On July 18th, 2003 Dr David Kelly was found dead in the woods. Was he hounded to death by Downing Street? Next week, Lord Hutton will reveal his conclusions about the weapons expert's presumed suicide, just one day after Tony Blair faces his most serious Commons rebellion over university fees. Can Blair survive? Frank Millar, London editor, reports.
Is it curtains for Tony Blair? Will he be gone by the next election? By the turn of the year? Or, even, come the end of next week? Most received wisdom at Westminster still says no - at least to the last of those three possibilities. Yet most commentators generally subscribe to Enoch Powell's dictum that all political careers end in failure. And two events - a Commons vote on variable university fees and the Hutton Report - have come spectacularly together to provide what one newspaper headline proclaims "24 hours in the life or death of a premiership".
High drama (and presumably at least some low farce) can certainly be expected next Tuesday and Wednesday as the action swings from the Palace of Westminster to the Royal Courts of Justice and back. Harsh light will again be thrown on the secret corners of government and the practitioners of its darker arts, reopening questions of war and peace no less - and the part played, if any, by Blair and his ministers and officials in the presumed suicide of a former government scientist in a lonely Oxfordshire wood last July.
The government will reach for the high moral ground as it appeals beyond a baying media pack to be heard on the issues it believes of most pressing concern to the British public. But the high policy and high-mindedness of this administration will sit alongside suggestions of low cunning and duplicity, as the public are invited anew to consider the case for war with Iraq while Lord Hutton determines whether - in pursuit of its war with the BBC - the government played any part in driving weapons expert Dr David Kelly to take his own life.
"Have you blood on your hands? Will you resign, prime minister?" one journalist famously demanded in Japan last July on the day after Dr Kelly's body was discovered. The prime minister had arrived in the Far East after a triumphant address to the US Congress, which had honoured him, like Churchill before him, with the award of the Congressional Gold Medal.
With President Bush having already declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, the countless standing ovations from his American admirers might have produced the defining image of Blair's year of high-risk diplomacy and war. Instead, it was the look of fear etched on the prime ministerial countenance that endured.
With the passage of time, and the long wait for Lord Hutton's report, 10 Downing Street no longer seems such a fearful place. Yet with blood on the floor, Blair, his defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, and their assorted advisers would do well to assume that the outcome on Wednesday will at the very least be messy.
Away from Westminster, meanwhile, battle rages on a second front this weekend as government whips seek by whatever means possible to suborn the Labour rebels threatening to destroy Blair's flagship policy for the reform of university funding. The arm-twisting and threats, promises and persuasion will continue when MPs return to the Commons on Monday. And the prime minister will be on hand to meet individuals and groups of doubters, selling his proposal simultaneously as the ultimate test of progressive politics, and as vital in its way for his administration's reputation and purpose as Margaret Thatcher's reform of the trade union laws in the 1980s.
As with every big idea associated with this Labour government, it is Blair - rather than his education secretary, Charles Clarke - who is in the lead. Much to the irritation of rebellious backbenchers, the whips and Number 10 have made it clear that it is Blair's authority that is on the line over a policy approved by the vice-chancellors of the top universities (and the OECD) but which many Labourites fear opens the door to unrestrained market forces and a two-tier system of higher education. In crude terms, nobody is asking what happens if the vote is lost and Clarke feels obliged to fall on his sword. "President" Blair still rules.
With all sides agreed that Britain's universities face a funding crisis, Blair proposes to allow them to charge tuition fees of up to £3,000 per year, repayable once the graduate starts earning £15,000 per year. And he has made considerable headway with some of the 150-odd MPs originally declared hostile, arguing the case in terms of fairness and opportunity.
Some of the rebels have been persuaded by a package of concessions Blair and Clarke have announced for students from poorer backgrounds. The increasingly voluble complaints from the middle class - who can see their offspring emerging from university with debts of £30,000 or £40,000 - have doubtless also helped persuade some that this is another redistribution measure in the fashion of chancellor Gordon Brown's stealth taxes.
Yet the Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, has launched an impressive counter-offensive, also in the name of fairness. How can it be fair, he has twice demanded of Blair in the Commons, that graduates earning £15,000 per year should find themselves effectively on a higher rate of tax than a multi-millionaire? Moreover, the price of those concessions is put at close to - or in excess of - the £1 billion which Blair says his proposal will give the universities. He has also assured his MPs that the maximum £3,000 will be capped for the life of the next parliament, and that any subsequent increase would require further parliamentary approval.
THIS IS proving less than comforting to those who remember that Labour's manifesto at the last election promised not to introduce top-up fees. Moreover, even a figure of £1 billion raised will leave a funding shortfall of a further £9 to £10 billion, reinforcing the belief of the irreconcilables that - once the principle is conceded - the only way for fees to go is up.
In his latest "big conversation" with the country, and with groups of hostile students in television studios, as well as with the Parliamentary Labour Party, Blair has been pressing his case with all the fervour and self-belief he showed in defying party and public scepticism to marshal his troops for the war in Iraq.
At this writing it is impossible to know if he will prove as successful this time. A cloud of disinformation has descended. Having previously promoted the belief that the rebellion was fading fast, government sources now declare that the vote will be "too close to call". In their pleas for loyalty, the whips will be pressing doubters not to grant Michael Howard and his seemingly resurgent Tories a famous victory - especially on the eve of a Hutton Report, which could lay Blair low. However, leading critics say the proximity of the two events may not weigh so heavily on MPs, as they have known for some time that one would quickly follow the other.
Moreover, most Labour MPs do not expect Lord Hutton to deliver anything like a fatal blow to the prime minister.
The guessing game and the bid for potentially crucial votes will continue all the way to Tuesday's 7 p.m. vote. All we can know for certain is that, assuming all the Tories vote against the government, 81 Labour rebels (fewer than voted against the war) would be enough to kill Blair's Higher Education Bill. And that could propel him into seeking a "confidence" vote in the Commons the following day - the same day as he makes his Commons statement in response to the Hutton Report.
For sure, Blair would win a confidence vote. But the combination of a defeat by his own backbenchers and collateral damage courtesy of Hutton would spell a moment of high danger. That same passage of time has allowed many to forget that for a few days last July even ultra-loyal Blairites feared their man could be swept from power as headlines accused him, Hoon, and former communications director Alastair Campbell of hounding an innocent man to his death.
Not that anybody in Downing Street anticipates such an outcome. True, whereas only the chief whip, Hilary Armstrong, has a real take on the likely result of Tuesday's vote, nobody inside or outside the government has a clue as to the conclusions Lord Hutton will deliver in a televised statement at noon on Wednesday. However,the prime minister and his advisers are clearly hopeful that His Lordship's reliance on "the facts" will put them in the clear and enable the government to move on.
The crucial "facts", as they would have it, would acquit Blair of lying over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD); condemn the BBC and its reporter, Andrew Gilligan, for wrongly suggesting that Number 10 "sexed-up" the government's controversial Iraqi weapons dossier against the advice of the intelligence services; and clear Blair, Hoon and their officials of a conspiracy to publicly identify Dr Kelly as the source of the BBC's claim, effectively, that the government took the country to war on the basis of a lie.
There would seem to be good grounds for government confidence on at least two of these counts. Dr Kelly himself spoke as it were from "beyond the grave" on Wednesday night, when the BBC Panorama programme broadcast an extract from a previously unseen interview recorded in the month after the dossier was published in September 2002. In it, Dr Kelly confirmed his view that Saddam was a threat to neighbouring countries, with a capacity to deploy WMD within "days or weeks." Critics seized upon this as confirmation of Dr Kelly's doubts about the specifics of the government's most notorious claim - namely, that Iraq could deploy WMD within 45 minutes. However, the head of MI6 has already acknowledged that this claim was given "undue prominence" in the dossier, in light of subsequent evidence that it related only to battlefield munitions. More crucially, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee told the Hutton Inquiry that the security chiefs had total "ownership" of the dossier.
In addition, the BBC - at least in the form of Panorama - has seemingly abandoned its long defence of Gilligan, the programme accusing its own bosses of betting the farm on "the shaky foundation" of his journalism. Gilligan was forced to admit to the Hutton Inquiry that he was wrong to attribute to Dr Kelly the suggestion that the government had inserted the 45-minute claim probably knowing it to be false.
That Blair was not recalled before the Hutton Inquiry explains the confidence that on the third count too - the so-called "naming strategy" - the prime minister will also be cleared.
Conservative leader Michael Howard is focusing hard on Blair's insistence on the aircraft carrying him to Japan that he did not authorise the leaking of Dr Kelly's name as the suspected BBC mole. What cannot be denied - not least because it was confirmed to the Hutton Inquiry by the permanent secretary to the Ministry of Defence - is that Blair presided at the meeting which led to the bizarre game of questions and answers by which Ministry of Defence officials would eventually confirm Dr Kelly as the source if journalists came up with the right name.
Blair's defence is that this was not a naming strategy at all, rather a precaution against the likelihood that the name would come out anyway and the need to protect the government against accusations of a cover-up in the face of ongoing parliamentary inquiries.
Thus, Blair's reputation hangs on what many would consider a very fine distinction indeed, between "a naming strategy" and "a leak strategy". Yet even assuming that Lord Hutton takes the prime minister at his word, does the same necessarily apply to all the others involved in implementing the course settled upon in Blair's study on July 8th?
Quite possibly not. For there is a formidable body of evidence that once Dr Kelly admitted unauthorised contact with Gilligan (while denying the key claims attributed to him as the BBC man's source), Campbell, Hoon and others in the government machine determined to "out" him in a sustained effort to force a BBC apology. Campbell's own diary entries confirmed that, for him, "the biggest thing needed was the source out" and his confident belief that this would "f**k Gilligan".
From the denigration of Dr Kelly as a "Walter Mitty" character to the release of critical information narrowing the list of suspects, and the fact that some of the leading journalists in the story were known to be close to Number 10 - the circumstantial evidence has already convinced the proverbial dogs in the street.
But will Lord Hutton find compelling evidence of a conspiracy to deliver Campbell his desired outcome? Or might the noble Lord even offset any criticism of the Ministry of Defence's failure in its "duty of care" to Dr Kelly by swingeing criticism of the deceased for systematically briefing against his own government and lying both to his line managers and the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee?
The Blair government is plainly hopeful about Hutton's conclusions. But from a distinguished Law Lord with a reputation for springing surprises, it would seem to be hoping for rather a lot.
The witching hours: what Blair faces
Tuesday, noon
Tony Blair and the other parties to the Hutton Inquiry receive advance copies of Lord Hutton's report into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly.
Tuesday, 7p.m.
MPs vote on variable university fees, with rebel Labour MPs threatening Tony Blair's flagship policy.
Wednesday, 6 a.m.
Opposition leaders Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy get six hours advance notice of Lord Hutton's conclusions.
Wednesday, noon
As Blair prepares to face prime minister's questions in the House of Commons, Lord Hutton delivers a televised statement summarising the findings in his report.
Wednesday, 3.30 p.m.
Blair makes House of Commons statement in response to Lord Hutton.
February 4th
Blair leads for the government in a full House of Commons debate on the findings of the Hutton Report.