
	MAJOR ISSUES BULLETIN

NO ONE’S TO BLAME! –PART 2

By

Max Hastings

Daily Mail, Thursday, July 15, 2004

Lord Butler seems to take the view that although all this now appears to have been rubbish, since those who produced the rubbish believed it, they cannot be held blameworthy.

‘C’- Dearlove-and ’S’ (or whatever Scarlett called himself), far from being staunchly independent masters of the secret world, are exposed by their actions as ambitious civil servants, eager to ingratiate themselves with the government of the day, whatever the cost to the National Institution for which they are responsible.

Butler, amazingly, concludes that Scarlett should not be obliged to forfeit his job as the new director of SIS. He is happy to let him off with a caution, seeing as he has a long record of previous good conduct.

Thus the man responsible for one of the gravest errors of intelligence assessment in recent history becomes responsible for the body guilty of the original failure of intelligence collection. Austin powers seems more credible.

I thought [Max Hastings] the war in Iraq was a huge mistake, because George Bush was overwhelmingly likely to bungle the politics.

But I was foolish enough to believe the British government’s claims about WMD, because I could not conceive that SIS would allow its name to be used in evidence without ironclad evidence. In other words I was a mug.

We cannot be surprised that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell contrived a spurious excuse for war: this is what such people do-like dogs’instinctive relationships with lamp-posts.

But by suborning Britain’s most senior intelligence officers to help them do it, they have brought shame on the SIS.

Butler concludes that everybody responsible for this sordid fiasco should keep their jobs, because the failure was systemic, not individual.

Yet the system is made up of individuals. They are called:

Scarlett

Dearlove

Campbell

Blair

Again and again , Butler uses words that should add up to a devastating judgment upon Tony Blair’s manner of governing Britain: his committee is ‘concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the Government’s procedures, which we saw in the context of policy making towards Iraq, risked reducing the scope for informed collective judgment.

In plain English, Butler says that this country is now run by an unelected group appointed by Tony Blair, which bypasses the machinery of Cabinet decision making when ever it suits him, as it did in preparing the ground for war in Iraq.

‘Mr Holmes, they were the footsteps of a gigantic hound’, observed the doctor who brought Sherlock Holmes first tidings of the murderous beast of the Baskervilles.

Lord Butler has found everywhere in his investigations the footprints of a gigantic failure of British governance. Yet, after exhaustive investigation he brings in a verdict of misadventure, and sends everybody home for a nice hot drink. The rest of us prefer to draw our conclusions on the footsteps.

Butler’s report portrays a government in which the boundaries between the Elected Executive and our National Institutions have become blurred-a process that began while he himself [RobinButler] was still Cabinet Secretary.

It is not surprising that Tony Blair, whose shamelessness in this matter seems to know no bounds, perceives no distinction between his own political interests and those of the country.

It is vital that others should do so [who have their country’s best interest at heart] However, they should defend their independence as Dearlove and Scarlett so lamentably did not.

This year, Tony Blair has seemed to bear a charmed life. He has survived Hutton, poor European election results, perilous rumblings with his Gordon Brown and growing doubts whether he remains an electoral asset to the Labour party.

Last night, he probably went to bed fancying that he has skilfully parried yet another dangerous threat to his premiership in the Butler report. He should not be too sure.

We are all familiar with the tale of the tribesman at whose head a Gurkha slashed with his kukri. ‘Ha! You missed!’ said the tribesman. ‘Twist your head,’ said the Gurkha.

Tony Blair’s premiership is bleeding in many places now, and it must be doubtful whether he can ever again staunch the flow.

The truth is that the Prime minister has been left threadbare by the implications of Butler’s report. Here is a man who was still telling the House of Commons as late as July 2003 :

‘I have absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes.’

His personal credibility is in tatters.

Michael Howard, as leader of the Opposition, touched the heart of the miserable story when he asked Mr Blair yesterday:

‘I hope we will not face in this country another war in the foreseeable future, but if we did and you identified the threat would the country believe you?’

We know the answer to that question. It is deeply disturbing one for the British people and for the Security of the Nation.

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