HUTTON INQUIRY: Blair stuck to stressing a few simple themes as he gave evidence at the Hutton Inquiry, writes Deaglán de Bréadún
It is said that Valéry Giscard d'Estaing once gave up reading the newspapers for 10 years. Tony Blair should take a leaf out of the French elder statesman's book.
We got another insight into Downing Street's fixation with bad headlines and negative media coverage when the Prime Minister finally arrived to give his evidence at the Hutton Inquiry yesterday.
In dark suit and tie, he could have been dressed for a funeral. Was this more media planning? one wondered. Did someone say: "This is about a man's death, so you can't go there dressed like an Italian gigolo." He looked nervous and his voice trembled slightly at the start, but it all went smoothly in the end. As he testified, demonstrators could be heard on the streets outside, the "noise of democracy", their anti-Blair chants acting as a kind of chorus of doom.
Blair is a formidable and assured public performer. His experience as a lawyer and parliamentarian stand him in good stead on occasions like this.
And he knows the importance of stressing a few simple themes again and again.
One of them was that, no matter how much the Iraqi weapons dossier was rewritten and enhanced, nothing was done without the approval of the spooks and spymasters.
This was in line with the testimony of the arch-spook, Mr John Scarlett, last Monday, which must have been very comforting for Blair.
His second theme was that the BBC's Andrew Gilligan had broadcast a false and extremely damaging story about him and his government on May 29th last, and this still had not been retracted.
Thirdly, he stressed what he saw as the unavoidable imperative of finding some indirect method of getting Dr David Kelly's name into the public domain, once he had owned up to being a Gilligan source.
If you were marking a score-card, you would have to say that Blair has had a good week in terms of making the case that, while the dossier may have been "sexed-up", no Viagra or other artificial ingredients were used. There seems to be no way that Lord Hutton could ignore or reject Scarlett's evidence, even if he wanted to.
Blair has also gained ground against the BBC. The fact that no opportunity was given to the government to comment on Gilligan's extremely serious allegations before they were broadcast on the Today programme on May 29th, for example, was out of line with traditional journalistic practice.
Where the Prime Minister fell down, however, was on the thorny issue of exposing the reserved - and, as it would now appear, extremely vulnerable private citizen and public servant - Dr Kelly, to the vicissitudes of parliamentary and media scrutiny after he owned-up to having briefed Andrew Gilligan.
Surprisingly, at the end of his evidence, Blair did not take the opportunity, as others have done, to express further condolences to the Kelly family. For example, yesterday's other witness, the BBC chairman, Gavyn Davies, spoke quite movingly about his feelings over Dr Kelly's death. Perhaps Tony felt it would be seen as hypocritical, or maybe he just plain forgot.
Lord Hutton, former Northern Ireland chief justice, will bring the proceedings to a close on September 25th and then go off to write his report.
Reporters covering the Inquiry are watching carefully for clues as to his outlook.
As a man in his early 70s, he belongs to a different generation from Blair and his media-driven associates. The Prime Minister spoke yesterday about the "quandary" the British government was facing, once Kelly decided to turn himself in.
"Why was it a quandary?" His Mystified Lordship inquired.
Likewise, he could not understand why such an elaborate and tortuous method was used to release Kelly's name in public, namely, the "question-and-answer" strategy whereby reporters had to ring up the Ministry of Defence press office and, if they guessed the name right, then, bingo, it was confirmed.
Similarly, Lord Hutton and his ultra-smooth senior counsel, Mr James Dingemans, appear puzzled as to why Kelly's name had to be released at all. At one point yesterday, Blair said: "We couldn't, just because he was a civil servant, keep this information to ourselves."
There was a time, which Lord Hutton presumably remembers, when a man or woman's name would not be disclosed, precisely because he or she was a civil servant, and the government of the day felt it had a "duty of care" to protect that person from hostile public scrutiny. In fairness to the Prime Minister, he believed the name would come out anyway.
The human cost of this sorry saga will be thrown into greater relief on Monday next, when the scientist's widow, Ms Janice Kelly, is due to give evidence.