On June 27 2003, four weeks after Andrew Gilligan made the infamous 6.07am broadcast on the Today programme in which he claimed the government had embellished its September 2002 dossier on WMD, Alastair Campbell went to Wimbledon. Two days earlier the Downing Street communications director had appeared before a Commons Foreign Affairs Committee investigation into the intelligence-gathering behind the dossier, at which he went on the attack, denouncing Gilligan's story and roundly condemning standards at the BBC. "If that is BBC journalism, then, you know, God help them."
The Wimbledon trip may have been an attempt to cool down, but he was still agitated, and believed he had not got his point across. He spent much of the afternoon negotiating the terms of an interview with Channel 4 News. At around 6pm, during a rain break, he decided to do it. Only in the car on the way to the studio did he phone Blair to tell him. At just before 7pm, he marched on to the set. Jabbing his finger on the table, he demanded that the BBC "just accept for once they have got it wrong".
Blair was equally furious with the BBC. But he was also becoming worried about Campbell's behaviour. It was an open secret in Whitehall that Campbell was preparing to leave and was, as one official put it, "in demob mode".
By this point, Peter Mandelson had re-emerged as a key player at Blair's side. They all went back a long way - Mandelson had been a lodger at the home of Gavyn Davies and his wife, Sue Nye, who runs Gordon Brown's office. Dyke and Davies had been prominent Labour supporters. It was Davies and Nye who brought Mandelson and Brown together at their home in 1999 in an attempt to broker a ceasefire. This time, through another BBC-New Labour connection, it was Mandelson's turn to try to fix a deal.
Two days before an emergency meeting of the corporation's governors, Mandelson phoned Caroline Thomson, the BBC's head of policy (who is married to Roger Liddle, an ally of Mandelson and long-time aide to Blair on Europe), suggesting a compromise: if the BBC said the story was wrong, the government would say it was a legitimate mistake and that the Today programme had been within its rights to broadcast it. Dyke and Davies pondered it, and rejected it.
On the evening of Sunday July 6, the governors gave Gilligan and Today their unqualified backing. The following day, at 7am, Blair phoned Davies at his home. Although both men stuck to their positions, the PM appealed for calm and indicated he was trying to rein Campbell in. Davies told him he thought Campbell was behaving "a bit OTT", to which Blair replied, "Don't we all." Davies wanted to believe the more emollient approach, but Blair appeared to be giving mixed signals.
Over the next few weeks the row, not just with Campbell but also with Mandelson, intensified. Mandelson suggested to Davies that he was "too weak" to control Dyke. When Davies said it was not a case of weakness, but that he stood by the original story, Mandelson said he was only doing so because he was "a Brownite". Davies was, Mandelson said, "doing Brown's conspiracies to bring Tony Blair into disrepute". That remark produced fury and bewilderment at the Treasury. Relations between chancellor and prime minister were already in one of their cyclical downturns, and few allegations were more explosive than the idea that Brown was using the BBC as a proxy to destroy Blair.
On July 7, the Foreign Affairs Committee delivered its report. The committee chairman, Donald Anderson, concluded that "the jury is out" on the main question of whether the government had exaggerated Saddam's threat. Anderson used his casting vote to exonerate Campbell, noting that he "did not exert or seek to exert improper influence on the drafting of the September dossier".
A week later, David Kelly appeared before the FAC, which had taken the unprecedented decision to continue its report on an ad hoc basis. He estimated the probability that Iraq had chemical or biological weapons to be no more than "30%". He had volunteered to his line managers that he had met Gilligan, but he suggested it was unlikely that he had been Gilligan's sole source for the "sexing up" claim. His inquisitors put his reticence down to the natural reserve of a civil servant. On July 18, as the prime minister was still luxuriating in his rapturous reception from Congress during a visit to Washington, the body of David Kelly was lying in an Oxfordshire ditch. Kelly had taken his own life.
Devastated, Blair asked Charlie Falconer, his friend whom he had just made lord chancellor, to prepare for an inquiry. One early name suggested to chair it was Lord [Brian] Hutton, the former lord chief justice of Northern Ireland. Mandelson had known him during his time in Ulster. He declared he was a man of impeccable legal - and establishment - credentials.
As the inquiry was formally announced, Gavyn Davies, the BBC chairman, received a call from a senior figure urging him not to cooperate. "Hutton was selected by the government. He is close to the security services and anti-BBC," Davies was told. "It's a trap." He thought about the warning for a few hours and then dismissed it. The choice had not caused public controversy, and the public relations consequences from withdrawing would have been disastrous.
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Publication of the Hutton report was delayed several times. It was due finally to be released on January 28, 2004. As MPs piled into the lobbies for the crucial vote, Blair was smiling. He knew the government had not just escaped censure, but had been completely exonerated. The BBC had been damned.
As he prepared his statement to parliament, Blair had several conversations with Gordon Brown. The Chancellor urged caution, to say as little as possible about the BBC. Blair agreed, saying nothing about BBC resignations.
An hour later, it was Campbell's turn, using as a venue the Foreign Press Association. "What the report shows very clearly is this: the prime minister told the truth, the government told the truth, I told the truth. The BBC, from the chairman and director general down, did not." He went on: "If the government had faced the level of criticism that today Lord Hutton has directed to the BBC, there would clearly have been resignations by now - several resignations at several levels."
Across town at Broadcasting House, the BBC was in disarray. From the moment he saw the report, Davies realised his chances of surviving were slim. But he and Dyke believed Blair and his people might keep to their side of their "deal". As he watched Campbell make his statement on TV, Davies realised it was over. He phoned his wife Sue Nye in Gordon Brown's office and told her: "This is it." At the Treasury, there was consternation. "Quite how, with so many enemies in the media already, they chose to turn their sights on to the BBC beggars belief," recalls one senior figure. "They must have taken leave of their senses." Davies made his announcement to the BBC governors, urging them to draw a line at that point and keep Dyke. The two men were invited to leave the room and Davies' advice was ignored. The next morning, Dyke also resigned. Campbell had got his scalps.
This was not what Blair had said he wanted. In the months before Hutton's verdict, he had had four conversations with Davies, always at the PM's instigation. Both men agreed to differ on the BBC's defence of the Gilligan report, but each discussion had ended amicably. In their final pre-Hutton chat, Davies was convinced they had an agreement. The BBC would defend its independence and its right to broadcast allegations against the government. The government would defend its own integrity. They would not attack each other.
A few days later, Dyke formalised the pact with Campbell's successor, David Hill. Blair told Davies he did not want him or Dyke to resign, before adding: "I can't control what people outside my circle say." Now that Campbell was no longer working for him, it was not clear whether he fell into that category.
Campbell had not deviated from his script that day. He had shown it to Hill, and his two deputies Godric Smith and Tom Kelly, and also to the PM. Blair would later protest that he had urged Campbell to tone down his statement, especially the point about resignations. If that was so, his request was not heeded. Mandelson's message to Davies had been altogether different from Blair's: if he tried to stay, the dogs would be back on him. Both Davies and Dyke felt they had been double-crossed.
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In the immediate aftermath of Hutton, Blair received conflicting advice. The majority view in and around Number 10 was to consolidate their victory and to hold firm against a WMD inquiry. Others urged Blair to use his Hutton statement on January 28 to announce a WMD probe immediately. Many around Blair would later wish that argument had prevailed.
Blair was not in control of events. On the Friday evening, January 30, George Bush declared: "I want the American people to know that I too want to know the facts. I want to be able to compare what the Iraq Survey Group has found with what we thought prior to going into Iraq." He did not specifically endorse an independent inquiry, but he was laying the ground for a retreat. The pressure had become unsustainable.
On Saturday, David Manning, Blair's former right-hand man and now ambassador in Washington, phoned Nigel Sheinwald, his successor as Number 10 chief foreign policy adviser. Sheinwald then contacted Condoleezza Rice to find out what was going on. She told him they were minded to hold an inquiry but had not finally decided. The British were miffed that the Americans had not bothered to tell them.
The following day, unbeknown to Downing Street, US TV networks were quoting "administration sources" as saying Bush would name a bipartisan, independent inquiry on the lines of the Warren Commission into John F Kennedy's assassination in 1963. It would report early in 2005 - after the US presidential elections. Sheinwald put in a second call to Rice, asking her to think again. Rice replied tartly to his last-minute appeal, suggesting the British had been a little slow on the uptake: "You have your politics, we have ours," she told him. For all the supposed camaraderie, Bush had carried out a U-turn without giving Blair's concerns so much as a second thought.
Sheinwald phoned his boss. Blair got on the phone to Straw. They realised they had no choice but to follow the Americans. "We were furious," says one official. Straw told Blair the Americans had "bounced us into it". On Saturday evening, Hill had advised ministers not to commit themselves either way if asked whether there should be an inquiry. The response should be: "Not for the moment." An official recalls: "It was a squalid weekend. We tried to hold the line in public as best we could."
A frantic search began for someone to lead the British inquiry. An outside figure with experience of intelligence and Whitehall was needed. Blair wanted the former chief of the defence staff, Lord Guthrie, but he was deemed too close. In any case, he was minded not to do it. They briefly considered Lord Burns, but he was heading a separate review into the BBC charter. They finally settled on a quintessential establishment figure, Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary. Butler was considered to have "sound" instincts. He had, after all, defended ministers to the hilt during the Conservatives' difficulties over the Scott Report into the illegal sale of arms to Iraq, famously declaring: "Half the picture can be true."
Sheinwald phoned the Americans to inform them. It was their turn to be displeased. Why, they wanted to know, did the British inquiry have to report in July, on the eve of the pre-election conventions? Could they not delay it until after November? The British responded that the timing of the Americans' own inquiry was not entirely convenient for Blair. Officials were sorely tempted to point out: the Americans had their politics and the Brits had theirs.
· This is an edited extract from the new edition of Blair's Wars, by John Kampfner, published by the Free Press on June 7.
