Hearing Transcripts

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1 adjournment. I am really in his hands.
2 MR SUMPTION: I think it would be more satisfactory, given
3 it is 5 to 1, if he made a clean start at 2 o'clock.
4 But we are in your Lordship's hands.
5 LORD HUTTON: Very well, I will rise now and sit again at
6 2 o'clock.
7 (12.55 pm)
8 (The short adjournment)
9 (2.00 pm)
10 LORD HUTTON: Yes Mr Sumption.
11 MR ALASTAIR CAMPBELL (called)
12 Examined by MR SUMPTION
13 MR SUMPTION: Mr Campbell, you have been through the story
14 of your role in the preparation of the dossier in your
15 evidence at phase 1 and there are only certain points
16 which I want to ask you about again.
17 On 9th September 2002 you wrote a memorandum to
18 Mr Scarlett describing certain aspects of the procedure
19 for preparing the dossier, in which you said that you
20 would be making comments with the assistance of an
21 informal group of officials.
22 You then, on 17th September, made a number of
23 comments to Mr Scarlett in writing, some of which came
24 from the Prime Minister and some of which were your own.
25 Can I ask you: on whose instructions were you

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1 assuming the role of making comments on drafts of the
2 dossier?
3 A. In the first instance on the instructions of the
4 Prime Minister and also because John Scarlett had asked
5 me to offer him presentational advice on the draft that
6 he submitted in the second week of September.
7 Q. Can you tell us why it was you as the Government's
8 director of strategy and communications who came to be
9 performing this function?
10 A. I think what the Prime Minister expected of me in this
11 particular communications exercise, if you like, was to
12 perform my role, which I traditionally would perform, on
13 something which crosses Departments, which is the role
14 of coordination. The second point is that this was
15 a document that was to be presented to Parliament and to
16 the public, not just at home but also overseas. It was
17 a major communications exercise. The other point
18 I would make is that the Joint Intelligence Committee,
19 for very obvious reasons, do not have the expertise or
20 the personnel to do that kind of job.
21 Q. The dossier said in its executive summary that it
22 reflected the views of the JIC, which is the organ
23 responsible for advising the British Government on
24 intelligence matters.
25 Do you think it appropriate that the Prime Minister

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1 or you as a member of his staff should be making
2 suggestions about such a document?
3 A. Well, the Prime Minister ultimately has responsibility
4 for the intelligence agencies. This was, as I said
5 a moment ago, a document that he was presenting to
6 Parliament. He was going to have to be answerable to
7 Parliament for every word in it. Equally, those of us
8 whose job it is to help the Prime Minister and other
9 Ministers put the Government's case to the media and,
10 through them, to the public were going to have to be on
11 top of the detail; and I would say that I was making
12 presentational points in accordance with the job that
13 the Prime Minister and Mr Scarlett had asked me to do.
14 Q. I am going to show you the comments that you made on
15 17th September in a moment. But before I do that, do
16 you have any view of your own about whether your
17 comments and the fact that it was you who was making
18 them was liable to affect the objectivity of Mr Scarlett
19 or the JIC or their staff?
20 A. I do not believe it should have done and I do not
21 believe it would have done and certainly not Mr Scarlett
22 and the senior representatives of the agencies who sit
23 on the JIC.
24 LORD HUTTON: Mr Campbell you said in reply to Mr Sumption
25 a moment or two ago that it was the responsibility of

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1 the Prime Minister, or words to this effect, to make the
2 Government's case. What do you mean by the Government's
3 case?
4 A. No, the point I was making, my Lord, is that when the
5 dossier was presented to Parliament, the Prime Minister
6 was the person who was going to have to stand at the
7 dispatch box and take all the questions upon it and be
8 answerable to Parliament for its contents. So the point
9 I was making is that he had to be confident. That was
10 a document worthy for him to present to Parliament and
11 for him to have sufficient confidence in it to be able
12 to answer all the questions of MPs and the public.
13 So we never saw this as a document that was making
14 a particular case for a particular policy in relation to
15 Iraq. What it was doing was setting out the facts on
16 Iraq's WMD as the British Government understood them to
17 be.
18 MR SUMPTION: As the British Government understood them to
19 be from what sources?
20 A. From the Joint Intelligence Committee.
21 Q. Could we have CAB/11/66, please? This is the first page
22 of your memorandum to Mr Scarlett of 17th September
23 which I mentioned a moment ago. Would you like to go
24 through the points that you have listed here on the
25 second page, 67, and explain, briefly, what point you

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1 were making in relation to each one?
2 A. Well, on point 1, when I say "in light of the last
3 24 hours..." that refers to the fact that Saddam Hussein
4 had announced that he was intending to allow the UN
5 inspectors back in.
6 Now, the Prime Minister and the Government's view
7 was that this was almost certainly another ploy. When
8 I talk about making "more of the point about current
9 concealment plans", I am simply making the point, given
10 that we knew he had an infrastructure for concealing his
11 WMD programme, that that should be brought out more in
12 the dossier. And I then say "it would be stronger if we
13 said that despite sanctions and the policy of
14 containment, he has made real progress", ie real
15 progress in the development of his programmes. My
16 understanding is that John Scarlett agreed with that
17 point; and I think one sentence was added to the text.
18 Q. When you said "it would be stronger if we said that
19 despite sanctions on the policy of containment, he has
20 made real progress", what did you mean by "stronger"?
21 A. What I meant by that is that the point we were making
22 there would be brought out more effectively and more
23 clearly.
24 Q. Can you move on to point 2, please?
25 A. Point 2 relates to what I spotted as an inconsistency

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1 between the executive summary, which said definitively
2 that Saddam and his son Qusay had or have authority to
3 launch chemical and biological weapons, and the point in
4 the main body of the text which said Saddam may have
5 delegated that authority. I had been present at
6 discussions where I thought that was a definitive piece
7 of information, if you like.
8 Q. What was the definitive piece of information?
9 A. That that authority had indeed been delegated. So
10 I could not really understand why it said one thing in
11 the summary and something different in the main body.
12 In the event John Scarlett, presumably having
13 checked against the assessments and against the raw
14 intelligence, reported that the intelligence only
15 supported "may have".
16 Q. Point 3.
17 A. Again, the draft of the 16th September referred to the
18 fact that Saddam had sought to secure uranium from
19 Africa, but did not follow the point through, and
20 I was -- wanted to know whether in fact he had been
21 successful in that. So I say "can we say he has secured
22 underlined uranium from Africa". Again the answer came
23 back from John Scarlett: no, he had not and the text
24 stayed exactly as it was in the September 16th draft.
25 Q. What about point 4?

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1 A. Point 4 related to an issue that had been well
2 documented, I think, in public already about these
3 aluminium tubes. I was simply making the point that
4 that might be something that was appropriate for the
5 executive summary. John Scarlett, at one point, did put
6 it in the executive summary, but when the final dossier
7 was published in fact it was not there, for reasons
8 which have nothing to do with any comment that I made.
9 Q. Point 5?
10 A. Point 5 again was a factual question, could we be "clear
11 about the distances by which he is seeking to extend
12 [the] missile range." The draft had worked on extending
13 its range beyond 150 kilometres. I wanted to know if we
14 could say how far beyond. The answer came back was it
15 200 and that went into the final product.
16 Q. Point 6?
17 A. Point 6, again you may recall when I first gave evidence
18 that we covered this point, I thought that was
19 unnecessary rhetoric.
20 Q. Point 7.
21 A. Point 7, again it was a factual question, how much of
22 the £3 billion of assets generated outside UN control
23 was illegal. The answer came back that all of it was
24 illegal and the word "illegal" was inserted into that
25 part of the dossier.

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1 Q. Point 8?
2 A. Point 8, I asked about whether we could be specific
3 about the quantities of some of the munitions that were
4 mentioned. The answer came back that we could not and
5 that point did not change.
6 Q. 9.
7 A. Point 9 I think referred to some of his chemical
8 weapons. In the event, that part of the dossier, again
9 without any comment or input from me, was actually --
10 was done in a different way. So that point became
11 irrelevant.
12 Q. Were you suggesting that the point should be
13 strengthened?
14 A. No, I was making an observation that it just read very
15 weakly.
16 Q. Did you have a view about how that should be dealt with?
17 A. No.
18 Q. Do you remember how it was dealt with?
19 A. It was -- as I say, it was -- John Scarlett came back
20 and said that particular word, according to the
21 intelligence, could not be improved upon.
22 Q. Right. Point 10.
23 A. Point 10, again this was the observation of an
24 inconsistency. This was in relation to the 45 minute
25 intelligence. The summary said that some of these

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1 weapons could be ready within 45 minutes and in the main
2 body of the text it said the Iraqi military may be able
3 to deploy them. I pointed out that the main body was
4 therefore weaker than in the summary.
5 Q. Did you --
6 A. And the outcome of that -- John Scarlett, at that time,
7 said that he would check that against the raw
8 intelligence. As it transpired, Julian Miller and his
9 team were already on to that point. When John Scarlett
10 talked in his response to me, he said: the language that
11 you queried has been tightened. That as I understand it
12 had already been done. So on that particular point,
13 I had no input or influence whatever.
14 Q. At the time when you wrote this memorandum did you have
15 any view about how the inconsistency pointed out in
16 paragraph 10 should be resolved?
17 A. No, I did not, and I did not suggest a view. What is
18 more, I did not chase up how John Scarlett resolved it.
19 I left that entirely to him.
20 Q. Point 11.
21 A. Point 11 related to what were called in the dossier dual
22 use facilities, in other words facilities that could be
23 used as both civil and -- sorry, both for civilian and
24 for military purposes. I pointed out that "could" again
25 sounded weak and suggested "capable of being used" was

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1 a better way of expressing it. I believe that was
2 incorporated into the text.
3 Q. Do you remember why?
4 A. I do not, no.
5 Q. Point 12?
6 A. Point 12, I suggested that in a short section on a foot
7 and mouth disease vaccine plant that a reference to its
8 probable renovation was not necessary. John Scarlett
9 agreed with that and the sentence was removed.
10 Q. Point 13.
11 A. Point 13, I simply made a factual observation that
12 I suspected that when they wrote 1991, that was either
13 a typographical error or a factual error because it was
14 actually 1998.
15 Q. 14.
16 A. Point 14 was actually a point that both the
17 Prime Minister and I had made; and this was perhaps more
18 complicated than some of the others, and this was an
19 issue, I think, where my role in offering presentational
20 advice was important because the fact is that I did not
21 actually understand the way that it had been described
22 in the September 16th draft that I saw. And
23 Julian Miller, as a result of my failing to understand
24 it, actually came and explained it to me and it did
25 become clear.

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1 If I can just explain the point that I, as it were,
2 did not get. I could not understand why it appeared to
3 take less time to build a nuclear device without
4 sanctions -- sorry, I beg your pardon, with sanctions
5 than it did without sanctions. What Julian Miller came
6 and explained to me is what the intelligence was based
7 upon was Saddam Hussein's efforts to acquire the
8 material illegally. In the end what happened is that
9 there was quite a long discussion about this and
10 eventually the text, I think, was made more clear.
11 Q. Point 15.
12 A. What I was trying to suggest here was that given that
13 the Prime Minister, in a sense, wanted to communicate to
14 the public the reasons why he was becoming more and more
15 concerned about this issue, I was actually suggesting,
16 if you like, as an editorial presentational device, that
17 within the dossier it was explained on such and such
18 a date this assessment with these facts went in; on such
19 and such a date this assessment with these facts went
20 in. And John Scarlett did not do it in that way. He
21 addressed the point in a different way.
22 Q. Over the page, page 68. Point 16. Was that an
23 important point?
24 A. No.
25 Q. Do you want to say anything about it?

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1 A. Simply that Ed Owen, who works for the
2 Foreign Secretary, had said to John Scarlett in an
3 e-mail that I had seen that he felt there were too many
4 bullet points in the executive summary, and I did not
5 agree with that.
6 Q. In your evidence a moment ago, and in fact in your
7 memorandum to Mr Scarlett on 9th September, you had
8 referred to your comments being made from
9 a presentational point of view?
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. Would you describe these comments as being made from
12 a presentational point of view?
13 A. I would.
14 Q. Are there any exceptions?
15 A. I do not believe there are, no, because at -- I mean
16 I think it is important to understand the dynamic of the
17 professional relationship that was at the heart of this,
18 namely the professional relationship between myself and
19 Mr Scarlett. Mr Scarlett was in control of the contents
20 of the dossier. He had asked me for advice on
21 presentation. Both of us were conscious of the fact
22 that this was a -- the expectations surrounding this
23 publication were huge; that the media and
24 Parliamentarians were likely to pore over every word.
25 John Scarlett will freely admit it is not an area he

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1 has expertise in and I was able to offer the sort of
2 advice he wanted.
3 Q. Taken together, were these suggestions and comments
4 trying to alter the message conveyed by the dossier so
5 as to make it more powerful or increase its impact?
6 A. No. I think if you look at the totality of the comments
7 that I made, both my own comments and those from the
8 Prime Minister, I think you could say that some were
9 clearly neutral, if you like, if you are looking at the
10 comments that are made about the structure of the
11 document. Some you could say, I think fairly, that they
12 were suggestions that would strengthen the text. Others
13 are suggestions that would weaken parts of the text.
14 But the overall aim was actually to seek to provide
15 greater clarity.
16 Q. Could you look at CAB/42/2, please? This is a letter
17 addressed to Clare Sumner following your evidence to the
18 Foreign Affairs Committee in which a committee clerk
19 asks you to provide some additional information and
20 a note on certain matters.
21 The second bullet point asks for:
22 "A full list of the changes requested by
23 Alastair Campbell to the September dossier, with an
24 indication of which were made and which were not made.
25 No reasons are required in respect of those not made."

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1 A. Hmm, hmm.
2 Q. What did you understand that you were being asked to do
3 here?
4 A. In relation to that second point?
5 Q. Yes.
6 A. I understood I was being asked for a list of changes and
7 how John Scarlett, on behalf of the JIC, responded to
8 those requests for changes.
9 Q. You did not include, in your memorandum to the FAC, all
10 of the 16 points which we have gone through from your
11 memorandum of 17th September. Can you identify the ones
12 that you did not include?
13 A. It would be difficult without having the version -- the
14 memorandum that I finally sent.
15 Q. You did not include, I think this is established, item
16 10 for example?
17 A. Hmm, hmm.
18 Q. Which related to the 45 minutes point?
19 A. That is right.
20 Q. Why was that?
21 A. Because I was -- in relation to point 10, as I said
22 a moment ago, I was pointing out an inconsistency
23 between the executive summary and the text. I was not
24 suggesting how that inconsistency should be addressed.
25 I was, therefore, not making the request for a change.

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1 This point about 45 minutes had never been a big issue
2 in relation to the planning of the dossier; and the
3 final point I would make is that we knew, at that stage,
4 that the ISC would be looking at all of these issues
5 anyway.
6 So I provided what I was asked to provide, which is
7 a list of the request for change and John Scarlett's
8 responses.
9 Q. I want to ask you next, if I may, about the dispute with
10 the BBC between 29th May and Dr Kelly's death. You have
11 already given evidence about the successive stages of
12 this dispute, and I am not going to ask you to go
13 through the history again.
14 Can you summarise for us the reasons why you took as
15 strong a line as you did?
16 A. Well, the first thing I would say is it was not me that
17 was taking that -- just me, should I say, that was
18 taking the strong line. The Prime Minister and other
19 members of the Government took a very strong line on
20 this, firstly because these were, in his and the
21 Government's view, grave allegations, about as grave as
22 could be levelled against the Prime Minister. If they
23 were true then it was not just a case of me having to
24 resign, the Prime Minister would have had to resign.
25 I think it is also fair to say that I had, if you

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1 like, political instincts that led me to believe that
2 this could do very serious damage to the standing of the
3 Prime Minister and the Government. It came in the
4 middle of what was a pretty concerted campaign against
5 the Prime Minister by the opposition and parts of the
6 media on the theme of trust.
7 I think the other point I would make finally is it
8 was the fact that it was the BBC. The BBC is not like
9 the Mail on Sunday or the Daily Mail. The BBC is
10 probably the most respected media organisation in the
11 world, and rightly. These allegations were going to go,
12 as indeed they did, right round the world the moment
13 they were made.
14 Q. What, in summary, was your objection to the way in which
15 the BBC sought to respond to your concerns during June
16 and the first half of July?
17 A. I think my main objection was born of the sense that
18 I felt nobody was taking our denials and then, following
19 the denials, our complaints at all seriously.
20 As I say, this story went right round the world. It
21 was followed up by media organisations here in very
22 large number and they gave considerable space to it.
23 And the central allegations that started this
24 controversy, the BBC and other parts of the media were
25 not covering in my view the denials of the

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1 Prime Minister and others fairly or fully and they just
2 were not taking our complaints seriously.
3 Q. You have described how you thought these were very grave
4 allegations. Did the BBC, so far as you could judge
5 from their responses, regard them as grave allegations?
6 A. I do not know. I mean I cannot really -- I can only
7 make my own judgment upon what they have said publicly
8 and what they said to me. But I did not get the sense
9 that they were taking them seriously at all. I think to
10 them it was just another story to kick around on the
11 Today Programme.
12 Q. Do you think that there were times during this six or
13 seven week period that you expressed yourself more
14 strongly than was appropriate, given the view you took
15 about the gravity of the allegations?
16 A. Well, I think as I indicated both -- as indeed
17 I recorded in my diary, and I indicated when I first
18 gave evidence, I think perhaps on the Channel 4 News
19 interview, although I stand by the substance of what
20 I said, I think the manner in which I said it, at times,
21 left something to be desired. But I think it is
22 important to understand the sense of anger and
23 frustration that is building when you have been accused
24 of something very, very serious which you know you have
25 not done, when your efforts to seek to resolve it

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1 privately are met with a mixture of disdain and
2 indifference, and then when it becomes a public issue
3 that the allegations are then sort of redefined and the
4 BBC just try to sort or wish away what they had said and
5 try to pretend they had never said it.
6 I think that -- I do not make any effort to disguise
7 the fact, I was extremely angry, I was very frustrated,
8 I was increasingly dispirited about the whole thing, for
9 all sorts of reasons. Professional reasons; I felt
10 I was not actually doing my job properly in getting
11 corrected allegations I knew to be false and were
12 damaging the Prime Minister and the Government.
13 Political reasons, to which I have alluded to earlier.
14 And also personal reasons; it is pretty unpleasant to be
15 accused of this kind of thing without a shred of
16 evidence and without anybody, it seems, remotely taking
17 seriously the complaint that has been made.
18 Q. You have spoken about your own reactions. Are you
19 talking about your own personal reactions alone or was
20 that frustration shared by others?
21 A. I think the frustration was shared right through the
22 Government because, from the Prime Minister down,
23 through the Cabinet, through the intelligence agencies,
24 the people that work for me, we all knew the allegations
25 were false; and it is a very difficult thing to try to

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1 deal with.
2 Q. I want to ask you, if I may, about two specific points
3 which have been raised by certain of the BBC's
4 witnesses.
5 First of all, it has been said that you did not
6 specifically refer to the 6.07 broadcast allegation
7 where Mr Gilligan said that the Government probably knew
8 that the 45 minutes point was wrong at the time that
9 they put it in until about a month after Mr Gilligan's
10 original broadcast when you included it in your letter
11 of 26th June.
12 What do you say about that?
13 A. Well, it is not true. My first letter -- bear in mind
14 it is important to understand the whole context of this.
15 Not just me but the Prime Minister had been denying this
16 on a daily, sometimes twice daily basis since the story
17 was first aired. My first letter -- including on the
18 floor of the House of Commons, and with specific regard
19 to the 45 minutes point.
20 My first letter on 6th June said:
21 "With regard to the report on the BBC Today
22 Programme last Thursday at 0607 (transcript enclosed),
23 can you explain to me how it conforms with the BBC's own
24 guidelines, in particular the following three".
25 So I attached the transcript, I set out the three

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1 areas of the BBC producer guidelines where I believed
2 they may be in breach and I send that to Mr Sambrook.
3 How anybody can say from that that I did not raise the
4 specific report and the specific allegations that were
5 made, I do not understand.
6 Q. The second point --
7 LORD HUTTON: I think the suggestion is that you complained
8 about the reports as a whole and the BBC says there were
9 a number of reports on that morning and you did not
10 single out the couple of sentences that said that the
11 Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was
12 wrong.
13 A. Well, that, my Lord, is why I attached the transcript of
14 the 0607 report.
15 LORD HUTTON: Yes. Was it just that report that you
16 attached?
17 A. There were a number of reports which I felt were
18 inaccurate.
19 LORD HUTTON: Yes.
20 A. The point was this was the report that did the damage.
21 LORD HUTTON: Hmm.
22 A. This was the report that went round the world. This was
23 the report that the rest of the media here and overseas
24 picked up. These were the allegations that were being
25 levelled against the Government. It was setting out to

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1 Mr Sambrook: here is the transcript. You can judge the
2 guidelines as well as I can but these three guidelines
3 in relation to the use of a single source I believe need
4 looking at. Added to which, since May 29th, when the
5 story was first broadcast, this story was the biggest
6 story not just in Britain but in other parts of the
7 world as well.
8 So the idea that by this stage Mr Sambrook or
9 anybody else at the BBC was not aware of the allegations
10 that we meant, as I say, I do not have it to hand but
11 the quote of the Prime Minister on the floor of the
12 House of Commons is very, very clear. He talks about
13 how with the backing of the JIC Chairman he was making
14 clear that nobody in Government committed this offence
15 in relation to the 45 minutes intelligence. So I do not
16 think Mr Sambrook or Mr Dyke or anybody else could have
17 been in any doubt about what we were saying.
18 MR SUMPTION: The second point which has been suggested by
19 some of the BBC witnesses is that it is said the dispute
20 had gone quiet by late June, until on 26th June you
21 needlessly revived it. What do you say about that?
22 A. I do not accept that. Why was I at the Foreign Affairs
23 Committee in the first place? As the Chairman of the
24 Foreign Affairs Committee said, I was there to answer
25 the allegations made against me by the BBC. Added to

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1 which, on the morning of my appearance, I think
2 overnight some British soldiers had been killed. That
3 was the lead story on the Today Programme. The second
4 story was my appearance at the Foreign Affairs
5 Committee.
6 I think there were six separate items about it on
7 the Today Programme. There was a report by their
8 political correspondent Norman Smith who said that the
9 reason I am appearing is because the Government has
10 realised this story is not going to go away. My
11 evidence, long before I said a word, the BBC took the
12 decision they were going to cover it live and, like
13 other networks, they covered it live. Normally when the
14 Prime Minister leaves Downing Street to go to
15 Prime Minister's Questions there are a couple of camera
16 crews in the street. The street was packed; and the BBC
17 journalists and others were saying they were there for
18 me, not the Prime Minister. So I think to suggest this
19 story had somehow gone away really does not stand up to
20 much examination.
21 Q. Can I ask you about another point please? Evidence has
22 been given that on the evening of 7th July 2003 you had
23 a discussion with Godric Smith in which you suggested
24 that Dr Kelly's name should be given out to an evening
25 paper. Can you tell us, please, exactly what your

131
1 suggestion was, why it was made and what became of it?
2 A. No, it was not a discussion with Godric Smith, it was
3 a discussion with the Defence Secretary, part of which
4 Godric Smith heard on my speaker phone in the office,
5 and I was not suggesting to Godric or to Mr Hoon or to
6 anybody else that the name of the person who had come
7 forward be put into the public domain. I was suggesting
8 in advance of the Prime Minister's Liaison Committee
9 appearance that the fact of somebody coming forward
10 should be put into the public domain. And there was
11 a very -- I hesitate even to call it a proposal, it was
12 a thought which was very quickly rejected by the
13 Defence Secretary, Godric and Tom Kelly both though it
14 was a bad idea. But more importantly I raised it with
15 the Prime Minister, he thought it was a bad idea and
16 nothing came of it.
17 Q. During the period between your having this thought and
18 it being sat on by all those people, did you have a view
19 about how the name would be conveyed to the press?
20 A. No, I was not suggesting the name be conveyed.
21 Q. Sorry, the fact that somebody had come forward.
22 A. What my thought was based on was the idea of whether
23 this should happen, not how. Had the decision been
24 taken that it should have been taken forward, then we
25 would have had a discussion about how to do that, but

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1 I was not envisaging doing it in anything other than an
2 open way, making clear that this was information that
3 would come from the Government.
4 Q. Mr Dingemans put to Mr Hoon that no doubt the suggestion
5 was that it should be done anonymously. When
6 Mr Dingemans puts that question to you, what will your
7 answer be?
8 A. If he does put that question to me in those terms, that
9 was not what I had in mind.
10 Q. What did you have in mind, if anything?
11 A. Well, what I had in mind at that point was -- I mean
12 bear in mind on 7th July I had been busy all day with if
13 you like helping to organise the Government's response
14 to the Foreign Affairs Committee report. Come the late
15 afternoon, early evening, I am starting to turn my mind
16 to the Prime Minister's forthcoming appearance at the
17 Liaison Committee and what I had in mind was something,
18 a plan, that allowed the Prime Minister when he appeared
19 at the Liaison Committee to be able to avoid what
20 I think could have been a very difficult situation had
21 he been asked about this, the question whether we knew
22 anything about the source.
23 What I had in mind was a chain of events which ended
24 if you like with the Prime Minister being able to say:
25 I am aware of these reports, I am aware somebody has

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1 come forward, it is being handled by the Ministry of
2 Defence. My worry was if there was nothing in the
3 public domain at that time, either he would be put in
4 a position where he could leave himself open to the
5 charge of being misleading, in other words if he said
6 nothing when he did know something that would be
7 difficult or he would be put in a position where he, the
8 Prime Minister, would be launching if you like yet
9 another fire storm around this issue.
10 MR SUMPTION: Thank you very much Mr Campbell.
11 Cross-examined by MR CALDECOTT
12 Q. Mr Campbell, I have a bundle for you which just may be
13 easier than the screen if you want to look at it. One
14 for Lord Hutton. (Handed).
15 Mr Campbell, in the course of preparing the dossier
16 were you shown any JIC assessments?
17 A. No.
18 Q. Were the contents of any JIC assessments read out to you
19 or summarised during the preparation of the dossier?
20 A. Almost certainly they will have been summarised because
21 the discussions that I had been having would no doubt
22 have been -- would have involved people who were seeing
23 JIC assessments the whole time.
24 Q. Do you in fact have security clearance to read JIC
25 assessments?

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1 A. I do.
2 Q. Could you, please, look at FAC/2/297? This is your
3 evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee.
4 A. Is this coming on the screen?
5 Q. You can either look at it on the screen or the first
6 page of your bundle if you prefer. Question 1054. To
7 give it some context, can we look at the end of 1053?
8 We see that Mr Illsley is asking you questions. This is
9 in the context of the September dossier. He says:
10 "... did you see raw intelligence material that
11 Security Services had or were you provided with
12 assessments from the senior intelligence community?"
13 You say: "In relation to this?" "This" is the
14 September dossier we are on here.
15 Mr Illsley then goes on:
16 "In relation to the first dossier now. In general,
17 the intelligence you were able to see up to September
18 before and after, did you see raw intelligence or was
19 this material provided to you as assessments from the
20 Intelligence Services?"
21 You say this:
22 "Again, I am not sure how much or how little of this
23 I am supposed to divulge but I certainly saw the Joint
24 Intelligence Committee assessments on which the
25 September report was based."

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1 That would appear to read to anyone, would it not,
2 that you did see JIC assessments in the course of
3 preparing the September dossier?
4 A. I can see why you might say that; and I would just point
5 you back to Mr Illsley's question, to the part where he
6 says "you were able to see up to September before and
7 after". It is a point I was also asked at the
8 Intelligence and Security Committee where I made clear
9 that I saw the JIC assessments after the production of
10 the dossier, not least in relation to preparing myself
11 for the Parliamentary inquiries that the May 29th
12 reports led to.
13 Q. Let me make two suggestions to you about that. First of
14 all, the words "up to September before and after"
15 I suggest are a reference to the first version of the
16 first dossier evolving, as we know, from the spring
17 until the beginning of September, that is up to
18 September; then of course we get the revamped version
19 developing in the course of the month of September.
20 I suggest that is the distinction Mr Illsley was making.
21 Secondly, he was not interested at all, was he,
22 whether you saw them after publication of the dossier?
23 He was interested in what material you had had as
24 a basis for preparing the dossier. So why did you say
25 in the context of a question like that that you had seen

136
1 the JIC assessments on which the September report was
2 based?
3 A. Well, again, you would have to ask Mr Illsley what he
4 meant by the question. I can only explain and stand by
5 the answers that I gave.
6 Q. Do you accept that Mr Illsley was only concerned with
7 the material you had while you were preparing the
8 September dossier? He was not remotely interested in
9 what you had seen after publication?
10 A. As well, as I say, you would have to ask Mr Illsley
11 that. I know what I saw whilst I was working on the
12 dossier and I know what I saw afterwards.
13 Q. How many meetings did you attend at which JIC
14 assessments were discussed in your presence?
15 A. Prior to the ...?
16 Q. Prior to publication of the September dossier.
17 A. Prior to publication. I mean, I could not give you an
18 answer to that. I attended meetings with the
19 Prime Minister, I attended meetings with Mr Scarlett and
20 with others. Some of them may have been discussing what
21 they knew to be material from the JIC assessments.
22 Q. What about intelligence officials being present, apart
23 from Mr Scarlett? How many meetings did you attend
24 where there were SIS or DIS officials present?
25 A. Well, the meetings I was chairing had intelligence

137
1 officials present, both from SIS and DIS; and I think
2 I gave evidence when I first appeared at the Inquiry
3 about another meeting that I had with the
4 Prime Minister, had with the head of the SIS and
5 a serving SIS officer.
6 Q. Were those officials there to bring you up-to-date with
7 any new intelligence and its effect?
8 A. The meeting with the Prime Minister?
9 Q. No, the meetings you chaired at which there were
10 security officials present.
11 A. No, they were not meetings about intelligence. They
12 were meetings to discuss the presentation of the
13 dossier.
14 Q. What were the security officials doing there, unless
15 they were interested in how the specific intelligence
16 would be presented in the dossier in terms of its
17 wording?
18 A. Well, that is exactly why they were there.
19 Q. They were not there for mere presentation, were they?
20 A. No, they were there because they are intelligence
21 officials who were involved in the preparation of
22 a dossier that the Prime Minister was intending to
23 present to Parliament which was the JIC's best
24 assessment of Saddam Hussein's WMD programmes.
25 Q. Is it right to describe the September dossier as

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1 a distillation of the joint intelligence assessments
2 being presented to the Prime Minister?
3 A. I would say it is more than that because it also
4 included historical background information. But it
5 certainly included the core of the JIC assessments that
6 had been presented to the Prime Minister.
7 Q. I mean, there is no mystery about this. If you look at
8 FAC/2/290, those are in fact your own words in answer to
9 a question before the Foreign Affairs Committee. It is
10 question 1030. I do not think we need the question. If
11 we look at your answer at the top of that page:
12 "... this is the distillation of the Joint
13 Intelligence Committee assessments that were being
14 presented to the Prime Minister."
15 A. I think that is fair enough.
16 Q. Broadly speaking, the idea was to put the public in the
17 place of the Prime Minister so they could share and
18 hopefully agree with the judgment the Prime Minister
19 himself had made; is that fair?
20 A. What led to this dossier was the fact that the
21 Prime Minister was constantly having to explain to
22 Parliament and the public that he was seeing
23 intelligence, it was making him more and more concerned
24 and he wanted to share some of that with the public,
25 that is right.

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1 Q. I am right, am I not, that as early as 5th September it
2 had been agreed between you and Mr Scarlett that there
3 should be a substantial rewrite of the dossier with
4 Mr Scarlett in charge of the project?
5 A. I know we met on the 5th and again on the 9th. As
6 a result of those meetings it was made clear right round
7 the system, right round every Department likely to be
8 involved in the production of the dossier, that anything
9 that went before was now in the hands of John Scarlett
10 and it was for him to rewrite it as he saw fit.
11 Q. Again I do not disagree with that answer, it is just at
12 CAB/11/17 for the record, this is an e-mail, I think --
13 is Sandra Powell one of your assistants?
14 A. She is.
15 Q. From her on your behalf to Jonathan Powell, Chief of
16 Staff at Downing Street. Some of these pages have
17 multiple e-mails but it is the middle one, in fact:
18 "Re dossier, substantial rewrite with JS [that is
19 Mr Scarlett] and Julian M [Miller, that is, chief of the
20 assessment staff] in charge ..."
21 Right?
22 A. That is right.
23 Q. "... and be in shape Monday thereafter."
24 So next Friday, and then be in shape Monday
25 thereafter. Friday is 13th September --

140
1 A. Hmm, hmm.
2 Q. -- and Monday is 16th September.
3 A. Yes.
4 Q. So the plan was that by 16th September the draft, if not
5 in final shape, was hoped to be in near final shape; is
6 that right?
7 A. I think what I am saying there is that by the time
8 John Scarlett and his team had rewritten the entire
9 dossier, he would get back from the States and by that
10 Monday there would be something else to look at.
11 Q. Can you just help me: Parliament was being specifically
12 recalled to debate this issue?
13 A. That is right.
14 Q. Can you tell me when it was that -- was it
15 25th September that they sat for the first time?
16 A. 24th or 25th, I cannot remember.
17 Q. Timing of publication was to coincide with the recall of
18 Parliament?
19 A. Correct.
20 Q. Can you tell me, I genuinely do not know, when the
21 recall of Parliament was actually fixed for that date of
22 25th September?
23 A. It would have been -- I think normally you have to give
24 at least two days' notice for a recall of Parliament
25 like that, so it would have been in the days up to the

141
1 24th. I think the Inquiry has a copy of my diary where
2 I record a conversation with the Speaker when he was in
3 New York on the 11th. The reason I remember it was the
4 11th, he was there for the commemoration of
5 September 11th, and we had a discussion then; and then
6 Jack Straw had a discussion and there were discussions
7 between the Speaker's office and No. 10 that followed
8 that. I think it was in the week before the 24th.
9 Q. We know there is a planning meeting on 9th September;
10 and we know that that leads to a memo that you write
11 afterwards which starts at CAB/6/2. I will just wait
12 for that to come up.
13 Do you know precisely who attended that meeting?
14 A. This is my meeting on the 9th.
15 Q. Yes, which I think is the origins of this memo. This is
16 not a minute, this is something you send out later in
17 the day to Mr Scarlett?
18 A. Yes. I could not tell you exactly who was there.
19 Certainly myself, John Scarlett, I recall David Manning
20 being there for a part of the meeting, Jim Poston who
21 was then the head of the CIC. There were two or three
22 representatives of the Foreign Office. There were
23 representatives of the MoD and DIS and there were
24 representatives of the Security Service.
25 Q. I think you said there were three very senior SIS

142
1 officers present?
2 A. No, I had a separate meeting prior to this with
3 John Scarlett and three SIS officers. Again, I would
4 have to check with their memories as well, but I think
5 only one of them stayed or two maybe stayed for the
6 whole meeting.
7 Q. What was the purpose of that first meeting?
8 A. As I explained when I first gave evidence, there had
9 been a number of reports, specifically one in the
10 Daily Telegraph and one in the Financial Times, and the
11 SIS officers, one wanted to convey to me and I think
12 through me to the Prime Minister that these reports did
13 not reflect their views or the views in their view of
14 the agencies; and we also then had a discussion about
15 how the dossier process might evolve. Then we had the
16 broader meeting, and that led to this outcome.
17 Q. Was there any discussion at either meeting of the JIC
18 assessment which was finalised on the very same day,
19 9th September?
20 A. None that I can recall.
21 Q. Could you, please, just look at CAB/6/3, which is the
22 second page of your memo produced as a result of this
23 meeting.
24 A. Hmm, hmm.
25 Q. About five lines in do you see from the top:

143
1 "The media/political judgment will inevitably focus
2 on "what's new?" and I was pleased to hear from you and
3 your SIS colleagues that, contrary to media reports
4 today, the intelligence community are taking such
5 a helpful approach to this in going through all the
6 material they have."
7 A. Hmm, hmm.
8 Q. Surely you must have asked, must you not, what the
9 latest intelligence was, at least in outline at this
10 meeting?
11 A. No, what they were saying was that they -- it was not
12 the case that those who had been asked to take part in
13 this exercise were in any way being resistant to it, and
14 I felt it important, and I think John Scarlett did as
15 well, given that this note was going to be circulated so
16 widely, that their view as representatives of the
17 leadership of SIS was being put down in print like that
18 and communicated. But it was not -- they were saying,
19 indeed I think the same day, as I recall it, I remember
20 the Foreign Secretary saying to me he had had
21 a discussion with Sir Richard Dearlove, who had made the
22 same point to him. They were going to be as helpful as
23 they possibly could be, bearing in mind the obvious
24 issues of security and source protection. That is the
25 point I am making there.

144
1 Q. It looks as though it was on about this date that the
2 decision was made that there should be a section in the
3 dossier expressly dealing with JIC assessments.
4 A. Well, that was not an outcome of that meeting. The
5 point about the JIC assessments was the one that I made
6 in the note that Mr Sumption took me through a short
7 while ago, which was that I felt it was important, it
8 was possible to do, to convey, through the dossier, to
9 the public that sense of mounting concern, which can be
10 expressed through the JIC assessments. But I was not at
11 that stage articulating that.
12 Q. Mr Campbell, what is puzzling me is this. You are
13 a communicator. This is a very important document.
14 A decision is made about this date to go public with the
15 JIC assessments. It just seems extraordinary that you
16 were not interested to know what the updated
17 intelligence on Iraq at least broadly was at this stage.
18 A. I am not saying I was not interested in that. In my
19 view it was always going to be the case that the JIC
20 assessments were going to be the basis of this because
21 that is what the Prime Minister has been seeing, that is
22 what was giving him cause for concern. They were the
23 concerns they wanted to communicate to the public.
24 Q. When did the 45 minutes claim first come to your
25 attention?

145
1 A. When I first read the September 10th draft.
2 Q. And you had not heard of it until then?
3 A. I had not.
4 Q. When you read the 10th/11th draft you presumably
5 assumed, it having been drafted by the chief of
6 assessment staff, that it reflected accurately the JIC
7 assessment?
8 A. I certainly assumed it would reflect accurately what the
9 intelligence community thought at that time. Whether it
10 came from an assessment or raw intelligence it frankly
11 was not for me to know, but the --
12 Q. Sorry to interrupt you, Mr Campbell. I just want to be
13 clear about this: are you saying that you never realised
14 that the 45 minutes claim was based on a final JIC
15 assessment as opposed to something else?
16 A. No, I am not saying that. I assumed that it did, but
17 when I first --
18 Q. Thank you.
19 A. -- read the draft of the dossier on September 10th, and
20 I have to say that this 45 minute point has taken on
21 huge significance following the May 29th allegations of
22 the BBC. At the time it was a very small minor part of
23 the dossier.
24 Q. It took on huge significance on September 25th in the
25 media of this country, did it not, Mr Campbell?

146
1 A. I do not think it did. As Mr Dingemans showed me the
2 front page of the Evening Standard, and that -- it is
3 true that the Evening Standard, which is one newspaper,
4 led on it. I think two other national newspapers made
5 that their main point. My point is in the Government,
6 in its presentation, it did not. It was not a big deal.
7 Q. Can we go back, please, just for a moment, to CAB/6/2,
8 the front page of the minute you wrote afterwards? As
9 I understand it, at this stage the position was already
10 agreed on 5th September, Mr Scarlett was doing
11 a substantial rewrite and he was in charge?
12 A. Hmm.
13 Q. Your interest, you say, and this is the word you
14 frequently use, was presentational?
15 A. Hmm, hmm.
16 Q. Can I ask you this: why were you chairing a meeting on
17 9th September with these senior people present? Why was
18 Mr Scarlett not chairing it?
19 A. I was chairing a meeting because the Prime Minister had
20 asked me to look at the presentational aspects of the
21 dossier. In terms of the status, if you like, of myself
22 and John Scarlett, I think for anything with regard to
23 the content of the dossier John Scarlett was, if you
24 like, superior to me. I was making points about
25 presentation, which I think were legitimate and

147
1 appropriate and which the Prime Minister would have
2 expected me to do. But I do not think it struck anybody
3 in that meeting as odd that it took place in my room and
4 that I chaired the meeting.
5 Q. It was a very important meeting, was it not?
6 A. It was an important meeting in terms of the planning of
7 the dossier, certainly.
8 Q. Why were minutes not taken of that meeting?
9 A. The note that is there on the screen is an accurate
10 account of the outcome of that meeting.
11 Q. What it actually says at the beginning is:
12 "At our discussion this morning, we agreed it would
13 be helpful if I set out for colleagues the process by
14 which the Iraq dossier will be produced."
15 A. Which is what the meeting was about.
16 Q. Did nobody make any notes at that meeting of what
17 actually took place?
18 A. I did not. I have a lot of meetings, they are not
19 routinely minuted. I am not a minister. The point
20 about this note is it set out accurately the outcome of
21 our meeting; and that is, in my view -- we are all busy
22 and that is the important thing from that meeting.
23 Q. You see, it is a planning meeting for a wholly
24 unprecedented publication of intelligence material to
25 the general public, I think for the first time.

148
1 A. No, we had the Al-Qaida document.
2 Q. There had been one before, you are quite right. I stand
3 corrected. This was a rather wider --
4 A. It was.
5 Q. Nobody took a live note of what was said at that
6 meeting, nobody?
7 A. I did not, my staff did not and I believe that the note
8 that was sent out was an accurate account of the outcome
9 of that meeting. I think that was sufficient for its
10 purpose.
11 Q. You do understand that there is a problem with
12 accountability if you do not have contemporary notes of
13 what is agreed at meetings?
14 A. Well, if I had to -- as well as the people I have
15 working for me to do the jobs that they do, also had to
16 have an infrastructure to take notes of every single
17 meeting that I have, then that would be a considerable
18 additional cost to the Exchequer.
19 Q. Can you have a look at the bottom of CAB/6/3, please?
20 This is the second page of your note:
21 "In the meantime, I will chair a team that will go
22 through the document from a presentational point of
23 view, and make recommendations to you. This team,
24 I suggest, will include John Williams..."; he is Press
25 Secretary at the Foreign Office?

149
1 A. Head of News at the Foreign Office.
2 Q. Mr Hammill, from the Foreign Office also?
3 A. The CIC, which is based in the Foreign Office.
4 Q. Mr Bassett, your special adviser?
5 A. Well, the Prime Minister's special adviser
6 Q. Is that not Mr Bradshaw? I thought Mr Bassett worked
7 for you and Mr Bradshaw for the Prime Minister. Maybe I
8 have it the wrong way round.
9
10 A. They both work for me but we all work for the
11 Prime Minister.
12 Q. It sound as if we are both right.
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. I want to ask you about this line in the middle:
15 "Writing by committee does not work..."
16 A. Hmm, hmm.
17 Q. "... but we will make recommendations and suggestions,
18 and you can decide what you want to incorporate."
19 A. Hmm, hmm.
20 Q. That means, does it not, that you are going to make
21 recommendations and suggestions about the writing?
22 A. This group did not happen.
23 Q. Can you just answer the question please about the
24 specific sentence?
25 A. What I am saying there is, as you rightly say when you

150
1 read it out, that this team would make recommendations
2 and suggestions and John Scarlett could decide what he
3 wanted to incorporate. I am simply making the factual
4 point that in fact in the end we did not set up the team
5 because John Scarlett took control of the writing in its
6 entirety.
7 Q. Why at this very early stage, before you had even seen
8 a draft from Mr Scarlett, were you talking about making
9 writing suggestions as part of the planning process?
10 A. Because at that stage, and I think again I recorded this
11 at the time, and I think this was raised by Mr Dingemans
12 when I first appeared, what this meeting decided was
13 that John Scarlett would be in charge and No. 10 would
14 give him whatever support he wanted.
15 Now, the other thing that was happening was that
16 there were people from other Departments who were
17 wanting, quite rightly, to be involved and I was seeking
18 to bring those people in. But it was clear, from this
19 moment, that John Scarlett was in charge; and
20 John Scarlett and his team took over the writing of the
21 dossier.
22 Q. Can we just look at the last sentence on that subject:
23 "Once they are incorporated..."
24 A. Hmm, hmm.
25 Q. What is "they"? That is your writing suggestions, is

151
1 it?
2 A. Yes.
3 Q. So once your writing suggestions are incorporated,
4 "... we need to take a judgment as to whether a single
5 person should be appointed to write the final version."
6 A. Yes.
7 Q. Now, Mr Scarlett's evidence I think was that he had
8 already made it clear that he was to be in charge at the
9 meeting.
10 A. Yes.
11 Q. Why were you suggesting that some other single person
12 should be appointed to write the final version after
13 Mr Scarlett had made that clear?
14 A. I think it is fair to say Mr Scarlett and I at this
15 stage were in a management process by which we were
16 making clear and we were laying down what was going to
17 happen on this dossier. There were all sorts of parts
18 of the Government that may have thought they had
19 a vested interest in being involved, and indeed to
20 a greater and lesser extent some were involved. But by
21 this point Mr Scarlett and I were very, very clear about
22 the process that would follow.
23 Q. You would be aware, Mr Campbell, would you, that the
24 language of JIC assessments is an exercise in precision?
25 A. Well, that is again not -- I mean, I am not an

152
1 intelligence expert. I think sometimes intelligence can
2 also reflect imprecision but, yes, I agree with the
3 basic premise of your question.
4 Q. I do not want to ask you about the final JIC assessment
5 if you never saw it or had it read to you in terms on
6 the 45 minutes. Did you or did you not have it --
7 A. I did not.
8 Q. Could we please look at BBC/29/9? You will appreciate,
9 Mr Campbell, I do not have the time to debate the whole
10 dossier and I am going to focus on the 45 minutes as the
11 main area of controversy.
12 A. Hmm, hmm.
13 Q. This is a construct produced by us with the agreement of
14 the Inquiry just to make it a little bit more
15 manageable.
16 A. Is this in the folder as well?
17 Q. It should be. It is a document headed "The 45 minutes
18 claim as it appeared in the draft of 10/11 September
19 2002". It has a rather big heading.
20 A. 29/0009.
21 Q. It is on the screen.
22 A. I will stick with the screen. It is okay.
23 Q. This is a draft you received after the 9th September
24 meeting we have been talking about and we see the way it
25 is dealt with, first of all in the executive summary at

153
1 the top of the page; and do you see the words:
2 "Recent intelligence adds to this picture. It
3 indicates that..."; do you see?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. Then we see the wording of the 45 minutes claim?
6 A. Hmm.
7 Q. You would agree, it is perfectly obvious, that a summary
8 is designed to summarise the text, the text is not
9 designed to summarise the summary?
10 A. Hmm, hmm.
11 Q. Then we see the text which uses a different word, last
12 sentence of paragraph 13:
13 "Within the last month intelligence has suggested
14 that the Iraqi military would be able to use their
15 chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of an
16 order to do so."
17 You would have assumed, would you not, this having
18 been drafted by the Chief of Assessment Staff, under the
19 supervision of the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence
20 Committee, that this language would accurately reflect
21 any JIC assessment on which it was based?
22 A. I would, but also I would say that in a drafting process
23 that anybody working in the drafting process would
24 assume that any inconsistencies would be picked up, as
25 indeed they were.

154
1 Q. But you agree with me that you would to look to the main
2 text, first of all, to see where the JIC assessments are
3 reflected?
4 A. I think you would read the dossier from start to finish
5 and certainly presentationally the executive summary was
6 bound to be probably the most important part of the
7 document.
8 Q. Did you have any problem with the wording either in the
9 executive summary or in the main text as it was
10 expressed in the 10th/11th September draft?
11 A. Well, the only problem that I had in any part of the
12 dossier that related to this point was the one that
13 I drew Mr Sumption's attention to earlier.
14 Q. So let us be quite clear about this. Insofar as
15 Mr Scarlett ever talks to you about the 45 minutes claim
16 in relation to this draft, you say you have absolutely
17 no problems at all with the way it is put here?
18 A. I am saying the problem that I had was the one that
19 I drew attention to.
20 Q. Let us look here, Mr Campbell. There is no
21 inconsistency in this version between the executive
22 summary and the main text, "indicating" and "suggesting"
23 being, both of them, in the land of possibility rather
24 than certainty. Three lines up in the main text it is
25 a suggestion, and in the opening line it is an

155
1 indication in the executive summary. Broadly similar
2 words and there is no inconsistency that any ordinary
3 mortal would see there, do you agree?
4 A. Yes. But can I just add to that that was not something
5 that struck me at the time. What struck me at the time
6 was the inconsistency that I pointed out.
7 Q. That is a later version. I am interested in this
8 version.
9 A. Well, I have to tell you when I first read the dossier,
10 and I think this goes for quite a lot of people who read
11 it both within the Government and when it was published
12 outside the Government, I am not sure this 45 minutes
13 point carried quite the weight that you think. And
14 I drew attention to the 45 minutes point in the way that
15 I did -- there is no point me pretending that I can
16 remember how I reacted when I first saw that draft.
17 Q. Can I just show you DOS/2/7, please? The next page if
18 you want to see it in hard copy if it is easier. It is
19 just to point out to you that in fact that word
20 "indicates" governs a whole series of judgments and not
21 just the 45 minutes claim.
22 A. Hmm, hmm. That may be so. But I do not think that is
23 a point for me.
24 Q. You got that draft, did you, on 11th September or the
25 10th? Can you remember which?

156
1 A. I think I am right in saying I first received the draft
2 on the 10th and I read it that evening.
3 Q. Is it right that you arranged a meeting with Mr Scarlett
4 for 6 o'clock on 11th September in reaction to that
5 draft?
6 A. I do not know is the answer to that.
7 Q. Could you look at CAB/11/32, please? This is from
8 Mr Matthews to Alison Blackshaw, another one of your
9 assistants, I think?
10 A. Hmm, hmm.
11 Q. 11th September, just after midday. You will see
12 underneath that:
13 "Alastair Campbell is meeting John Scarlett tonight
14 at 6.00 pm to discuss the Iraq dossier."
15 Do you see that?
16 A. Hmm, hmm.
17 Q. "Others in attendance will be..." Then these are all
18 Downing Street staff, are they not?
19 A. Hmm hmm.
20 Q. Tom Kelly, Godric Smith, Phil Bassett and Danny Pruce?
21 A. Hmm, hmm. I have no reason to assume that meeting did
22 not go ahead.
23 Q. I think we know from Mr Scarlett that it did.
24 A. Hmm, hmm.
25 Q. Mr Scarlett gave evidence that some e-mails were put to

157
1 him; and he said he remembered the broad effect of those
2 e-mails being mentioned. I just want to show one or two
3 of them to you. CAB/11/25, an e-mail from you to
4 Mr Bassett, your senior special adviser. It is the top
5 of that page:
6 "Re draft dossier (J Scarlett version of 10 Sept).
7 "Very long way to go, I think. Think we're in a lot
8 of trouble with this as it stands now."
9 What trouble did you understand him to be meaning
10 there, Mr Campbell?
11 A. I think he is saying that he was not terribly impressed
12 with the draft; but I was impressed by the draft and
13 actually thought it did form the basis of a very strong
14 document.
15 Q. He meant political trouble, did he not?
16 A. I do not believe so.
17 Q. Can I just show you another one from Mr Bassett who we
18 know attends this meeting with Mr Scarlett. CAB/11/23.
19 This is sent to you and Mr Godric Smith and Mr Pruce,
20 all of whom are attending this meeting. About four
21 paragraphs in:
22 "Crucially, though, it's intelligence-lite. It
23 feels like this is the least possible intelligence
24 material the intell people are prepared to let go
25 (despite the fact that we say at a couple of points

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1 eg para 2 that it's everything the Govt knows on the
2 issue~-- which it clearly isn't)."
3 How does Mr Bassett know it clearly is not all the
4 intelligence available on that issue?
5 A. I do not know and I do not know that he does.
6 Q. If he does not know that it is, it is an expression of
7 considerable frustration, is it not?
8 A. I think I dealt with some of these e-mails when I first
9 gave evidence and I stand exactly by what I said then,
10 that there were -- within the office, people were making
11 comments, trying to be helpful. But at this stage it
12 was absolutely clear who was in charge, that was
13 John Scarlett, and who within No. 10 was communicating
14 with John Scarlett, and that was myself,
15 Sir David Manning and Jonathan Powell; and not, with
16 respect, Phil Bassett, Danny Pruce or any other people
17 on this e-mail.
18 Q. Mr Bassett is a senior special adviser, is he not?
19 A. He is a special adviser. He no longer works in No. 10,
20 he works for Lord Faulkner. But I am not sure special
21 advisers are -- I think I can say I was a senior special
22 adviser. I think the rest are pretty much of equal
23 rank.
24 Q. You see, Mr Bassett is at the meeting, he sends this
25 e-mail two and a half hours before the meeting. These

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1 sentiments were expressed in strong terms to Mr Scarlett
2 at the meeting, were they not?
3 A. No, they were not, and the discussion that mattered was
4 the discussion that I was having with John Scarlett and
5 any discussion that the Prime Minister, Sir David
6 Manning or Jonathan Powell were having with
7 John Scarlett.
8 Q. Read on:
9 "All intelligence material tends to read like
10 unevidenced assertion, and we have to find a way to get
11 over this (a) by having better intelligence material,
12 (b) by having more material (and better flagged-up) and
13 (c) more convincing material (eg by printing some of it
14 eg as appendices, with names, identifiers etc blacked
15 out."
16 Do you see that?
17 A. Hmm, hmm.
18 Q. Are none of these sentiments pointed out to Mr Scarlett
19 two and a half hours later?
20 A. Not to my recollection, no, because any discussion I was
21 having with John Scarlett was based on -- I did not
22 agree with this assessment. I did not agree that
23 the September 10th draft was not a good document, it
24 was. Obviously, as John Scarlett himself said, there
25 was a lot of work to do on it and that work was done.

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1 But it was done according to the principles we had
2 agreed and that were set out in that note
3 of September 9th.
4 Q. Can we look at BBC/29/10 which is the next draft of
5 16th September. At this stage I want to point out one
6 thing to you. Do you see at the bottom that
7 a conclusion has been added by Mr Scarlett? Indeed, yet
8 again there were more than one, but this is the one we
9 focused on:
10 "We judge that the current position is as follows:
11 "... Some weapons could be deployed within
12 45 minutes of an order."
13 Do you see that?
14 A. I do, yes.
15 Q. Whose idea was it to have a conclusion?
16 A. It was John Scarlett's idea to have a conclusion.
17 Q. Are you sure about that?
18 A. I am sure about that.
19 Q. Can you go back to CAB/11/23, please; Mr Bassett's
20 memorandum to you. Just after the passage I read out:
21 "It needs to end. At the moment it just stops.
22 A conclusion, saying something -- making a case which is
23 compelling. At the moment, it isn't."
24 Are you sure it was not Mr Bassett who suggested to
25 Mr Scarlett that there should be a conclusion which was

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1 compelling?
2 A. I am sure. And as I said the last time I appeared, I am
3 not even aware that Mr Scarlett would have been made
4 aware of these e-mails, I doubt that he was. There
5 is -- Mr Scarlett had the idea of writing a conclusion,
6 he drafted a conclusion. He raised the conclusion with
7 me later and I knew that he had doubts about it himself.
8 I read the conclusion he drafted and I agreed with those
9 doubts and ultimately there was no conclusion.
10 Q. Can we, please, just go back to BBC/29/10, which is the
11 next version of 16th September. We see at the
12 beginning, and it is rather maddening having to jump
13 backwards and forwards, but the phrase it indicates that
14 in the first draft, in the executive summary, has
15 suddenly become:
16 "And it allows us to judge that ..."
17 And again, you have seen that the conclusion is in
18 emphatic terms:
19 "We judge that ... weapons could ..."
20 Do you see the beginning and the end?
21 But in the middle we see three lines in:
22 "The Iraqi military may be able to deploy these
23 weapons within 45 minutes of a decision to do so."
24 Again on page 17 of the dossier, point 5:
25 "The Iraqi military may be able to deploy chemical

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1 or biological weapons."
2 Now, the main text had been supplied to JIC members
3 for comment by this stage, had it not, and they had come
4 on it? This is the 10th/11th September version.
5 A. Sorry, this is now the 16th, is it?
6 Q. This is the 16th. We have moved on one.
7 A. Hmm, hmm.
8 Q. The first version had been to the JIC members, I think
9 circulated by Mr Scarlett on about 11th September, and
10 you may not have known this, but they were asked
11 particularly to focus on section 6 of the main text, and
12 this is what we have, the main text with the word "may"
13 in it, in both cases; do you see?
14 A. Hmm, hmm.
15 Q. You would agree, looking at it, the executive summary
16 and the conclusion are plainly in stronger terms, are
17 they not?
18 A. As I say, the only point I made in relation to this is
19 the inconsistency I pointed out between the executive
20 summary and the text, which I think was the first from
21 the main text that you read.
22 Q. You were given the 16th September draft on the morning
23 of 17th September. We can see that from the minute
24 which Mr Sumption showed you at CAB/11/66.
25 "As I was writing this, the Prime Minister had read

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1 of the draft you gave me this morning, and he too made
2 a number of points."
3 Then we get his points.
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. And then we get yours at the bottom of the page.
6 A. Hmm, hmm.
7 Q. I am not going to go through all of them because we will
8 be here until next week if I do. But if we look at
9 point 1 which you were asked about.
10 A. Concealment?
11 Q. Yes. It is right, is it, in fact that when you
12 subsequently give evidence to the FAC you only mention
13 the first sentence of 1, not the second?
14 A. I will have to take your word for that. I do not have
15 the FAC memorandum, unless you can -- I have it
16 somewhere, I can find it.
17 Q. I can put it up for you on the screen. Give me
18 a minute. It is CAB/1/266.
19 A. Actually I can read -- I have not seen the evidence,
20 I beg your pardon. Yes.
21 Q. CAB/1/266. The second paragraph is point 1.
22 A. Yes.
23 Q. "I suggested that in the light of Iraq's agreement
24 of September 16 to allow UN inspects to return to Iraq,
25 we should further address the issue of Iraq's current

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1 concealment plans as assessed by the JIC."
2 Do you see?
3 A. There is nothing on the screen at the moment at all.
4 Q. I do apologise. CAB/1/266, please.
5 A. Yes. It is quite a long way down, I think.
6 Q. CAB/1/266. Can we go on to the next page, please? That
7 is it. It is the second paragraph on that page, do you
8 see?
9 A. Yes.
10 Q. You will see that that paragraph deals with the first
11 sentence of paragraph 1 of your memo that we were just
12 looking at.
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. That is all it deals with. If we go back to CAB/11/67,
15 we will see that there is a second sentence:
16 "Also in the executive summary, it would be stronger
17 if we said that despite sanctions and the policy of
18 containment, he has made real progress, even if this
19 echoes the Prime Minister."
20 A suggestion from you, prefaced by the words "it
21 would be stronger".
22 A. Hmm, hmm.
23 Q. Can we now look, please, at CAB/3/25? You will see, at
24 the very top of the page, that suggestion is adopted
25 almost verbatim, top two lines of that page.

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1 A. Yes.
2 Q. Why did you not tell the FAC about that suggestion
3 prefaced by the words "it would be stronger"?
4 A. I mean, I do not know and I do not think it is a very --
5 within the discussions we were having, either myself and
6 John Scarlett or myself and the FAC, I do not think it
7 is a very big point. I agree with you that for the sake
8 of completeness it could easily have gone in. I do not
9 think -- I would have had nothing to worry about that
10 being expressed in exactly the way you have expressed
11 it.
12 Q. Can I just point out to you the uses of the word
13 "stronger", "weak" and "weaker" in this memo. Bottom of
14 the first page, CAB/11/66, I just want to put this
15 suggestion to you:
16 "... my detailed comments on the draft, which is
17 much stronger."
18 A. Hmm, hmm.
19 Q. Was that in fact reflecting the request you had made to
20 him at the meeting on 11th September?
21 A. No, it is an observation that the dossier as it goes
22 through the drafting process is improving and becoming
23 clearer, becoming the kind of document that the
24 Prime Minister would feel comfortable about presenting
25 to Parliament.

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1 Q. Can we go back again to CAB/11/67, the next page,
2 please? I just want to point out to you this recurrence
3 of this formula. The second and third line of 1:
4 "It would be stronger if ..."
5 A. Hmm, hmm.
6 Q. Paragraph 2, second line:
7 "... it is weaker 'may have'."
8 A. Hmm, hmm.
9 Q. Paragraph 10:
10 "... 'may' is weaker than in the summary."
11 Paragraph 11:
12 "... 'could' is weak, 'capable of being used' is
13 better."
14 A. Hmm, hmm.
15 Q. Paragraph 15:
16 "It would be stronger if..."
17 What you were concerned to do was to strengthen the
18 language of the dossier, were you not, through these
19 suggestions or at least most of them?
20 A. I was keen, and this is the job the Prime Minister asked
21 me to do, to make sure that the dossier as presented to
22 Parliament was a strong, clear, consistent document that
23 allowed him effectively to explain to the British public
24 the reality of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's WMD.
25 That is my job in these circumstances; and I think if

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1 you are saying "strong" equals "sexed up", I do not
2 accept that at all. If you are saying "strong" equals
3 a good, solid piece of work that does the job that the
4 Prime Minister wants it to do, then I agree with that.
5 Q. Would it be sexing up -- sorry.
6 LORD HUTTON: Carry on, Mr Caldecott.
7 MR CALDECOTT: Would it be sexing up the dossier to change
8 the text, to strengthen the text to match the summary
9 rather than to lower the summary to match the text,
10 Mr Campbell?
11 A. It would depend on the circumstances that you were
12 putting. None of it would be sexing up unless you were
13 doing something improper in relation to the intelligence
14 judgments. This dossier could only be as strong as
15 a public document as the underlying intelligence
16 assessments allowed it to be.
17 Q. Why were you commenting on the intelligence judgments at
18 all?
19 A. I was not. I was commenting upon a draft of a document
20 that the Prime Minister was expected to present to
21 Parliament and the public. And I was doing so in my
22 capacity as the Prime Minister's adviser, and in this
23 instance John Scarlett's adviser because that is what he
24 had asked me to do, on presentational issues.
25 Q. The response you got from Mr Scarlett on the 45 minutes

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1 point is at CAB/11/71; and obviously I accept that this
2 is mainly a point for him, but all he says is:
3 "The language you queried on the old page 17 has
4 been tightened."
5 A. Hmm, hmm.
6 Q. Do you see that?
7 A. I do. I am aware of that.
8 Q. He had adopted a change which you had initiated, had he
9 not?
10 A. No. May I say, I do not think there would have been
11 anything improper had he done so because I had pointed
12 out an inconsistency and it was for John Scarlett to
13 resolve that in whatever way he and Julian Miller and
14 Julian Miller's team wanted. But, as I understand it
15 from Mr Scarlett, that is a point Mr Miller had already
16 spotted. I do not accept that in me saying on page 17,
17 two lines from the bottom, "'may' is weaker than in the
18 summary" I am doing anything more than pointing out what
19 is an inconsistency, which is one of the points the
20 Prime Minister had asked me to undertake.
21 Q. I do not understand what it was that Mr Miller had
22 spotted.
23 A. The inconsistency.
24 Q. Okay, he spotted an inconsistency between the main text
25 and the summary of the main text?

169
1 A. Correct.
2 Q. The answer is perfectly obvious, you have to downplay
3 the summary so it matches the text, it is very simple,
4 is it not?
5 A. No, the answer depends --
6 Q. The summary is too strong.
7 A. The answer depends upon the underlying intelligence
8 assessments which Mr Scarlett and Mr Miller have. They
9 are not a matter for me.
10 Q. But you knew it had been round to JIC members, it had
11 been round the agencies, and we have a draft on
12 16th September which talks about "may". What business
13 was it of yours to suggest that "may" might be
14 strengthened?
15 A. I am not suggesting "may" might be strengthened. I am
16 pointing out that in one place it is more definitive
17 than in another. That is an inconsistency. And this is
18 a document which -- I mean the JIC, their job, most of
19 the time, is obviously to prepare assessments to be read
20 by small numbers of other experts. This was a document
21 to be read by the public. And that -- it was being
22 presented by the Prime Minister. It was going to
23 attract massive attention around the world. I was doing
24 the job on this the Prime Minister asked me to do. And
25 this was a very, very, very small part of it. This was

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1 not an important part of those discussions.
2 Q. You were writing a foreword at this time, were you not,
3 for the --
4 LORD HUTTON: Mr Caldecott, before we proceed, could we just
5 try to see where we are on this point because I think it
6 is of some importance. As I understand it, you are
7 suggesting to Mr Campbell that if he strengthens the
8 document from the point of view of presentation that is,
9 to use the term that was used in Mr Gilligan's report,
10 "sexing up" the dossier.
11 Mr Campbell, as I understand his evidence, is saying
12 that if he makes presentational points which, I think he
13 accepts, may strengthen the document, that is
14 permissible provided it does not alter the intelligence.
15 Mr Campbell, I think, is suggesting that on his
16 understanding that is not sexing up the document.
17 First of all, is that the way in which you are
18 putting the point to Mr Campbell?
19 MR CALDECOTT: My Lord, I fully accept that to a substantial
20 degree this must be a point for Mr Scarlett because
21 after all he is responsible for the ultimate draft.
22 LORD HUTTON: Yes.
23 MR CALDECOTT: However, there is a point which I have yet to
24 come to, which is why I will be --
25 LORD HUTTON: I do not want to anticipate, but I think it is

171
1 an important point and I want just to be clear what the
2 difference between you and Mr Campbell so far is.
3 Mr Campbell, have I correctly summarised the point
4 that you have been making in the point I put to
5 Mr Caldecott?
6 A. You have.
7 LORD HUTTON: Yes.
8 MR CALDECOTT: The point I want to develop with you --
9 actually, if the stenographers want a break now, it
10 would be convenient, if they want one.
11 LORD HUTTON: Yes. I will rise.
12 (3.22 pm)
13 (Short Break)
14 (3.28 pm)
15 LORD HUTTON: Yes Mr Caldecott.
16 MR CALDECOTT: Mr Campbell, just to remember the chronology,
17 there is a draft of 16th September that you get on the
18 morning of the 17th. We were debating the differences
19 between the wording and the text, your suggestion or
20 your comment to Mr Scarlett about the tension between
21 the executive summary and the main text. Just for
22 completeness, at BBC/29/11, perhaps you can take this
23 from me, the word "may" becomes "are" in the main text
24 as a consequence of your exchange, or you would say as a
25 consequence of your exchange and Mr Miller's further

172
1 work, and I will explore that with Mr Scarlett.
2 I do want to ask you about this is that before you
3 actually got a copy of the 16th September draft, you had
4 already been drafting, had you not, a foreword for the
5 Prime Minister?
6 A. I do not know when I began drafting the foreword, but it
7 was around about this time.
8 Q. Let me try to help you. If we look at CAB/11/38,
9 please, this looks a surprisingly uninformative
10 document, but if one looks at that little paper there,
11 you see "foreword" almost illegibly underneath it; do
12 you see?
13 A. I do.
14 Q. 16th September, 3.42, subject: draft.
15 A. Hmm, hmm.
16 Q. Annexed to it we get a first draft of the
17 Prime Minister's foreword, which I think you were
18 writing?
19 A. I drafted a foreword based on a discussion with the
20 Prime Minister and my colleagues.
21 Q. All I wanted to ask you about was a passage on
22 CAB/11/40, the second page, the top of that page, the
23 first paragraph, last three lines where you see
24 a reference to WMD. Then:
25 "And the document discloses that his military

173
1 planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within
2 45 minutes of an order to use them."
3 A. Hmm, hmm.
4 Q. This is not a very long document. You plainly had
5 selected 45 minutes as a message worth including in the
6 Prime Minister's foreword?
7 A. Well, more to the point the Prime Minister had. Can
8 I also just say I can see from that and the line above,
9 for example, "internal" when it should be "intention"
10 and also some of the question marks on page 1, that is
11 my secretary typing up my first handwritten version
12 before it comes back to me.
13 Q. I do not quarrel with you at all Mr Campbell about this
14 being an early draft. Indeed, that is the point I make.
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. Why were you as it were formulating an account of the
17 45 minutes point before the text had been finalised in
18 the dossier itself?
19 A. I was, I think, at the right time in the process, given
20 that the foreword obviously was going to be an important
21 part of the document overall, it would be the first
22 thing that anybody getting the document would read, this
23 was the right time to start drafting the foreword.
24 I had a discussion with the Prime Minister, I think with
25 David Manning, with Jonathan Powell, certainly with

174
1 John Scarlett, and I based -- I started a draft based
2 upon what the Prime Minister wanted to say. And
3 certainly that was one of the points that he felt was
4 worth covering.
5 Q. One thing I think we can agree on, having looked at
6 these three drafts, is that the wording of the
7 45 minutes claim has been changing, has it not?
8 A. Within the foreword or within the dossier?
9 Q. Within the text and within the executive summary.
10 Forget the foreword for a moment, I am talking about the
11 dossier.
12 A. Yes.
13 Q. Of course come the Foreign Affairs Committee you were
14 personally very focused on the 45 minutes claim because
15 of the allegations made by Mr Gilligan?
16 A. Hmm, hmm.
17 Q. I want to ask you about an answer you gave to Mr Ottaway
18 at FAC/2/279. His question at question 987:
19 "You use some rather interesting wording in your
20 memorandum that to suggest it was inserted against the
21 wishes of the intelligence agencies was false. Was it
22 put in at your suggestion?"
23 That is the 45 minutes claim.
24 A. Yes.
25 Q. "No" you say. I am not suggesting you did insert it.

175
1 "It existed in the very first draft and, as far as I am
2 aware, that part the paper stayed like that."
3 A. Hmm, hmm.
4 Q. How were you able to give that answer when you knew
5 there had been a number of changes to the 45 minutes
6 claim in the drafts?
7 A. I think I am right in saying in the foreword the
8 45 minutes point did not change. I accept and agree
9 that within the various points of the different drafts
10 of the dossier where the 45 minutes point was put that
11 they were changing, but I do not think the central
12 thrust of the point changed at all. I mean I accept
13 that -- bear in mind, again, at this point I have not,
14 as we have for the purposes of this Inquiry, sat down
15 literally and gone through every draft and every e-mail
16 and every note and all the rest of it. I think the
17 central point I am making is that the 45 minutes point,
18 the thrust of that point, stayed the same throughout;
19 and I certainly had no influence upon it whatever. And
20 you skirted by -- you said you are not suggesting that
21 I inserted it, but I mean --
22 Q. I did not skirt by it. I expressly made the point in
23 fairness to you actually.
24 A. I am grateful for that; but I think it is important that
25 I am allowed to set the context for my FAC appearance,

176
1 which is that I was being accused of that very thing,
2 and that is what I was there to defend myself against.
3 Q. Mr Campbell, am I right that you are saying that you did
4 not look through the drafts for the purpose of your
5 giving your evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee?
6 A. I did not look through every draft, no.
7 Q. Could you please look at FAC/2/288, answer 1021:
8 "Mr Chidgey: ... anything you can give us to
9 demonstrate otherwise would, of course, be very
10 helpful...", that is no political interference.
11 "Mr Campbell: As I say, I do not think I can make
12 that judgment for the intelligence agencies who were
13 producing the various drafts as they evolved, but in
14 relation to the changes that I was suggesting on either
15 changes that I was suggesting or that I was putting
16 forward to the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence
17 Committee on behalf of the Prime Minister, and I have
18 gone and looked at all of them..."
19 A. I have gone and looked at all of the drafts that I saw
20 which were in the file that I had on the dossier; and
21 the drafts that I saw were the 10th September and the
22 16th September and the final draft that was sent to me
23 I think days before publication.
24 This was a drafting process. Julian Miller and his
25 team were in charge of that, John Scarlett was in charge

177
1 of the document; and I was there, at the FAC, to defend
2 myself against very, very serious charges; and I -- it
3 is easy now -- you can pick this word and that word but
4 I stand by my evidence to the FAC and the defence I was
5 making myself against those charges.
6 Q. It is a very simple point, a change from "may" to "are"
7 is a material change. You had looked at all the drafts
8 on the 45 minutes claim, you must have known about that
9 change and you did not tell the FAC about it.
10 A. Sorry, you are now going back to point 10 of my memo.
11 Q. No, I am going back to your oral evidence to the FAC
12 where you say the drafts stayed the same on the
13 45 minute claim throughout, and you say that you had
14 looked at all of them.
15 A. The central point on 45 minutes I do not believe changed
16 substantively. I pointed out an inconsistency and
17 John Scarlett and Julian Miller addressed that
18 inconsistency.
19 Q. One more passage, Mr Campbell. FAC/2/305. We now have
20 questions from Mr Maples. Here he is specifically
21 asking you about the tension between the executive
22 summary and the main text because for reasons I will
23 have to explore with Mr Scarlett, there in fact remained
24 some tension even in the dossier as published. Three
25 lines down -- he is quoting here from the dossier:

178
1 "I suggest to you that the summary is a much
2 stronger statement than actually what the main body of
3 the document says. Can I give you another example
4 before you respond to that. On the 45 minutes piece on
5 page 19 of the dossier it says, and this it seems to me
6 is a much lower degree of certainty remark,
7 'Intelligence indicates...' -- not, 'The JIC has
8 concluded' -- '... that the Iraqi military are able to
9 deploy chemical or biological weapons within
10 45 minutes.' The summary says, 'Some of these weapons
11 are deployable within 45 minutes.' I am putting to you
12 that there are three respects in which the summary is,
13 I would suggest, almost fundamentally different from
14 what the body of the document suggests."
15 So he is right on the point that we have been
16 exploring. I just want to point out three lines in the
17 middle of your answer:
18 "That document was the document which was presented
19 to us. The changes we made in relation to it had
20 nothing to do with the overriding intelligence
21 assessments."
22 Again, the clear implication is that the document
23 that was presented to you was the same as the document
24 which was published in relation to the 45 minutes claim
25 and these tensions that Mr Maples is pointing out to

179
1 you.
2 A. I stand by my answer there.
3 Q. Very well. Now, you produced a supplemental memorandum,
4 did you not, for the FAC?
5 A. I did.
6 Q. You were taken through it by Mr Sumption; and I am not
7 going to go through all the numbered points. Can we
8 quickly look, please, at CAB/1/266 which is the second
9 page of it. Apart from the fact that you promote point
10 6 to the top of the page, will you take it from me that
11 the remaining paragraphs are all in the same order as
12 they appeared in your original minute? So the second
13 one is point 1, that is the second paragraph is point 1;
14 the third is point 2 --
15 A. Sorry, I think we just need to go down a little bit
16 more.
17 Q. Has it not come up? I am sorry. They are all in
18 chronological order apart from the very first one which
19 is the comment about the wording about the human rights
20 record, do you remember that?
21 A. Yes. No, we need to go further down.
22 Q. The rest follow in sequence?
23 A. I will take your word for that, yes.
24 Q. The position is this: that you put this memorandum
25 together with Mr Scarlett?

180
1 A. I did, yes.
2 Q. You had in front of you your memo and Mr Scarlett's
3 reply?
4 A. We did.
5 Q. And the 45 minute claim at this point was at the centre
6 of the controversy?
7 A. It certainly was, yes.
8 Q. You have told us, and I will not revisit the
9 questioning, as to why you say you excluded the
10 45 minutes claim, point 10, from your memo.
11 A. Yes.
12 Q. Will you please go back to CAB/1/266, the previous page?
13 About six lines up:
14 "The JIC Chairman first sent me a draft of the
15 dossier on September 10.
16 "To the best of my recollection, and that of [the]
17 Chairman of the JIC, I did not make any comments on the
18 text of the draft at that stage.
19 "On September 17 he sent me a further draft.
20 "As far as we recall, our discussions on the text
21 took place over September 17 and 18. The following are
22 the changes I requested, and the responses of the JIC
23 Chairman."
24 A. Hmm, hmm.
25 Q. Now, Mr Campbell, you had the comments in front of you

181
1 in a document. Why was this an exercise in
2 recollection?
3 A. Well, because as well as these documents we had
4 discussions; and also I mentioned earlier that in
5 relation to this Inquiry, there for example have come to
6 light, subsequent to this, e-mails about further
7 discussions which, at the time, we did not recall. Now,
8 that is why we say "as far as we recall".
9 At the time, I went to the Foreign Affairs Committee
10 on I think it was Wednesday. I was asked to provide,
11 and it was not just in relation to this part of our
12 discussions, but in four separate areas, substantial
13 additional material and information by the Friday
14 morning. We had a limited amount of time. We did the
15 obvious thing. We went to the file. We got out the
16 file. The file had the drafts that I had seen and it
17 had these exchanges. So I think "as far as we recall"
18 is an accurate way of putting our discussions at the
19 time.
20 Q. I want to make it absolutely clear what I am suggesting
21 to you. The plain inference the FAC would have got was
22 that these were oral discussions you and Mr Scarlett
23 were doing your best to remember.
24 A. I see, I beg your pardon --
25 Q. The truth is simple: all those points were taken from

182
1 two documents you had in front of you. You did not want
2 the FAC to know about the documents because they
3 evidenced change to the 45 minutes point, that is why
4 you used this formula and did not say: there are simply
5 documentary exchanges between us, and you created this
6 whole idea of an exercise in recollection which can
7 never have happened?
8 A. No, I do not accept that at all. If you are saying that
9 we could have simply supplied the documents to them,
10 that is true. However, as you will have seen from the
11 documents yourself, they require pretty considerable
12 explanation. Point 9 on page 16, bottom line, "'might'
13 reads very weakly".
14 The other thing you would have to do with this, you
15 would have to supply the drafts. And the JIC, and
16 I think this would go -- I know it went I think for the
17 Foreign Secretary as well, and for the Cabinet Secretary
18 and others -- did not think it was appropriate to
19 provide the drafts to the Foreign Affairs Committee. So
20 these exchanges required explanation. We did sit down
21 and try to recall all the discussions that we had, and
22 we did have, as the basis of that, these documents, that
23 is correct. But I do not think that the point that you
24 are making is a fair one.
25 Q. Just one question on just one last document. CAB/15.

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1 This is a briefing for Prime Minister's Question Time
2 sent by you on 3rd June I think for Question Time on
3 4th June?
4 A. Yes.
5 Q. I just want to look at CAB/15/2 which is the second page
6 of that briefing. About three lines in from the top of
7 the page, you are here advising the Prime Minister how
8 he might deal with the allegations about the dossier?
9 A. Hmm, hmm.
10 Q. "I would recommend that you say that in the light of the
11 controversy you asked the JIC to set out for you
12 a detailed analysis of the process of the dossier from
13 inception to publication, and as a result not only you,
14 but more importantly the JIC, are 100 per cent clear
15 that nothing wrong took place."
16 Had you ever seen any such document, Mr Campbell?
17 A. No.
18 Q. Was there ever any such document, Mr Campbell?
19 A. There was a document which I was aware, from the
20 weekend, John Scarlett was minded to write; and this
21 again is something that I was asked about by
22 Mr Dingemans when I first appeared, and it is
23 complicated. If I could just have a little time to
24 explain this. You may recall that I spoke to
25 John Scarlett when the allegations were first made and

184
1 asked whether he might consider writing -- allowing to
2 be published a letter making clear that no wrongdoing
3 had taken place.
4 John Scarlett told me over that weekend that he was
5 minded to set out a note for Ministers that Ministers
6 could draw on. I was in America for a funeral when
7 I wrote this note to the Prime Minister. I would
8 normally speak to the Prime Minister before
9 Prime Minister's Questions, not send him notes. The
10 point I was making, at this stage of the process,
11 John Scarlett was in the process as far as I understand
12 it of writing a note about the dossier process. That is
13 what this is a reference to.
14 Q. Well, what you are suggesting the Prime Minister tell
15 the House is that there has been such a document and
16 that, as a result, not only you but more importantly the
17 JIC are 100 per cent clear that nothing wrong took
18 place?
19 A. No, I am not suggesting that the Prime Minister do
20 anything that would not accord with the facts. The
21 facts at that time were John Scarlett had told me over
22 the weekend he was thinking about writing a note. The
23 Prime Minister for obvious reasons was very concerned
24 about this issue, about what he should say about it at
25 Prime Minister's Questions. I am aware that the JIC

185
1 Chairman is writing something about this. I am aware
2 that the Prime Minister is about to appear before
3 Parliament to to be asked about it and suggesting that
4 he make reference to this analysis which I believe
5 the Inquiry has seen of the dossier process.
6 So I accept it is not very clearly written, but bear
7 in mind this is me writing to the Prime Minister about
8 issues he and I will be discussing the whole time
9 anyway.
10 Q. Can I ask you lastly about the last sentence of the same
11 paragraph:
12 "But these discussions related primarily to your
13 front piece printing, briefing materials, preparation of
14 Q and A, in other words the normal stuff of
15 presentation."
16 That is the normal stuff of presentation, is it not,
17 Mr Campbell?
18 A. It is part of the normal stuff of presentation. Again
19 that sentence, in terms of what we did in relation to
20 the dossier, is not complete. But again the
21 Prime Minister knows the complete picture, as do I. And
22 this is a note -- this is, if you like, correspondence
23 from myself to the Prime Minister which frankly one does
24 not expect to be published. But he knows and I know
25 what I am talking about in relation to what we on the

186
1 presentational side at Downing Street did in relation to
2 the dossier.
3 MR CALDECOTT: Thank you my Lord.
4 LORD HUTTON: Thank you.
5 Cross-examined by MR DINGEMANS
6 Q. Mr Campbell, one of the answers you gave to my learned
7 friend Mr Caldecott was justifying the involvement of
8 the presentation personnel in the dossier. Having dealt
9 with the Prime Minister, you said that he was presenting
10 the material to the House. Then you said this:
11 "Equally, those of us whose job it is to help the
12 Prime Minister and/or Ministers put the Government's
13 case to the media and, through them, to the public..."
14 were involved.
15 A. Hmm, hmm.
16 Q. What case were you intending to put through the dossier
17 to the public?
18 A. The explanation as to why the Prime Minister and the
19 Government were growing more and more concerned about
20 the issue of Iraq's WMD.
21 Q. We have seen e-mails, and you have seen them in the
22 past, where it was suggested that No. 10 wanted the
23 document to be as strong as possible in the light of the
24 available intelligence.
25 A. Hmm, hmm.

187
1 Q. And my learned friend Mr Caldecott has taken you through
2 "may" and "might" and "weaker" and "stronger". Was that
3 the extent of your involvement, to try to strengthen the
4 document?
5 A. I think it is the point that Lord Hutton alluded to
6 earlier. If you mean strong in the sense of a document
7 that is going to stand up to rigorous scrutiny, and you
8 mean strong in the sense of it presents what the
9 Government is saying and what the Prime Minister is
10 presenting to Parliament, well then that is exactly what
11 I saw my role as being, assisting John Scarlett to do
12 that.
13 Q. And not strong as in strengthening the judgments that
14 are made in the material?
15 A. Absolutely not.
16 Q. But you mentioned, and I will not take you to the memo,
17 you mentioned when we looked at the memorandum that
18 there were some that were going the other way,
19 suggesting a weakening?
20 A. Hmm, hmm.
21 Q. That is "vivid" and "horrifying"; all the others, is
22 this not right, appear to suggest a strengthening of
23 language?
24 A. I do not think so. I mentioned for example in relation
25 to the foot and mouth plant. I think that again it was

188
1 a small part of the dossier but you could argue that was
2 weakening. I think in relation to the -- there was the
3 point about the missile range. I mean that is just
4 a factual observation, the point about them getting the
5 date wrong. I mean, I really do not think that these
6 16 points, all the points that were made in the e-mails
7 that have since been sent to the Inquiry, I really do
8 not accept they amount to strengthening in the terms
9 that you imply. They certainly do not amount to
10 a transformation of the dossier.
11 Q. Can I take you to PKN/1/2. This is the written
12 statement that you made to the Foreign Affairs
13 Committee. When we can pull that up we can see that in
14 the wording there is some wording in italics. That was
15 in your original version, that does not end up in the
16 final version. You can also see some underlying -- for
17 example, seven lines down, "had several", you can see
18 what the new word was. In the first version, "I had
19 many discussions with the Chairman" and it has changed
20 to "several".
21 A. Where is that analysis from? I do not ...
22 Q. That is an analysis which is taken from your original
23 memorandum. If you go down to the bottom of the page,
24 CAB/31/11 was the draft version and the final version is
25 at CAB/1/257 to 258.

189
1 A. I have to take your word for it, I have not seen the
2 document.
3 Q. If you go to the second paragraph, accepting, for the
4 moment, my word for it?
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. "I should therefore emphasise that the intelligence
7 judgments were entirely those of the JIC and there was
8 no question [in the original version] of interference
9 with them."
10 A. Hmm, hmm.
11 Q. Then what appears to have been put in place of that: "of
12 anyone seeking to override them."
13 A. Hmm, hmm.
14 Q. We can see that this is a document that you have run
15 past Mr Scarlett because if you go down about six lines:
16 "...I have the support of the Security and
17 Intelligence Coordinator, Chairman of the Joint
18 Intelligence Committee, and the Heads of the
19 Intelligence Agencies..."
20 That is what it said at the end.
21 A. Hmm, hmm.
22 Q. Before that it said:
23 "... of the Chairman of the JIC, and the head of the
24 SIS. (John are you happy with this (and can you check
25 that Richard is) in so doing."

190
1 A. Hmm, hmm.
2 Q. So that is what the draft was.
3 A. Can I just ask, is this a draft of something that I have
4 written?
5 Q. Yes, it is what you submitted to the Foreign Affairs
6 Committee.
7 A. What, the non- italicised, non-underlined bits?
8 Q. Yes. If you take out the underlined bits and leave in
9 the italic bits, that is your draft that you give to
10 Mr Scarlett.
11 A. Right.
12 Q. What you submit to the FAC is the document without the
13 italicised bits but with the underlining in.
14 A. I see, I see.
15 Q. Can I just ask this: it looks, from the lawyer's point
16 of view, as if there has been some careful drafting in
17 the first sentence:
18 "I therefore emphasise that the intelligence
19 judgments were entirely those of the JIC and there was
20 no question of anyone seeking to override them."
21 What is taken out is "of interference with them".
22 Mr Scarlett has been perfectly clear throughout, as
23 have you, you have not been challenged on this, that it
24 was Mr Scarlett's judgment at the end. But it rather
25 suggests that the words "of interference with them" have

191
1 been downplayed to "override them"; is that fair or is
2 that just being wise after the event?
3 A. I do not think so. I do not think it is being fair.
4 I think -- this is me thinking on my feet because I have
5 not seen this before. There was a discussion on the
6 Wednesday when the Prime Minister did Prime Minister's
7 Questions, which is presumably the day before or two
8 days before John Scarlett and I are discussing this; and
9 the Prime Minister had a discussion with Sir John
10 Scarlett and Sir David Omand about how best to express
11 this.
12 I think the Prime Minister following that discussion
13 took the judgment that we should be making clear that
14 nobody had sought to override the intelligence
15 judgments. I think this is just to make that consistent
16 with that. I do not think anybody was ever suggesting,
17 within the Government system, that there had been
18 interference with intelligence judgments. As I say,
19 I think that is what that will refer to.
20 Q. The final point at the bottom:
21 "The claim in the original BBC story that the '45
22 minute' command and control was put in at my or No. 10's
23 insistence" originally read "is false" and then "against
24 the wishes of Intelligence Agencies is also false, and
25 I say that with their support too."

192
1 Was that just to make it more emphatic or was it for
2 any other reason?
3 A. I think it was probably to restate one of the central
4 points that was made on May 29th by the Today Programme.
5 Q. One final document. At CAB/27/2 -- when I asked you
6 questions before we did not have this document; and this
7 is a document dated 18th September.
8 A. Yes.
9 Q. You have seen this?
10 A. Yes, I have.
11 Q. You see it says:
12 "Ownership of the dossier.
13 "... lay with No. 10."
14 On the face of it that, appears slightly
15 inconsistent with the suggestion that ownership was with
16 Mr Scarlett throughout. Can you help us with that?
17 A. What that means is, in a sense, ownership of the
18 production. As it says, "the public handling and the
19 briefing" now that essentially the dossier is a product
20 to be put into the public domain. As I understand it --
21 that was not a meeting that I attended but it was
22 a meeting to discuss -- you can see, for example, the
23 point there, it is being issued formally as a command
24 paper, so the contact with the stationery office,
25 stationery office, how we are going to print copies, how

193
1 many copies are going to be printed. It is those kind
2 of issues that that meeting was discussing. Those were
3 going to be the responsibility of No. 10.
4 Q. Because after 18th September we know that some changes
5 were still made to the dossier.
6 A. That is true.
7 Q. Were those all to be cleared with Mr Scarlett as opposed
8 to No. 10?
9 A. They were. Any points to do with the text had to be
10 cleared with Mr Scarlett. Indeed, Mr Scarlett spent the
11 weekend prior to publication at the printers and
12 personally signed off the proofs page by page.
13 Q. Mr Campbell you have been asked a lot about the dossier
14 and I will leave what Mr Caldecott has done in relation
15 to that.
16 Can I take you to your diary entries, CAB/39/1?
17 A. Yes.
18 Q. Now they are obviously in hard form.
19 A. Yes. Some of them.
20 Q. Yes. Those considered relevant. I have asked you
21 before about the plea bargain point so I will not go
22 through that with you.
23 In line 4:
24 "Says that he'd come forward and he was saying yes
25 to speak to AG, yes he said intel went in late but he

194
1 never said the other stuff."
2 As far as the "intel went in late" point, do you
3 have any recollection of what was said in relation to
4 that? Because at the moment, as far as we have been
5 told, Dr Kelly was denying that he knew anything about
6 the 45 minutes point.
7 A. This is my recollection of the conversation with
8 Geoff Hoon on that day; and this is my recollection of
9 what Mr Hoon was saying to me about the information that
10 had been told to him within the MoD.
11 I think if I may just make an observation, I am
12 happy to stand and account for anything that I have
13 written in a private diary. But I think it does risk at
14 parts being unfair to others and that is a point I made
15 the first time round.
16 Q. In your covering letter, which I hope we introduced.
17 A. Yes. But certainly one of the points that I -- early in
18 the discussions we were having in relation to the person
19 who had come forward, this point, you know, about
20 accepting that this person said that the intelligence
21 went in late, but again on that, I mean, as has been
22 pointed out, the 45 minutes point was under a headline,
23 "Recent Intelligence", so it was not actually a very --
24 it was not a terribly big point. It am just making an
25 observation there about what I took from the first

195
1 conversations I had.
2 Q. You agree that it was double edged or "it was double
3 edged". Why was it double edged?
4 A. Because it was I think clear within the MoD from the
5 outset that there were real difficulties here. The
6 person who had come forward, and at this stage I did not
7 know that it was Dr Kelly, was saying that they had said
8 certain things. Clearly there had been some sort of
9 unauthorised contact. And I think, from early on, it
10 was never thought necessarily that this was, as I said
11 when you last questioned me, necessarily unalloyed good
12 news that this person as it had were had come forward.
13 Q. Then you used words the gist of which are: it is going
14 to be pretty bad for Mr Gilligan if that was his source.
15 A. I did.
16 Q. Regardless of this being a private diary, that seems to
17 be a strength of feeling you had about Mr Gilligan.
18 A. I do not deny and I did not deny when I was questioned
19 by Mr Sumption that I was very, very angry and
20 frustrated about this whole situation and the BBC were
21 saying that the source for their story was a senior
22 intelligence official, somebody centrally involved in
23 the drawing of the dossier. I was as certain as it is
24 possible to be in myself, and I think so was Sir John
25 Scarlett and so was Sir Richard Dearlove and so was the

196
1 Prime Minister, that this was probably not the case, and
2 therefore I felt it was important from May 29th that the
3 Government have these allegations withdrawn and
4 retracted; and as I explained when I first gave
5 evidence, I felt that this development was probably
6 important to that.
7 LORD HUTTON: Can we just look at the slightly earlier part
8 of that entry. I understood from your evidence on the
9 first occasion, I think, that it is your recollection
10 that the Secretary of State used the words "some kind of
11 plea bargain"?
12 A. I do not know that he used those exact words. I used
13 those words to convey there the sense of what I felt he
14 was saying to me, which was that this person had come
15 forward, the person had acknowledged that he had done
16 something wrong in having the unauthorised contact with
17 Mr Gilligan. What I felt Mr Hoon was saying was that
18 the person was saying: yes, I did some of these things.
19 I did not do these, and I hope that by being honest and
20 straightforward in coming forward to you that will be
21 taken into account in any disciplinary action that might
22 follow. And that was my assessment of what Mr Hoon was
23 saying to me.
24 LORD HUTTON: Well, then you, yourself, would sometimes use
25 the word or the term a "plea bargain"?

197
1 A. No, I would not normally, no, but I --
2 LORD HUTTON: Are you saying it is a term that is familiar
3 to you?
4 A. It is not a term that I would normally use. It may be
5 that the Secretary of State used that. It is certainly
6 my sense of what he said. But I cannot vouch
7 100 per cent for the Secretary of State using those
8 exact words.
9 LORD HUTTON: Yes, thank you.
10 MR DINGEMANS: 6th July, fourth line down:
11 "GH, [that is Mr Hoon] like me, wanted to get it out
12 that the source had broken cover to claim that AG
13 misrepresented him."
14 That was your understanding of the discussions with
15 him, certainly on 6th July; is that right?
16 A. Well, we discussed it, I think, on the 5th and the 6th
17 although I think on the 5th -- the extracts have not
18 been published for this, but the 5th I was very much
19 focused on the BBC Governors and another issue relating
20 to Sir Richard Dearlove; but certainly I wrote this on
21 the 6th and it reflects those conversations over the
22 weekend. And I think both of us felt that this was
23 a development that was relevant both to the FAC report,
24 which was being published on Monday, and the BBC
25 Governors' meeting on Sunday evening.

198
1 Q. It is then said that:
2 "I wanted, and GH did, to get it to the
3 BBC Governors that we may know who the source was, he
4 was not a spy, not involved in the WMD dossier and was a
5 WMD expert who advised departments."
6 That is what you were being told at that stage about
7 Dr Kelly's involvement with the dossier, was it, that he
8 was not involved in the dossier?
9 A. I was not aware at this stage that it was Dr Kelly.
10 Q. No, but the individual?
11 A. That again is the impression I was getting. I mean by
12 now I have spoken to the Prime Minister, I am speaking
13 to Jonathan Powell, I have spoken to the Secretary of
14 State; and the sense I was getting was that this was
15 somebody who was not centrally involved in the dossier.
16 Q. Then towards the bottom of that paragraph:
17 "GH said he was almost as steamed up as I was. TB
18 said he didn't want to push the system too far. But my
19 worry was that I wanted a clear win not a messy draw and
20 if they presented it as a draw that was not good enough
21 for us..."
22 That was in relation to the Foreign Affairs
23 Committee?
24 A. Correct.
25 Q. And in that respect a split on party political lines was

199
1 not good enough; is that right?
2 A. No, because I think what -- I felt that in relation to
3 these allegations we had to get -- they were so damaging
4 to the Prime Minister and the Government, we had to get
5 to a position where the BBC withdrew them. The BBC by
6 then had stated -- I do not quite understand the
7 intellectual underpinning for this statement, but they
8 had said they would accept the allegations were false if
9 there was a unanimous verdict by the Foreign Affairs
10 Committee, and that is what I am referring to there.
11 Q. Can I then go just below the dots:
12 "GH and I both wanted to get the source up but TB
13 was nervous about it."
14 What does getting the source up mean?
15 A. That is I am afraid the journalist in me coming out.
16 That is the issue, get that issue to those two bodies
17 that were relevant to this situation at the time, the
18 BBC Governors and the FAC. I am not talking about
19 getting anything as it were public.
20 Q. "Felt that we should not push K Tebbit/Omand too hard,
21 and could maybe bring it out tomorrow if we needed it."
22 Bring it out to whom?
23 A. That is, I think, to be perfectly frank, the
24 Prime Minister humouring me. I think I am saying to the
25 Prime Minister: I think we should get this to the BBC

200
1 Governors and to the FAC Chairman now; and he is
2 basically saying: look, do not do anything, just wait
3 until tomorrow, we will talk about it again.
4 Q. And "TB also feeling that we had to have something for
5 the ISC to go for and this could be this".
6 A. I think that is part of the same conversation, yes.
7 LORD HUTTON: Could the "source up" mean get the source out
8 into the open?
9 A. That was not what I was thinking about at that time,
10 my Lord, no. What I was -- the thought I had there, and
11 I think this was in large part shared by Mr Hoon, was
12 that this was a development potentially absolutely
13 central to the discussion the Governors were having on
14 the Sunday evening and to the report that was being
15 published on the Monday. So I was talking there about
16 whether Donald Anderson, the Chairman of the FAC, should
17 be informed and whether the BBC Governors should be
18 informed.
19 MR DINGEMANS: But if the FAC are going to be informed then
20 I think we have been told the world would have been
21 informed.
22 A. Well, I think the -- I think the Chairman -- I think the
23 Chairman certainly could have been trusted to be told
24 something like this in confidence.
25 Q. Could I take you to 7th July:

201
1 "Then round [to a meeting, a discussion about the
2 source]. He was an ex-inspector, who advised the
3 Government, was aware of information going into the
4 dossier but not involved in drawing it up."
5 A. Yes.
6 Q. No-one at that stage appears to have known any
7 involvement Dr Kelly had in the later stages of the
8 dossier.
9 A. Again, and I cannot vouch for this being verbatim, but
10 this is the sense that I was getting from the meetings
11 that I attended on the 7th.
12 Q. I appreciate that; but you will understand that the
13 reason the diary is in is that we have no other notes.
14 A. Yes.
15 Q. Going down to the 7th, continuing:
16 "Felt that maybe Gilligan just lied about the stuff
17 about me. Was agreed he should be interviewed again..."
18 That is Dr Kelly~--
19 A. Can I say I think that is me quoting Sir Kevin Tebbit,
20 he felt rather than --
21 Q. It was agreed that he, Dr Kelly, should be interviewed
22 again:
23 "... and then we should get it out that the source
24 was not in the intelligence community, not involved
25 drawing up [the] dossier."

202
1 That is getting it out to whom?
2 A. That is again jumping ahead. If it transpires that the
3 person who has come forward -- I think by this stage
4 I will have known the name; yes, I certainly would have
5 known by this, by the morning of the 7th, that that
6 person is judged by the MoD to be in all likelihood
7 Mr Gilligan's source -- that these are the points we
8 should be making.
9 Q. To the public?
10 A. Making to the media, yes.
11 Q. So this is, at this stage, getting it out or getting it
12 up to the world at large?
13 A. No, not at this stage. I am saying --
14 Q. No, once the interview has happened?
15 A. Once the interview has happened and it has been
16 concluded that in all likelihood this is Mr Gilligan's
17 source.
18 Q. "Several chats with MoD, Pam Teare, then Geoff H re the
19 source. Felt we should get it out through the papers,
20 then have line to respond and let TB take it on at
21 Liaison Committee."
22 Just ignoring the last bit, did you have discussions
23 with Ms Teare on 7th July?
24 A. I did, but not about that issue. I think I made that
25 clear in the first note I sent to the Inquiry

203
1 accompanying the diaries the first time I appeared.
2 Q. Notes are not being published, your evidence is, so...?
3 A. Right. The discussion that I had there in relation to
4 the source that I then go on to talk about was with the
5 Secretary of State, not with Pam Teare.
6 Q. What were you discussing with Pam Teare on that day?
7 A. I do not recall. I imagine we were discussing -- as
8 I say, at 7th July I was taken up with the Foreign
9 Affairs Committee report. I imagine at some point in
10 the day I would just have been trying to find out what
11 was going on in relation to the issue of the source, but
12 I do not think anything of substance.
13 Q. Pam Teare, she is Ministry of Defence Chief Press
14 Officer, is she not?
15 A. Hmm, hmm.
16 Q. And the Ministry of Defence is not the Foreign Affairs
17 Committee department, that is a Foreign and Commonwealth
18 Office --
19 A. No, no, I am not saying I am talking to her about the
20 FAC report.
21 Q. If you read what you said -- and I appreciate diaries
22 can be cryptic but sometimes they can shed light:
23 "Several chats with MoD, Pam Teare, then Geoff H, re
24 the source."
25 It rather looks as if it was all about the source.

204
1 A. No, the point I was making about Geoff Hoon re the
2 source, when it goes on to talk about the discussion we
3 have been discussing earlier that was part overheard by
4 Godric Smith, I am making the point there that Pam Teare
5 was not party to that.
6 Q. I appreciate that. If you turn the page, we get to that
7 about four lines down the next one.
8 A. Fine.
9 Q. You were talking with Pam Teare about the source?
10 A. I was, again -- I do not think we are talking about
11 anything of great -- that will surprise you. I was
12 simply trying to find out what was happening.
13 Q. Find out whether I am surprised. Tell me what you were
14 talking about.
15 A. That I have no recollection of those conversations other
16 than I was trying to find out what was going on.
17 Q. You see, it is on 7th July that Ms Teare starts
18 redrafting the Q and A material.
19 A. Hmm, hmm.
20 Q. Which was in case something had come out on 4th July
21 over that weekend.
22 A. Hmm.
23 Q. Then she redrafts it to provide for confirmation of the
24 name if the person has been contacted and enough people
25 have got it.

205
1 A. Hmm, hmm.
2 Q. Then, if you look at "felt we should get it out through
3 the papers and then have a line to respond", a cynic
4 might think that is what actually happened. It is out
5 through the papers and there is a line to respond in the
6 Q and A material.
7 A. No, I cannot emphasise enough that is not what I was
8 discussing with Pam Teare.
9 Q. Try to help me, what were you discussing?
10 A. I cannot help you beyond what I have said, that at some
11 point I would have phoned up and just said to Pam: what
12 is going on in relation to the -- where are we on the
13 source issue? I had no discussion about the Q and A.
14 Q. You knew what was happening, he was going off to be
15 interviewed.
16 A. Yes, I know. This is at the end of the day. The only
17 conversation I had with anybody from the MoD that I can
18 recall, and therefore that says to me that was of
19 anything, if you like, that was out of the ordinary, was
20 the one that I had with Geoff Hoon. So I think I am
21 just -- you know, I am going through the day, I am
22 working on the FAC report, I then just want to know what
23 is going on. I am sorry I cannot go any further than
24 that, but I cannot.
25 Q. Over the page to the top:

206
1 "TB felt we had to leave it to Omand/Tebbit judgment
2 and they didn't want to do it."
3 What did they not want to do?
4 A. This -- they -- again this is diary writing which is
5 not -- does not accurately express what is going on. If
6 you are reading into that that Sir David Omand and
7 Kevin Tebbit were somehow involved in this discussion
8 about this proposal, this thought that I had, they were
9 not. The Prime Minister is making the point there,
10 again: look, just leave this to David Omand and
11 Kevin Tebbit, let them sort it.
12 Q. What does the entry: "Had go for natural justice" have
13 to do with something that they are not even party to a
14 discussion on?
15 A. That is, I think, a general point of principle that the
16 Prime Minister is expressing to me. You just have to
17 let them get on with it. They are the making the point
18 that the person who has come forward, Dr Kelly, has to
19 be treated properly. Again -- I would like to emphasise
20 in relation to this, this is a situation where I am
21 thinking here not about Dr Kelly, I am thinking about
22 the Prime Minister and his situation at the
23 Liaison Committee the next morning, and I explained
24 earlier the reasons why I was focused upon that in the
25 way that I was. But this is a thought that is just

207
1 quashed quickly; and that is the end of it. It is not
2 something that we took forward. David Omand and
3 Kevin Tebbit were not aware of it, unless Geoff Hoon had
4 raised it with Kevin Tebbit, which I do not think he
5 did.
6 Q. What thought was quashed quickly?
7 A. The thought that we should get something out into the
8 public domain overnight prior to the Prime Minister's
9 Liaison Committee appearance.
10 LORD HUTTON: When you wrote into your diary "they did not
11 want to do it", you must have had in your mind something
12 as to what the "it" was.
13 A. The "it" was I think, my Lord, anything that in their
14 view -- this is something which I do not believe they
15 were aware of at the time -- would cut across the
16 approach they were taking which was that Dr Kelly had to
17 be treated properly. That meant they had to go through
18 the process they were going through. Now, by this time
19 the -- if you go back to the -- I think the 4th when
20 Geoff Hoon was certainly making the point to me that
21 there are lines being prepared, because there is an
22 assumption that this development might actually leak
23 very, very quickly, because I am afraid these things
24 have a habit of doing so. There was an assumption that
25 this was going to become public at some point. I did

208
1 not want and I did not think it would be good for the
2 Prime Minister if the first time that this issue was in
3 the public domain was when he was appearing at the
4 Liaison Committee. And the other point I would like to
5 make on that --
6 LORD HUTTON: I am sorry, I fully understand that. But
7 really is your evidence that you just have no idea what
8 the word "it" in that passage in your diary means?
9 A. No, leave it to Omand and Tebbit judgment and they did
10 not want to do it, ie anything out of the ordinary,
11 untoward, anything like this. This conversation I had
12 with the Prime Minister -- I apologise for this my Lord,
13 this is my diary that I am writing. At the end of the
14 day, it is not an account of the day, it is me sitting
15 down and scribbling whatever comes into my head. Now,
16 that is just the reality of what this is.
17 So there is nothing specific there that was ever put
18 to Sir David Omand or Sir Kevin Tebbit, and the
19 conversation that I had with the Prime Minister, that
20 was the end of it. This "it" went no further.
21 MR DINGEMANS: Do you have that conversation -- ignore
22 Sir Kevin Tebbit, ignore Sir David Omand -- did you have
23 that conversation with Pam Teare?
24 A. No, I did not, no.
25 Q. With Mr Hoon?

209
1 A. With Mr Hoon, I did.
2 Q. Get something out and have a line to respond to?
3 A. What -- and again it is -- you are presenting it as
4 though it is like a sort of thought through proposal.
5 I have come to the end of the day on the FAC, I am
6 thinking about the Liaison Committee, I speak to the
7 Secretary of State and I say I do not want the
8 Prime Minister to be in a position where he is either
9 potentially misleading MPs or he is starting off another
10 fire storm about this issue. Therefore, what do you
11 think about the idea that we put this into the public
12 domain overnight and the Prime Minister can then just
13 respond by effectively parking it at the Committee?
14 Mr Hoon did not think it was a good idea.
15 Godric Smith did not think it was a good idea.
16 Tom Kelly, the only other person who was aware of it,
17 did not think it was a good idea; but, most importantly,
18 the Prime Minister thought it was a bad idea and that
19 was it.
20 Q. Line 2:
21 "GH said there was a problem that he [Dr Kelly] once
22 gave evidence alongside Jack Straw..."
23 Why is that a problem?
24 A. I do not think it was a problem, I was already aware of
25 that.

210
1 Q. All right. Why did Mr Hoon think it was a problem?
2 A. I think that is a question for him. I think the point
3 he was concerned about was that -- and I -- once I knew
4 this, I had always thought that the BBC, when it came to
5 defending Dr Kelly as a credible source for the
6 allegations that they made, would say: the reason why we
7 can say that he is so credible is because he once sat
8 alongside the Foreign Secretary at a Select Committee.
9 I never, in fact, saw that as a terribly impressive
10 point but perhaps Mr Hoon did.
11 Q. That was your understanding of what he was saying at the
12 time?
13 A. I think the Defence Secretary was saying to me: did you
14 know by that time -- which I did by that time, because
15 the Foreign Secretary had told me in the morning -- did
16 you know that this man had once sat alongside Jack Straw
17 at a Select Committee? Yes, I did. I think Mr Hoon
18 thought that was a bigger problem than I did.
19 Q. "We were briefing that they [BBC] would eventually
20 apologise."
21 You will have to help me. How do you brief that
22 they are going to apologise?
23 A. Well, that is what you are saying to the press, ie those
24 of us whose job it is to talk to the press, and
25 particularly Tom Kelly and Godric Smith, we were making

211
1 clear our view -- I think this goes back to the FAC,
2 that on the back of the FAC report, regardless of the
3 fact that the BBC's response to it was to say that it
4 justified their journalism, that we felt confident that
5 eventually they would be forced to apologise for this.
6 Q. These are briefings no doubt given by the PMOS. Did you
7 give any briefings to any journalists at the time?
8 A. Well, I do not spend that much time speaking to
9 journalists, but I do talk to journalists, yes.
10 Q. That is not an answer to the question.
11 A. Well, yes is the answer.
12 Q. You did brief journalists at the time about this story?
13 A. Yes, I was talking to journalists certainly.
14 Q. And what were you talking to them about?
15 A. At this particular time?
16 Q. Hmm, hmm.
17 A. I was -- I mean, I talked to journalists when --
18 I mainly talk to editors and senior journalists. At
19 this time I was emphasising that I did not believe that
20 the BBC source was a senior intelligence official and
21 I did not believe that their source was somebody
22 centrally involved in the drawing up of the dossier; and
23 also by now -- but by now I am at the centre of the
24 story whether I like it or not, so journalists were
25 asking me about my position in relation to this, so

212
1 I was talking about that.
2 Q. Were these all briefings on the record?
3 A. Well, most -- I do not -- I no longer know with
4 journalists what on the record and off the record is. I
5 think most -- when I talk to journalists I make an
6 assumption that there is a likelihood it will end up in
7 print
8 Q. Did you tell anyone what Dr Kelly's qualifications were,
9 namely that he was a weapons of mass destruction
10 specialist, that he was employed at the Foreign Office?
11 A. No, no. And I do not believe I ever thought he was
12 employed at the Foreign Office. As far as I was
13 concerned, he was an MoD official.
14 Q. "Wall to wall all day, source issue not moving."
15 What does that mean?
16 A. "Wall to wall all day" is a reference to the FAC
17 coverage.
18 Q. "Source issue"?
19 A. Source issue means that the reports that are coming back
20 from the MoD, in my case through Jonathan Powell, there
21 were no developments.
22 Q. And "source going better but not necessarily him", what
23 does that mean?
24 A. That is again I presume from Jonathan Powell, that the
25 conclusion is probably being reached that this is

213
1 Mr Gilligan's single source that he mentioned at the
2 Foreign Affairs Committee but they cannot be sure.
3 Q. "GH wanted to get up [the] source..."
4 That is not what I recollect Mr Hoon tells us this
5 morning. He said it was your suggestion.
6 A. I think in relation to that that does risk being unfair
7 to Mr Hoon because I think that is if you like
8 a conflation of the fact that Mr Hoon was keen for the
9 point on the 6th to be made clear to the BBC, to the
10 FAC, that this development had taken place; but I would
11 admit that in terms of the conversation that I think
12 that refers to, it was I that was -- that was -- I think
13 this goes back to the proposal we were discussing
14 earlier. So I think that section does risk being unfair
15 to Mr Hoon.
16 Q. So it was your suggestion, and was it to be done
17 anonymously?
18 A. No, I do not think something like that, frankly, could
19 be.
20 Q. But Godric Smith said this: Alastair floated the idea
21 that the news that an individual had come forward who
22 could be the source be given that evening to one paper;
23 and Godric Smith said: I thought that if the decision
24 was taken to make this information public then the
25 Government should make it public itself, rather

214
1 suggesting this was to be done without as it were the
2 Government's fingerprints on it.
3 A. No, that is -- and again if you look at what I recorded
4 in the extract just above that, I talk about papers
5 plural. But in any event all that is being discussed at
6 this stage, and it is a very, very short passage this,
7 we are talking a matter of minutes, is, if you like,
8 whether this should be done. Had the decision been
9 taken that, yes, this should be done, there would then
10 have been a proper discussion about how. But that is
11 not a piece of information that the Government could
12 reasonably put into the public domain in an anonymous
13 unattributable way.
14 Then you would have gone on to whether it was an MoD
15 statement, a No. 10 statement, whether it was -- by now
16 you get to the evening, whether you actually wait for
17 the evening papers and the next day. But we never got
18 to that. This was a thought that was born and died
19 within minutes.
20 Q. Can I take you to 8th July? After the early morning
21 meeting for the Liaison Committee when no-one knows what
22 is going to be done, you speak to Mr Hoon:
23 "Said he [GH] should get going on the source issue,
24 TB clear that we should leave the bureaucracy to deal
25 with it."

215
1 Can you help us with that entry?
2 A. Yes, I think I can. That I believe refers to the fact
3 that during the Prime Minister's evidence to the
4 Liaison Committee I spoke to Mr Hoon again to try to
5 find out what was going on. Mr Hoon was not clear
6 exactly where the MoD was on the process. I said the
7 Prime Minister would want to know when he came back and
8 that I think is he, Mr Hoon, gets going to find out, as
9 it were -- and I then just reiterate "TB clear we should
10 leave the bureaucracy to deal with it". Whether that is
11 a point I am making to myself or a point I made to
12 Mr Hoon, I do not know.
13 Q. The Prime Minister comes back from the Liaison Committee
14 and tries to sort out the source issue. Then there is
15 the meeting when it is first of all decided to send
16 a letter to the ISC copied to the FAC. Mrs Taylor does
17 not want that?
18 A. Yes.
19 Q. Then this:
20 "Word came back she did not want a letter, that
21 meant do it as a press release."
22 Why did that mean do it as a press release?
23 A. Because I think by that stage within these meetings the
24 point was continually being made that everybody thinks
25 this is going to become public quite soon. The

216
1 development had been communicated to the ISC.
2 Ann Taylor, as you rightly say, did not want to be put
3 in a position where it might even look like she was, as
4 it were, being directed by the Government, but she did
5 express an interest or she made clear that her committee
6 would express an interest in seeing and interviewing the
7 person who had come forward. So from that moment the
8 discussion then revolved around: how is that development
9 to be put into the public domain? The decision was
10 taken that it should be done as an MoD statement.
11 Q. Then a number of people go to Godric Smith's room, write
12 the press release, and Tebbit writes the letter from
13 Mr Hoon to Gavyn Davies offering to give him the name of
14 the source.
15 A. Hmm.
16 Q. "Martin Howard ... was pretty convinced that [Dr Kelly]
17 was the source, though of course we could not be sure."
18 A. Hmm, hmm.
19 Q. "[Sir Kevin] Tebbit took it away to MoD and had to clear
20 it with David Kelly who was on a motorway.
21 Is that what you were told, that the press release
22 had been cleared with Dr Kelly while he was on the
23 motorway?
24 A. What we were told was that Dr Kelly was out of London,
25 I think he was driving back, and had had to pull in to

217
1 have the statement read to him and then cleared by him.
2 Q. How long was the drafting session in Godric Smith's
3 room?
4 A. How long?
5 Q. Mr Powell, Mr Campbell, Prime Minister's official
6 spokesman, John Scarlett, Sir Kevin Tebbit, all in
7 Godric Smith's room.
8 A. I could not give you for sure but I would have thought
9 something under an hour.
10 Q. Under an hour?
11 A. I do not know, but an hour I would have guessed.
12 Q. We can see some of the details, MoD/1/67. I mean
13 perhaps just one of the interesting developments on the
14 press statement is the fact that more detail goes in
15 about who Dr Kelly is rather than who he is not.
16 A. Hmm, hmm.
17 Q. The earlier one is: he is not a member of DIS, he is not
18 a member of the Intelligence Services et cetera.
19 A. Yes.
20 Q. Whereas in paragraph 3:
21 "The individual is an expert on WMD who has advised
22 Ministers ... and whose contribution was ...
23 historical."
24 He is not and then he is not.
25 A. Yes.

218
1 Q. Why was it decided to put these bits of information in?
2 A. The second part of that first sentence I do remember the
3 discussion on this; and I think that may have been my
4 observation, that it goes back to the point I was making
5 earlier about the discussion I had with Mr Hoon. I felt
6 that the BBC would seek to defend their source on the
7 grounds that he had sat next to Jack Straw at a Select
8 Committee, that would be one of the central arguments
9 they would deploy; and that I think is thinking forward
10 to that.
11 So, I felt, and I think this was something that
12 others felt, that the BBC's -- not just the BBC but
13 other parts of the media might say that we were seeking
14 to say that Dr Kelly, if it turned out Dr Kelly was the
15 source, was not a senior figure, was not terribly
16 important and all the rest of it. I think these are
17 points, if you like, that actually make clear that we
18 are not going to be saying Dr Kelly is nothing. We are
19 not going to be saying that Dr Kelly is anything other
20 than an expert in his field; and we are going to
21 acknowledge he is somebody who worked closely with
22 Ministers.
23 Q. Can I take you to CAB/1/56 which says at the top,
24 somebody has written in handwriting "saved on Godric's
25 machine", I imagine that is Mr Smith's machine, "on

219
1 8th July 2003, 16.35 (created 12.35)".
2 Obviously we have heard that the meeting with the
3 Prime Minister ended after his return from --
4 A. Liaison Committee.
5 Q. -- the Liaison Committee, started about 11.30, finished
6 at 12.30 and then started again at 1.30 after there was
7 word back from Mrs Taylor?
8 A. Hmm, hmm.
9 Q. Do you recall the meeting finishing at about 4.35?
10 A. I do not. I do not recall exactly when it ended. If it
11 was a normal day and Parliament was sitting then one of
12 Tom or Godric would have had to have left at 3.45 to do
13 that afternoon's briefing. I think I have
14 a recollection of them both being there. So I just do
15 not know when the meeting ended.
16 Q. Then the last entry on 8th July:
17 "Then out by 6 and briefing mainly on fact BBC put
18 out a non-denial denial within two hours."
19 You seem to be doing a lot of briefing at this time.
20 A. No, that does not refer to me, I do not think. I think
21 that is me referring to the response that I have agreed
22 with Tom and Godric is the response to the BBC
23 statement. But I mean, again, just to set the context
24 for this, this was, if you like, a media fire storm.
25 I mean, that is what it was. Every part of this, every

220
1 development in this was a very major story at the time.
2 Our phones were ringing the whole time saying, you know:
3 what are you saying about this? What are you saying
4 about that?
5 When the BBC put out their statement saying or
6 seeking to suggest that this person could not possibly
7 have been their source, we are being asked obviously:
8 what do you say about this? This is the point we are
9 making. This is what we call a non-denial denial.
10 Q. Can I take you to 9th July? What you say is this:
11 "BBC story moving away because they were refusing to
12 take on the source idea."
13 A. Yes.
14 Q. Was that not right? The FAC report had come out on
15 Monday, the BBC had put out a non-denial denial, the
16 matter was not going to go forward any further without
17 Dr Kelly's name?
18 A. Well, certainly on that, I think a decision was taken
19 within the BBC and obviously within the BBC there were
20 people at executive level who knew that Dr Kelly, at
21 this stage, was the source. They took a decision that
22 they were not going to cover the story; and that is when
23 I say big conspiracy, that is not me getting paranoid,
24 that is what that is a reference to, that they had
25 basically taken a decision they were not going to cover

221
1 this.
2 Then when I say we kept pressing on as best we
3 could, what I mean by that is we are drawing attention
4 to the importance of this as an issue because of course
5 the BBC at that stage have said -- their central point
6 has been: we are not making these allegations, the
7 source was.
8 Q. Mr Kelly we know in the afternoon of 9th July gives out
9 some further information which helped Mr Blitz along the
10 path to the identification of Dr Kelly:
11 "We kept pressing on as best we could at the
12 briefings."
13 Is that a reference to any discussions you had had
14 with Mr Kelly?
15 A. No, that I think is the point that I am making. We keep
16 having to make the point to the press that in our view,
17 if this is the source then the story is wrong and the
18 BBC should acknowledge that. And that is the point that
19 we are making; and I think that the -- I know that
20 Tom Kelly is before the Inquiry tomorrow so he will have
21 to answer the questions that you put then. But the
22 points that he made at that briefing were in response to
23 a BBC response to the MoD statement that was seeking to
24 put over the point that this could not possibly be the
25 source and that is why he had to make the points that he

222
1 did.
2 Q. In which case the BBC are saying it is not him. You
3 think it is him because that is what Mr Howard thinks,
4 and the biggest thing needed was a source out. Now
5 I imagine that is the name of the source, is that right?
6 A. That is correct, yes.
7 Q. So in Government circles it was recognised that it would
8 assist them to have Dr Kelly's name out; is that fair?
9 A. That was my view. There were -- although again
10 qualified by the observation that I made earlier,
11 qualified further, I think you raised other parts of my
12 diaries when I first gave evidence, it was never going
13 to be unalloyed but I think the --
14 Q. I am going to take you to a bit which balances that.
15 A. But this had become the nub of the issue. That was not
16 Dr Kelly's fault. He did not know that was going to
17 happen when he met Mr Gilligan but that was the reality
18 of the situation that now pertained.
19 LORD HUTTON: I know you have gone over it before but you
20 say qualified the view expressed. Just remind me very
21 briefly what you are referring to there.
22 A. That it was not clear that it was necessarily going to
23 be unalloyed good news for Dr Kelly to appear in public
24 because he may well have things to say that would not
25 necessarily accord with Government policy.

223
1 LORD HUTTON: I see, thank you.
2 MR DINGEMANS: Of course if you prevent, not you personally
3 but if Government prevents him giving that evidence,
4 keeps the Foreign Affairs Committee off it, it is all
5 good news from the Government's point of view.
6 A. Well, you have probably, no doubt, read some of the
7 transcripts and you may have seen some of the video
8 coverage of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I do not
9 believe the Foreign Affairs Committee would have held
10 back from asking whatever questions they wanted.
11 Q. The biggest thing needed was the source out. You say
12 that was your view. Do you know if anyone else had that
13 view?
14 A. I think by now -- I mean, I think the mood around No. 10
15 and I suspect much of the rest of the Government by now
16 is that this whole issue is taking up a huge amount of
17 time and energy; the BBC clearly were not going to
18 accept they were wrong. They were not investigating, in
19 my view, the complaint. It was frankly just going
20 nowhere.
21 Q. Without his name out?
22 A. No, just generally. And I think that what had happened
23 is that the statement had gone out, everybody felt it
24 was inevitable at some point he was going to be
25 identified. It was probably certain that the FAC and

224
1 the ISC would want to see him. That was where this was
2 heading. But I think by now, frankly, everybody is
3 thinking this whole thing is just -- I do not think --
4 I think everybody felt pretty dispirited by the whole
5 thing.
6 Q. Did you agree or discuss with Ms Teare the proposition
7 that the Ministry of Defence would confirm Dr Kelly's
8 name if the correct name was given?
9 A. I was aware that that was the policy that they had
10 agreed.
11 Q. Who told you that?
12 A. (Pause). I think I learnt it from Pam or from
13 Kate Wilson at one of the morning meetings, that that
14 was the approach they were taking.
15 Q. Do you know which morning meeting?
16 A. I do not know.
17 Q. What was your reaction: good, that is what I want,
18 because I think you have said quite frankly you wanted
19 his name out?
20 A. As I said when I first gave evidence, I had been asked
21 by the Prime Minister to take pretty much of a back seat
22 on all of this. I can see why that plan was put
23 together. It is, as I explained earlier when I gave
24 evidence before, the reality of a lot of press office
25 work; but I think it would have been better if there had

225
1 been greater clarity and control in the process.
2 I think it is always a mistake to cede control on these
3 issues to the press.
4 Q. You have seen the Q and A material now. You have heard
5 that Dr Kelly was not told about that. As a press man
6 yourself, what are your views on that? Do you think
7 Dr Kelly ought to have been told about the proposal to
8 confirm his name?
9 A. I thought he had been told, that -- I thought he
10 understood, certainly I understood that he understood
11 that that was going to happen.
12 Q. That the Ministry of Defence would confirm his name?
13 A. That if it was put to them by the press.
14 Q. Who had told you that? I appreciate that you say was
15 your understanding. Who had given you that
16 understanding?
17 A. Again, specifically I think it was -- it was within the
18 context of those meetings then. I cannot specifically
19 recall that.
20 Q. Because assume, just for the purposes of the argument,
21 that he had not been told.
22 A. Had not?
23 Q. Had not. That would have been quite wrong, would it
24 not?
25 A. Well, just to go back to the point I made earlier.

226
1 Q. Not going back to points.
2 A. Well, it is actually to answer the question. I think
3 that in a situation like this, where you have a person
4 there who whilst experienced with the press on one level
5 has not necessarily experienced what it is like dealing
6 when you personally are the centre of this sort of
7 thing, then I think it is best that you are brought in
8 and are part of an agreed plan and agreed strategy which
9 you then implement together.
10 Q. Indeed. And if you are not and you are told only about
11 the press statement but not about the lines or the
12 Q and A material or about the fact that your boss may
13 confirm the name if the correct name is given to you, it
14 is always likely to lead to problems, is it not?
15 A. Again, I can see why in the circumstances that existed
16 at the time the plan that was put together was put
17 together. As I said both times I have appeared now,
18 I always think it is better in these difficult
19 situations, you have a plan, you involve everybody in
20 that, everyone knows what is going on. But, again,
21 the -- I mean I read Kate Wilson's evidence for example.
22 I never spoke to Dr Kelly. I do not know how he was
23 reacting. I mean, I got the sense from the way she was
24 describing those conversations that maybe he did not
25 want the help that was being offered. I just do not

227
1 know. But I do not think it is really fair for me to
2 deliver judgment in the way that you are asking me to.
3 Q. "We agreed that we should not do it ourselves, so didn't
4 but later in the day the FT, Guardian [and] after
5 a while Evans [Defence Correspondent of the Times] got
6 the name."
7 A. Hmm.
8 Q. After Mr Blitz from the Financial Times got the name, he
9 was rang up by someone who gave him further information;
10 he spoke with Miss Teare. Do you know anything about
11 that?
12 A. I do not know.
13 Q. I imagine you would deprecate all this briefing off the
14 record after the event beyond the Q and A and the press
15 statement, is that right?
16 A. Well, there would not be any need for it. The statement
17 had gone out. I have said, you know, what I think about
18 the fact that this came out as it were in an
19 uncontrolled way. Beyond that, there is no real purpose
20 served. As I say, again, just to put the other side of
21 this, there was a -- this was a -- the media were
22 banging the phones of everybody the whole time, but I am
23 not aware of what you are referring to in relation to
24 what Mr Blitz was told after the name.
25 Q. Mr Blitz was given further information about the status

228
1 of the individual providing further information, which
2 was supporting the Government line that Dr Kelly could
3 not have known what was said to have been said --
4 A. I see. I am not aware of that.
5 Q. And I have already asked you about the articles that
6 Mr Baldwin wrote.
7 A. Yes.
8 Q. Did you have any knowledge of any information given to
9 Mr Baldwin at this time about Dr Kelly's status or
10 anything?
11 A. No.
12 Q. 15th July, finally:
13 "Looking forward to Kelly giving evidence, but GS,
14 CR and I all predicted it would be a disaster and so it
15 proved."
16 I think that was the point about it not always being
17 good news.
18 A. I think it goes back to the point I made about 9th July.
19 I mean, through this whole episode, really, what has
20 been so -- it has obviously been terrible and far worse
21 for Dr Kelly and his family than for anybody else but
22 what has been terrible from our perspective is that at
23 every stage of this we have felt as it were to be the
24 wronged party and yet nothing has really ever gone
25 according to the outcome that we might have wished, and

229
1 frankly I think it just reflected in the mood that then
2 existed in Downing Street that this was something which
3 we were just going to have to sort of put behind us and
4 forget.
5 Q. "Despite MoD assurances he was well schooled..."
6 Who gave you those assurances?
7 A. Again, I think that was a -- myself and Jonathan Powell
8 just wanted to be assured by the MoD that Dr Kelly was
9 being prepared, as an FAC appearance does require a lot
10 of preparation. I think it was Kate Wilson, at
11 a morning meeting.
12 Q. I am sorry, I did say "finally" before. Going back to
13 the 9th July, one question I forgot to ask. The last
14 sentence:
15 "We agreed that we should not do it ourselves..."
16 Who is "we"?
17 A. No. 10, No. 10.
18 Q. So that is No. 10 -- there are a lot of people in
19 No. 10.
20 A. That will be a reference -- the discussions I have about
21 these sorts of issues would be myself, Tom Kelly and
22 Godric Smith.
23 Q. The Prime Minister?
24 A. The Prime Minister would not -- I mean, I am not
25 suggesting there that anybody is saying that we should

230
1 be doing it ourselves. I am just making the point --
2 the Prime Minister was clear we should be saying nothing
3 about this at all and beyond the strategic points that
4 I had been making earlier, namely if this is the person
5 then the BBC story is wrong and the BBC should be big
6 enough to accept that.
7 MR DINGEMANS: Thank you.
8 LORD HUTTON: Mr Sumption any re-examination?
9 MR SUMPTION: No.
10 LORD HUTTON: Very well. Thank you very much indeed
11 Mr Campbell. We will rise now ladies and gentlemen and
12 sit at 10.15 tomorrow morning.
13 (4.45 pm)
14 (Hearing adjourned until 10.15 am the following day)
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25

231
1 INDEX
2 PAGE
3 MR GEOFFREY WILLIAM HOON (called) ............... 2
4
5 Cross-examination by MR GOMPERTZ ............. 20
6
7 Cross-examination by MR CALDECOTT ............ 69
8
9 Cross-examined by MR DINGEMANS ............... 99
10
11 MR LEE TERENCE HUGHES (called) ................... 108
12
13 Examined by MR DINGEMANS ..................... 108
14
15 MR ALASTAIR CAMPBELL (called) .................... 111
16
17 Examined by MR SUMPTION ...................... 111
18
19 Cross-examined by MR CALDECOTT ............... 135
20
21 Cross-examined by MR DINGEMANS ............... 188
22
23
24
25

232

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