Gilligan has committed the worst crime known to New Labour: he has told the truth
ROD LIDDLE
Idon't know if you are fully acquainted yet with that careerist Teutonic harridan, Gisela Stuart. She is one of New Labour's muppets on the now disgraced foreign affairs select committee, a once respected institution now serving out its time as a singularly ineffective propaganda department for Mr Alastair Campbell.
'It voss you, not Kelly! It voss you!' screeched Ms Stuart at Andrew Gilligan, jabbing at him with her finger when the reporter refused to back down — despite enduring hours of abuse and invective from this supposedly impartial committee — on his assertion that the late Dr Kelly had indeed fingered Campbell, something we know now to be unequivocally correct.
The committee, as we also now know, was very hastily convened — and convened solely, if I can put it like this, to kick the hell out of Andrew Gilligan. Its job was not to discern the truth; if that had been the case, its members would have asked him questions rather than shrieked at him. Further, it was convened with an almost complete absence of Conservative members and began its 'impartial' work by denigrating Gilligan's reputation as a journalist, relentlessly attacking him for previous stories he had filed which had annoyed New Labour.
The transcript of the select committee was published for the first time this week, timed to coincide with the explosive second day of the Hutton inquiry, presumably so that nobody would notice its manifest grotesqueries. If you remember, after they had beaten up Gilligan, the committee chairman, Donald Anderson (Muppet No. 1), strode towards the waiting press corps to announce that the reporter had been a rather unsatisfactory witness. He had been inconsistent, Anderson alleged. Now that we've seen the transcript we can see for ourselves that — au contraire, Donald, mate — Gilligan stuck doggedly to his position throughout. He had not been inconsistent at all. And he had been 'unsatisfactory' as a witness precisely for that reason.
The subversion of the foreign affairs select committee and its total co-option into a third line of defence for No. 10 Downing Street is, I suppose, a relatively minor element of the Gilligan–Campbell saga — but one which should not pass without notice.
It began when Campbell himself was 'cross-examined' by its members. Before even the committee had time to deliver its report, Labour Muppet No, 2, Eric Illsley, had pronounced to friendly journalists that Mr Campbell would be 'exonerated'. This was remarkably prescient of him, don't you think? Later came the shameful hounding of Dr David Kelly (you're just chaff!) and the committee's laughable conclusion that he was not the source of Gilligan's story. (At that time, the government's line of defence was that Gilligan had made it up; later it changed to Kelly having made it up.)
And then we had the kangaroo court, shorn of most opposition members, eviscerating the Today reporter and pronouncing immediately that he was unsatisfactory.
The Conservative members of the committee seem to have been pretty distraught by all of this, if a little slow to react (which is becoming a bit of a trait, isn't it?). A furious John Maples dissociated himself from Anderson's offensive and inaccurate pronouncement about Gilligan — and it was easy for him to do so, because the committee had been convened so hastily that Maples wasn't present for the sitting. Maples also complained that the committee was effectively abusing its role, a sentiment echoed this week by another Conservative member, Richard Ottaway.
But even now, Labour Muppets Nos 3 and 4, Gisela Stuart and Chris Bryant, have been parading themselves before the television cameras, asserting that Campbell and the government are in the clear, that Gilligan and the BBC got it wrong and should apologise, and hey, listen, we're not spokesmen for the government, we're impartial. Yeah, right. During one appearance — on Newsnight — Chris Bryant even told the television audience that there had been no attempt by the government to smear Dr Kelly. When I heard this my jaw actually dropped, just as happens in cartoons. Did Mr Bryant think we'd forgotten the deputy spin master Tom Kelly's description of Dr Kelly as a 'Walter Mitty figure', or the Ministry of Defence's description of him, weeks earlier, as a sort of junior factotum, uninvolved in the big decisions? It is the brazenness of these attempts to rewrite histo
ry, almost on a daily basis, that most amazes. It comes, I suspect, from a growing sense of desperation within New Labour and, concomitantly, a contempt for the electorate, It will, in the end, do for them.
The more frightening thing is the extent to which the government seems able to politicise and thus 'bring on side', through bullying of one kind or another, such supposedly impartial and independent instruments of state as the foreign affairs select committee, the BBC, the security services.
Alastair Campbell's close involvement with the security chiefs should, now, be forcing us to ask the question: what are MI5 and MI6 actually for? Are they there to provide information, neutral information, for the good of the country, or are they merely at the service of the government of the day, charged with the task of convincing the electorate of the rectitude of the government's policies? Latterly, this is what the security services have become — and as we now know, they are not happy about it. These are the sort of fundamental constitutional issues which I suspect the Hutton inquiry will not address; but they are intrinsic to our conception of democracy and I am surprised we have not become more outraged with every abuse that takes place. This is, after all, George Orwell's centenary. You'd think we might therefore be alive to such manipulations.
When Andrew Gilligan was reporting the war from Baghdad, complaints about his journalism came in to the BBC every day or so from Alastair Campbell. The animus between the two men stretches back a long time and is, I suspect, the root cause of this whole disquieting imbroglio. During the war, Campbell particularly objected to Gilligan's description of Baghdad the day after the Iraqi capital had been liberated. Gilligan had said, on the BBC, that the place was chaotic and that its citizens feared for their safety. This was not what the government wished to hear, true though it undoubtedly was.
But then Gilligan was never very good at being 'embedded'. Which is just as well. Because, at the moment, the government seems determined to embed pretty much everything it can get its hands on: an embedded select committee, an embedded security service and an embedded BBC. I reckon we need people like Gilligan more now than ever. He broke a vitally important story, a story which was in the public interest. And now he is paying for it.
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