33 and 35). That Kelly’s degree took four years and that he entered Leeds a year later than might be expected from his birthdate, are points not addressed in Dark Actors.

Setting Hampstead Ablaze

Checking a link for a recent post about the Iraq Inquiry, I read again the story in the Observer on 16 October which had predicted the Inquiry’s report being postponed to summer 2012. It also said:

Intriguingly, Chilcot is known over the summer to have attended a performance of Loyalty, a play about the build-up to the Iraq war that was performed at the Hampstead Theatre. Written by journalist and author Sarah Helm, the wife of Tony Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, the play provided a rare insight into the psychology of those involved.
Some scenes, including a phone call from Rupert Murdoch to Blair on the eve of the war and another suggesting British officials harboured doubts about the sources behind claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD, are close to the truth, say Whitehall insiders.
Private Eye magazine reported that Chilcot had demanded to review some of the evidence presented to his inquiry after attending the play.

Loyalty ran from 14 July to 13 August, so some time had elapsed before Private Eye ran its story (see below) in the 14 October issue. The Hampstead Theatre seats about 325 and there were, it seems, 30 performances including matinees, so only about 9750 people at most saw the play. By comparison in September BBC2’s Page Eight (MI5 as envisaged by David Hare) was watched by nearly four million (high for that channel, but ITV’s hit Downton Abbey series was getting about 11 million). I wasn’t one of the 9750, so I decided to buy a copy of the text, published by Oberon Books, and read it.

It doesn’t take long for the main challenge presented by Helm’s play to emerge: not so much one of loyalty as of veracity. On the cover Loyalty is described as “A fictionalised memoir”, and, on page 7, a Note states: “This play is a work of fiction”. The Foreword, written by Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles (who has appeared in this blog before), sets out to clarify this:

Sarah Helm's remarkable play …
… documents real events of great historical importance. Of course, it is a play, it is fiction. Yet it is also a roman à clef in which we all know that Laura is really Sarah Helm, Nick is her partner Jonathan Powell (Tony Blair's Chief of Staff), Tony is Tony, Alastair is Alastair (Campbell), and Jack is Jack (Straw), and so on.
So in one, and perhaps the most important sense, it is an upclose, insider's, account of what it felt like to be living with the daily agonies of deciding to invade Iraq, and then finding out that the original justification for the war - that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction - did not exist, and had been based on false intelligence.
… Even if the plot is not literally true, the characterisation is authentic - alarmingly so.

and closes with:

The first and last question most people will ask about Loyalty will be 'Is it true?' Only Sarah Helm herself can answer this. But my guess is that Loyalty must be at once true, and not true, and somewhere in-between. Not everything in it can be literally true - it is not a documentary - though many or most of the details are remarkably accurate. Paradoxically, however, it uses fiction to get at some much deeper truths, about the reality of the Iraq war, and about how human beings relate to each other.

One could well imagine some of the assessments of Saddam’s WMD capabilities as having been equally categorical.

As for the play itself, the reviews seem a bit lukewarm on the whole (aggregated at the Omnivore, and ongo.com ). In any case, reading the text is a poor basis for judging how it might have seemed on the stage. The first Act is set in LAURA and NICK’s home (like the text, I will put Characters names in capitals) in early 2003, and reminded me of the domestic scenes in BBC R4’s Clare in the Community, as if scripted by Hare. Most of the second Act is set in 10 Downing Street in September 2004. Although no-one should expect cinematic realism on a stage, after a while that feeling of observing a parallel universe set in, often induced by Hare or Stephen Poliakoff dramas. The anomalies eventually undermine the required suspension of incredulity. For example, the RAF has no decoration called a “DFO” (page 80). The PM’s Outer Office has “a vast TV screen showing Sky News” (page 79) whereas Jonathan Powell, no less, describes it as having several (The New Machiavelli, page 48). In the civil service the job title “Clerk” doesn’t always involve clerical duties (or Secretary, secretarial ones, come to that).

But rather more disconcerting is when, in Act 1 Scene 3, LAURA tells us:

At one point a BBC reporter, called Andrew Gilligan, thought he’d got a scoop on the intelligence but instead he botched it up; and there were tragic consequences (page 46)

PETE, “an unidentified government figure”, announces on page 47/48 that “Andrew Gilligan”’s source, “Kelly”, was “A junior official” and “Too junior to have known anything”. Why this “Andrew Gilligan” and “Kelly” are brought in at all in March 2003 is unclear. Curiously for a roman à clef, there are no clues as to the identity of PETE, but he can’t be ALASTAIR, the Press Secretary.

Later, in Act 2 Scene 8, DAVID (C), the "Head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)", says “Look I told the inquiry all this” (page 99), perhaps referring to Lord Hutton’s [Report of the] Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly C.M.G. Dr Kelly died in late July 2003. Or was he referring to Lord Butler’s 2004 Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction? In the real world the Chief of SIS gave evidence to both. Then on page 100, C says “It wasn’t me who wrote that dossier”, which the reader has to conclude must be the September Dossier of 2002, never mentioned by the omniscient LAURA (in whose world there seems to be no Joint Intelligence Committee).

Also in Act 1 there was no end of business with “the Brent”, NICK’s special secure phone (“very antiquated in appearance”), forever being unpacked and put away. In fact, it’s Laura’s listening-in on the phone’s second earpiece which makes her so well-informed about affairs of state. But something odd happens in Scene 4 when Nick and Laura listen in to a conversation between PM TONY and RUPERT, “a newspaper proprietor”. On page 50, at the beginning LAURA “sits up next to [NICK] and hears on the ordinary landline. We hear the conversation with TONY is already underway”. At the end, NICK “Puts the phone down. NICK starts putting it back in its box.” So was RUPERT on “the Brent” or not? And if so, where was he, having been “speaking today to Rumsfeld”?

In the end, the MacGuffin is not “the Brent” but an intelligence source with the codename Daisy. Sarah Helm is the author of A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE, published in 2005 (and LAURA, of course, had been working on something similar, page 36). One can’t help thinking that Daisy sounds more like one of SOE's codenames than, say, Curveball.

But is there any point in spending time on these or other minor, or not so minor, details and discrepancies? Well, many of the Hampstead theatre-goers, and most of us who will ever read the play, inevitably find themselves lost in a no man’s land between Cowper-Coles’ “not literally true” and his “many or most of the details [which] are remarkably accurate”. We are hardly helped by him also telling us:

Naturally the details of the play's plot are fiction, and have to be, not least for legal reasons.

so we are left to our own devices in trying to make any sense of it all.

There is an unprecedented amount of official and other documentation in the public domain about the Blair government and Iraq to pore over, even before Sir John Chilcot’s report next year. Not only is Powell’s own book available (and several of LAURA’s narrations align with incidents he describes less dramatically), but Lord Hutton’s Report can easily be downloaded, and similarly Lord Butler’s Review (and, of course, evidence to the Iraq Inquiry). Lastly, Gordon Corera’s well-regarded, The Art of Betrayal: Life and Death in the British Secret Service, might provide rather more insight into what went on than Loyalty, which, come to think of it, is the opposite of Betrayal – shame Pinter got there first.

Alongside this welter of information, Loyalty may be doomed to fail as a roman à clef because it tries hard to get close, but inevitably ends up being tangential. In the end it’s neither documentary nor metaphor. Adam Lang, the subject of Robert Harris’s The Ghost, is Blair-like, but in neither his book nor Polanski’s film are we left in any doubt that we are engaging with a fictional thriller, from which we can draw wider moral lessons about the nature of modern politics if inclined to do so.

If forced to draw conclusions, I would be reluctant to accept that Jonathan Powell habitually breached the rules for custodianship of official secrets like Nick Beeching did. I’m also uncertain as to how much credence to give the Observer and Private Eye stories about the effect on the progress of Chilcot’s inquiry of a play which clearly declares itself to be a work of fiction. On the other hand, Powell in The New Machiavelli mentions “my future brother-in-law, the journalist Toby Helm” (page 68) who may be the same Toby Helm as the Political Editor of the Observer – if so, things become even less clear. To be honest, like I suspect nearly everyone else, I’m in the same position as Alexander Armstrong’s Geordie window cleaner, the one who always concludes his monologues with "but what do I know?":



PRIVATE EYE 14 October 2011 (Issue 1299, page 5)

When Sarah Helm’s play Loyalty opened at the Hampstead Theatre this summer much was made of the fact that she is married to Tony Blair's former chief of staff Jonathan Powell. Since the drama featured Downing Street discussions before the invasion of Iraq, as the Observer noted*, “the question that will be asked in Whitehall is to what extent the play is art mirroring life”.
Sir John Chilcot seems to have asked himself the same question when he saw the play in August. Certain scenes - such as a conversation between Tony Blair and MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove - included details that hadn't been mentioned by Dearlove himself when he gave his testimony (in private) to Chilcot's Iraq War inquiry. After his night at the theatre Sir John asked Whitehall to supply him with more secret files, even though Dearlove and co had supposedly already handed everything over in a spirit of full cooperation.
Chilcot has now obtained the new files - and they confirm what Helm revealed in Loyalty. Although the play was billed as fiction for legal reasons, it appears to have been rather: more informative than some of the evidence from the spooks!

*“as the Observer noted” is a reference to an article on 15 May written in advance of the staging of Loyalty.

Iraq Inquiry Update

The last reference to Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry on this blog was on 17 October in the form of an update to an earlier posting. The Observer had learnt that the Inquiry report might not be published until June 2012. Late on 16 November, there were media reports of the following statement, now available in full on the Inquiry’s website:

… The Inquiry has advised the Government that it will need until at least summer 2012 to produce a draft report which will do justice to the issues involved. Very considerable progress has already been made, but there is still much to be done.
As well as drafting the report, the Inquiry will need to negotiate the declassification of a significant volume of currently classified material with the Government, to enable this to be quoted in, or published alongside, the Inquiry’s report. That process has begun, but there will be a series of further major requests as drafting progresses. The Inquiry has made clear that it will need co-operation from the Government in completing this in a satisfactory and timely manner. …

which confirmed one aspect of the Observer story, except ‘at least summer 2012’ might well be interpreted as later than June.

Coincidentally, the Inquiry had been mentioned earlier on 16 November by the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, in an address, Securing our future, about ‘the role of secret intelligence in foreign policy’. As well as the use and importance of the Intelligence Agencies’ contribution, he:

set out what the Government is doing to tackle the lessons of the past, and to strengthen the independent and Parliamentary oversight of the Agencies for the future

and he later stated:

This Government believes that Britain’s national interest is served best when diplomacy is informed by Intelligence, and Intelligence is balanced by diplomatic assessments.
This means that Intelligence is weighed and assessed alongside all other sources of information available to us including diplomatic reporting and the insights of other government departments; judged in the context of the Government’s overall strategy and objectives; and brought together to make careful decisions which are considered in the National Security Council.
We also recognise that serious issues have been raised by the events of recent years that have to be addressed decisively and with clarity.
Intelligence throws up some of the most difficult ethical and legal questions that I encounter as Foreign Secretary, with which my predecessors in this position also have had to grapple.
Some of them relate to the past use of Intelligence in reaching and justifying decisions in foreign policy – the most controversial instance of this, the Iraq War, is currently the subject of an Inquiry.

He went on to deal with allegations of UK complicity in extraordinary rendition, and, should such matters come to court, put forward

:… proposals to ensure that cases involving national security information can be heard fairly, fully and safely in our courts, and that we protect British interests by preventing the disclosure of genuinely sensitive material. This includes intelligence information shared with Britain by intelligence partners overseas.

He then went on to make the point:

The ability of other countries to share Intelligence with us without fear we will have to disclose it here or overseas is absolutely vital to our national interest. This is managed under the Control Principle, a strict rule of intelligence sharing whereby any further use or disclosure of intelligence requires the agreement of the Agency that provided it in the first place. If we cannot uphold the control principle and others do not share information with us, the very real risk is that our security will be jeopardised.

And to underline this:

Intelligence really is like a jigsaw in which we very rarely have all the pieces, and rely on others to share the pieces they have with us just as they often rely on us to help them in the same way. It is the analysis of information from our partners along with our own intelligence that enables us to piece together each snippet of information with others to create the fullest possible picture of the threats to our national security and to act against them.

He said the Government intends:

to make the Intelligence and Security Committee a statutory Committee of Parliament, reporting formally to Parliament, and to enable it to take evidence from any Department or body in the wider intelligence community. It also proposes careful consideration of extending the Committee’s remit to include retrospective review of certain operational aspects of the work of the Agencies where there are matters of significant national interest. We also propose that the Committee be given the power to require information from the Agencies, bringing it more in line with Parliamentary Select Committees, but with this power subject to a veto only from the Secretary of State where national security so requires it.

Together, these statements suggest that the Iraq Inquiry may have its work cut out if it is to ‘negotiate the declassification of a significant volume of currently classified material with the Government, to enable this to be quoted in, or published alongside, the Inquiry’s report’. Also, if there were a need for a similar Inquiry to Chilcot’s in the future, presumably it would fall under the remit for retrospective review of the statutory Intelligence and Security Committee.

The Iraq Inquiry and ‘Warning Letters’

After last month’s media firestorm over phone hacking, quite a few people in Fleet Street and in Downing Street must have been pleased to see the headline of 31 July’s Mail On Sunday (MoS) focussing on something quite different: ‘The damning of Tony Blair: Former PM to be held to account on Iraq in Chilcot report on war’. David Cameron had attempted some hosing down of ‘Hackgate’ on 20 July in the Commons when he made a ‘Statement on Public Confidence in the Media and Police’ and took questions at length. During one of his replies he said:

[Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the shadow Chancellor says, “We didn’t hire Andy Coulson.” Look, you hired Damian McBride. You had Alastair Campbell. You had Alastair Campbell falsifying documents in government. You have still got Tom Baldwin working in your office. [Interruption.] Yes. Gotcha!

Whether the remark about Campbell was an unguarded response to Ed Balls, who the PM seems to find very irritating, or whether it was a ‘gobbet’ intended for release in response to any criticism of the PM's having employed Coulson, we may never know. However, as explained on his blog, Campbell immediately emailed the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell (GOD):

Dear Gus,
The Prime Minister said in the Commons today that whilst working in Downing Street I falsified government documents. He said this without qualification, and without providing any evidence to substantiate the claim.
As you know, I have appeared before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, the Intelligence and Security Committee, and the Hutton Inquiry. All three thoroughly probed allegations made against me with regard to inserting false intelligence into government documents in the run-up to war in Iraq, and all three concluded that the allegations were unfounded. Similarly, no evidence has been presented to the Chilcot Inquiry, to which I testified for several hours, that I falsified government documents.
I am writing to ask on what basis the Prime Minister made the claim that he did, under parliamentary privilege, and what evidence he has to justify it.
If he concludes that no such evidence exists, I would hope that he could withdraw the allegation via a letter from you.
Yours, Alastair Campbell

It took over a week, and presumably a fair bit of aller retourner between No 10 and the Cabinet Office, and perhaps others, to produce GOD’s letter in reply on 28 July:

Dear Alastair,
Thank you for your email and apologies for the delayed response.
The Prime Minister is aware that the allegations made against you in relation to the WMD dossier presented to Parliament by his predecessor in September 2002 have been investigated by several inquiries. Let me assure you that, contrary to some of the media reporting of his comments about you in the Commons, that was not what the Prime Minister had in mind.
In what was a very lively Commons debate, the PM was referring to the briefing paper you commissioned on Iraq’s infrastructure of concealment and deception which, because of the failure to attribute material taken from the work of an academic, became known as ‘the dodgy dossier’.
Whilst I know you were unaware of the mistake by a member of your team which led to this controversy, you did take responsibility for it at the time, when you appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee.
You are well aware of how heated things can get in the Commons and I can assure you the Prime Minister’s statement about you was no more than political knockabout which got a bit carried away.
I hope you will accept my assurances. I understand that No10 have and are continuing to make it clear that the PM was casting no aspersions whatever in relation to this, and it is right that they do so.
Yours,
Gus

Campbell concluded:

Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell today replied to my complaint of a week ago about the allegations made by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons that I falsified government documents. I am very grateful to him for the reply, and to the Prime Minister for the explanation offered; that this was ‘political knockabout which got a bit carried away,’; that contrary to some of the media reporting of his statement last week, he was not referring to the WMD dossier presented to Parliament by Tony Blair in 2002, and that he was ‘casting no aspersions.’ So far as I am concerned, that is a satisfactory conclusion to the matter.

Three days later (or probably the next day, Friday, when the Sundays usually decide on their main stories), the MoS claimed:

The Mail on Sunday has been told that the former Prime Minister will be held to account on four main failings:
* Bogus claims that were made about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
* Not telling the British public about his secret pledge with George Bush to go to war.
* Keeping the Cabinet in the dark by his ‘sofa government’ style.
* Failing to plan to avoid the post-war chaos in Iraq.
Well-placed sources say the reputations of Mr Blair and key allies will suffer major damage when the report by Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq War inquiry is published this autumn. Mr Blair, former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and ex-Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell are all expected to be criticised.
…
The Mail on Sunday understands that the inquiry rounds on Mr Blair for telling Parliament that intelligence suggesting Saddam had WMDs was ‘beyond doubt’.

Most of the MoS’s report was a selection from material published by the Inquiry which supported the main thrust of their story:

The inquiry report is also expected to criticise spin doctor Mr Campbell, whose denial that the dossier on Saddam’s weapons was designed to ‘make the case for war’ was challenged by former spy chief Major-General Michael Laurie, who was head of intelligence collection for the Defence Intelligence Agency.
…
And earlier this month an unnamed MI6 officer said Mr Campbell acted like ‘an unguided missile’ in work on the intelligence dossier. The spin doctor had ‘a propensity to have rushes of blood to the head and pass various stories and information to journalists without appropriate prior consultation’.

However, the MoS statement that:

… Sir John Chilcot's Iraq War inquiry is published this autumn

was contradicted in the London Evening Standard (LES) the next day: ‘Sir John Chilcot Iraq verdict won't be published until January’. This was because:

Under the rules of public inquiries, anyone taken to task must be told in advance and given chance to respond. But the so-called "Salmon letters" have yet to be sent out, and a source said the process would put the report back until the new year.

- not quite the expectation of the MoS. It will be interesting to see which paper is right, and whether the LES ‘source’ turns out to be closer than the MoS’s ‘well-placed sources’.

So what is ‘the process’? According to the Inquiry website’s FAQs:

35. Will you notify witnesses/individuals before you mention or criticise them in the report?
The Inquiry’s Witness Protocol makes it clear that if the Inquiry expects to criticise an individual in the final report, that individual will, in accordance with normal practice, be provided with relevant sections of the draft report in order to make any representations on the proposed criticism prior to publication of the final report.

What might ‘in accordance with normal practice’ involve? For non-lawyers, a helpful explanation is available on law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse’s website in the form of ‘A practical guide to commissioning and conducting investigations and inquiries’ by Ed Marsden and Martin Smith. Among many other things, it explains the “Salmon letter” mentioned by the LES:

For inquiries conducted under the Inquiries Act 2005, the Salmon letter procedure has been codified in to a process of “warning letters” (see section 13 of the Act). This provides that the chairman may not include any explicit or significant criticism of a person in a report unless he has sent a warning letter to a person who:
(a) He considers may be, or who has been, subject to criticism in the inquiry proceedings; or
(b) About whom criticism may be inferred from evidence that has been given during the inquiry proceedings; or
(c) Who may be subject to criticism in any report or interim report.
Section 14 of the Act creates a statutory duty of confidence between the recipient of such a letter, the inquiry team and the recipient’s legal representative. The duty persists until such time as the inquiry’s report is published or the chairman waives the duty.
The contents of warning letters under the Act are set out in section 15. They must:
(a) state what the criticism or proposed criticism is
(b) contain a statement of the facts that the chairman considers substantiate the criticism or proposed criticism
(c) refer to any evidence which supports those facts.

But is the Iraq Inquiry being conducted under the 2005 Act? Presumably it is, but some of the key provisions are not being exercised, eg Section 17(2): Power to take evidence on oath and Section 37: Immunity from suit. The latter is interesting, in that according to Marsden and Smith:

The law provides that where a statement is made by one individual about another which is false and damages that person’s reputation, that person may commence proceedings for damages on grounds of defamation.
Those conducting inquiries, and those giving evidence in such proceedings are as susceptible to an action for libel (in respect of written statements) or slander (oral statements) as anyone else.
However, where “qualified privilege” attaches to an inquiry it serves to protect the statement-maker where they make a false and disparaging statement in the course of the inquiry providing the statement is made in good faith. This is not the case, though, where the statement-maker is motivated by malice.
For inquiries conducted under the Inquiries Act 2005, section 37 codifies the previous common law understanding of the qualified privilege defence to defamation proceedings. Section 37(3) provides as follows:
37(3) for the purposes of the law of defamation, the same privilege attaches to
(a) Any statement made in or for the purposes of proceedings before an inquiry (including the report and any interim report of the inquiry)
(b) Reports of proceedings before an inquiry
As would be the case if those proceedings were proceedings before a court in the relevant part of the United Kingdom.

However, the Iraq Inquiry FAQs state:

27. What protection did [do] witnesses have to speak freely?
The hearings are not covered by Parliamentary or other privilege. The Committee expects all witnesses to provide truthful, fair and accurate evidence. The Inquiry welcomes the fact that the Government and Services have extended an immunity from disciplinary action to serving officials and military personnel who give evidence or otherwise assist the Inquiry, as this will help reassure witnesses that they can provide frank and honest evidence.

Returning to the ‘Salmon letter’, Section 14 of the Act (see above) refers to the ‘recipient’s legal representative’. Witnesses should have been offered the opportunity to bring a friend or legal representative to their interview, though it should have been made clear that the investigators’ questions will be directed to the witness. Of the three whose reputations the MoS expects to see suffering major damage, two, Blair and Straw, were barristers before entering politics. Whether they or Campbell (who met up with a well-known and eminent QC about 25 minutes into Episode 7 of Jamie’s Dream School, as broadcast on Channel 4 earlier this year) have sought, or will be seeking, legal advice on how to deal with any criticisms from the Inquiry, we may never know. But one cannot help wondering if the other witnesses, in making their comments, fully appreciated the possible implications of an absence of privilege, if this is actually the case. Presumably, in the event of a legal action concerning a defamatory statement, the defence costs would be borne by the witness’s employing department. In these circumstances, however, evidence would be under oath and subject to cross-examination by a barrister.

As for the MoS’s ‘four main failings’, I don’t see the latter two (sofa government and post-war planning) being made that much of – the former already addressed by Lord Butler and the latter potentially awkward for the present incumbent of No 10, given the uncertain outcome in Libya. As for the ‘bogus WMD claims’, the Inquiry might feel it should come up with something new. Going back to GOD’s letter above, the ‘dodgy dossier’ was explained, and apologized for, by Campbell at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FAC) on 25 June 2003: 

Q1152 Sir John Stanley: I would like to turn to another apology which I think is very seriously outstanding and on which you may wish to correct your evidence. If I heard you correctly you suggested the Government had made an apology to Mr al-Marashi. Mr al-Marashi's work was lifted off the internet without attribution; it was used in a highly political context to help make the Government's policy case for going to war against Iraq which was a matter which concerned him very greatly. His thesis or his article in the Middle East Review in certainly one crucial respect was substantially changed to suggest terrorist linkage between the Saddam Hussein intelligence agency and al-Qaeda which was not what he said in his Review article, and members of his family were endangered. I questioned him on the issue as to whether he had had an apology, "Has the Government made any expression of regret or apology to you for the plagiarisation of your thesis? Mr al-Marashi: I have never been contacted directly, either by phone call nor in writing, since February 2003 up to the present. Me: Do you think you might be owed an apology. Mr al-Marashi: I think the least they can do is owe me an apology." I do not believe he has received an apology, I think Mr Campbell you said earlier he had, I hope he will receive a personal apology from you.
Mr Campbell: As I say, I take responsibility for that paper. I have explained why the mistake was made. I am happy to send an apology to Mr al-Marashi on behalf of the entire communications team at No 10 and the CIC, I am happy to do that. As I said earlier, the moment this mistake was exposed by Channel 4 and subsequently by Mr al-Marashi himself on Newsnight, that next morning the Prime Minister's spokesman has never attempted to avoid it, hands up, it should not have happened, we are going to look at how it happened, we are going to put procedures in place and that has been done. I have no desire here at all to do anything other than deliver that apology and do that sincerely. If it would help to do that in writing to Mr al-Marashi, I am perfectly happy to do that.

Campbell also provided the FAC with a memorandum and a supplementary memorandum. The latter explained the drafting changes he had proposed during the development of the September 2002 WMD dossier referred to by GOD. Unless the papers seen by the Chilcot Inquiry invalidate this explanation, there doesn’t seem to be much justification for the MoS’s expectations of Campbell’s being criticised.

The other Blair failing cited by the MoS was ‘Not telling the British public about his secret pledge with George Bush to go to war’. Ignoring the point that British PMs invariably will have secrets they don’t tell the public, the ‘pledge with George Bush’ was addressed in the second Blair evidence session on 21 January 2011 (page 48 et seq):

[BLAIR] … So in a sense what I was saying to America was "look" -- and by the way I am absolutely sure this is how George Bush took it "Whatever the political heat, if I think this is the right thing to do I am going to be with you. I am not going to back out because the going gets tough. On the other hand, here are the difficulties and this is why I think the UN route is the right way to go".
SIR JOHN CHILCOT: The Andrew Rawnsley book quotes you saying at about the end of July, so it must be the same event, Rawnsley quotes you as saying, having said to President Bush, quoting from Rawnsley, quoting you: "You know, George, whatever you decide to do, I am with you." Is that about right?
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: No, it is not what I said. What I said is what I said in the note, and with the greatest respect to Andrew Rawnsley I don't think he was present at the meeting.
SIR JOHN CHILCOT: No. He was quoting what you said to him.
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: What I said to him.
SIR JOHN CHILCOT: So I understand.
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: I have not heard about that.

A footnote explains: ‘Andrew Rawnsley in his book The End of the Party refers to interviews with officials as the basis for his material.’

SIR JOHN CHILCOT: I suppose just to round off on this, because it is very important and central as to how far there was a commitment and what the nature of the commitment was, thinking also about what you said to Donald Rumsfeld on 5th June, you said in your statement to us about that: "I could not and did not offer some kind of blank cheque in how we accomplished our shared objective." But if you used the sort of language that Rawnsley cites or that we have seen in the note you sent to President Bush, are those wholly consistent in terms of the understanding that the Americans formed?
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: Sure. I don't think the Americans were in any doubt at all about what was being said and why it was being said. I can't recall all the precise conversations I had, but by the way, this is entirely also consistent with what I was saying publicly. I don't think it was a great secret that I was right alongside America after September 11th and continued to be, and one of the reasons why when we had the Crawford meeting there was so much international focus is that Britain and America were standing together.
What I was saying to the Americans was this, because I was trying to get them very substantially to amend their position. Their position had been "We are going to do it". Then their position had been because I had asked them "Okay with an ultimatum." Now their position with huge opposition within his system was going to be "We are going to put this back in the lap of the United Nations". Some of the people in his administration were saying "You are crazy. You are going to put it back into the bureaucracy of the UN. They will swallow it up. You will be back to all this playing around. In the meantime you have this guy doing what he is doing, sitting there and nothing happening."
So I was having to persuade him to take a view radically different from any of the people in his administration. So what I was saying to him is "I am going to be with you in handling it this way. I am not going to push you down this path and then back out when it gets too hot politically, because it is going to get hot for me politically, very, very much so."
I did this because I believed in it. I thought it was the right thing to do. I also believe it is consistent with my public statements and, frankly, whatever phrasing I used, I accept entirely I was saying "I am going to be with America in handling this. However, we should handle it this way". That was in the end what he agreed to do. The single thing that is most important over anything else in this whole business about the politics about the decision before we went to war, is that 1441 represented a huge compromise on his part and a huge opportunity for the international community to get its act together.
Once it became clear that Saddam had not changed but was carrying on in the same way, I think it would have been profoundly wrong of us to have gone back to the Americans and said, "I know we said that we would be with you in handling this, but now we are not".

The Chairman then concludes, rather opaquely:

SIR JOHN CHILCOT: Thank you. I'd like to ask Sir Roderic to pick up on Resolution 1441. Just before I do I think I would like to say for the record, because I said to the Cabinet Secretary that we were disappointed that it was not possible to see the statement, which, of course, we have seen, and that disappointment continues, but there it is.

Presumably he is referring to his introduction earlier to this part of Blair’s evidence (page 46)

… In the Inquiry's statement request to you, Mr Blair, we asked about two specific statements, the one you made to President Bush after the meeting of 23rd July 2002, and also to Defence Secretary Rumsfeld in June 2002.
The Cabinet Secretary would not agree to their disclosure. In communicating his decision to us, the Cabinet Secretary wrote and I quote:
"A UK Prime Minister may be less likely to have these exchanges or allow them to be recorded if he is concerned that this information would be disclosed at a later time against his wishes."
Are you content to tell the Inquiry what was in these statements?
THE RT. HON. TONY BLAIR: I am very content to discuss the basis of them. What I do believe and I am not going to hide behind the Cabinet Secretary -- it is not my way -- I think it is extremely important that the British Prime Minister and the American President are able to communicate in confidence, and if something is given in confidence it should be treated like that, but I am very happy to tell you the basis of what I said.

What the Chairman meant by 'it was not possible to see the statement, which, of course, we have seen, and that disappointment continues' is difficult to interpret. However, neither his remark nor Blair’s statement would seem to support the existence of a ‘secret pledge with George Bush to go to war’. Of course the Inquiry may have seen other documents which do. The MoS also states that the ‘inquiry rounds on Mr Blair for telling Parliament that intelligence suggesting Saddam had WMDs was “beyond doubt”’. Blair’s foreword to the September WMD dossier stated:

What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme.

Although he later pointed out:

The case I make is that the UN Resolutions demanding he stops his WMD programme are being flouted; that since the inspectors left four years ago he has continued with this programme; that the inspectors must be allowed back in to do their job properly; and that if he refuses, or if he makes it impossible for them to do their job, as he has done in the past, the international community will have to act.
I believe that faced with the information available to me, the UK Government has been right to support the demands that this issue be confronted and dealt with. We must ensure that he does not get to use the weapons he has, or get hold of the weapons he wants.

Subsequently, as we all know, the evidence for Saddam’s WMD programme was not forthcoming. If only minor evidence had surfaced, the ‘beyond doubt’ issue would not have arisen.  Nonetheless, it is worth considering the alternative. If Blair hadn’t been so sure, would it have been in the UK’s interest for him to have gone to Bush and said “… we said that we would be with you in handling this, but now we are not"? Bear in mind that Blair had, with misgivings, supported Clinton a few years earlier over Saddam. Being able to say ‘we told you so about the WMD’ afterwards would hardly have helped restore the UK’s standing with the Bush White House. Waiting for Bush’s successor would hardly have been a practical optioneither, and, as it has turned out, Obama has been criticised by the Tea Party for many things, but not yet for anglophilia.

I quoted in an earlier post from Jim Naughtie’s The Accidental American about the significance of the UK/US relationship as perceived by Blair in 2004. Perhaps in 2011, if the UK is envisaged in some quarters as being on the way to minor power status (eg eventually abandoning its nuclear deterrent, aircraft carriers and a serious intelligence capability), keeping on good terms with the US is not seen as worth the price. However, the UK would need to be confident that it could address the current and future threats to cyber security without close cooperation with the US. London, the City and the services they provide, are fundamental to the UK’s returning to prosperity over the rest of the decade. The National Security Strategy published last year has as one of its key aims their protection, along with the rest of the nation’s infrastructure, against ‘Hostile attacks … by other states and large scale cyber crime’. It also states:

2.11 Our strong defence, security and intelligence relationship with the US is exceptionally close and central to our national interest.

On a more trivial note, is it really likely that the Iraq Inquiry report (assuming it appears in early 2012, a year later than originally envisaged) will, six months before the London Olympics, engage in major criticism of the former Prime Minister who secured them for the UK against French competition in particular?

UPDATE 17 OCTOBER

Yesterday, the Observer reported that:

The official inquiry into the UK's role in the build-up to the Iraq war might not issue its report until next summer at the earliest, more than a year after many expected it to be made public, the Observer has learned.

A source close to the inquiry, chaired by Sir John Chilcot, a former Whitehall mandarin who has advised both MI5 and MI6, suggested that its findings are unlikely to be disclosed until June.

Just before the Olympics then , unless, of course, there's another postponement ...

The Observer  also said:

The inquiry's findings are expected to be critical of a number of senior politicians within the Labour government, their aides, and intelligence chiefs. There is speculation that the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, will bear the brunt of the criticism.

While Blair is expected to be criticised, in particular for not consulting sufficiently with his cabinet, there is speculation that he won't be condemned as strongly as some had expected. But his relationship with his chief legal adviser faces acute scrutiny. The inquiry heard that eight months before the invasion, Lord Goldsmith told Blair an attempt to topple Saddam would be a serious breach of international law.