Deaglán de Bréadún evaluates Tony Blair's approach at the Hutton inquiry and the implications of Alastair Campbell's sudden departure from Downing Street
Today's exam question: compare and contrast the likely conduct of Irish politicians if confronted by the events that are currently under investigation in the Hutton inquiry. The first and most immediate difference is that no head of an Irish government would dream of leaving the witness box, as Tony Blair did this week, without expressing condolences for the scientist's tragic death to the Kelly family.
Indeed, it is possible to imagine some of our political leaders who might have gone a little too far, hamming it up to an almost embarrassing degree.
But whatever the faults and failings of our politicians, at least they would have been aware of the need for the human touch, because the Hutton inquiry is, after all, a type of inquest and its brief is quite explicit: "Urgently to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly".
Happily, Ireland does not actively engage in wars, whatever about providing airport transit facilities, and the Government is not under the same pressure to assess the capacity of countries like Iraq to launch weapons of mass destruction. Consequently there would have been no major dossier on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and, therefore, no charge that it was "sexed up" to promote the case for putting Irish troops in harm's way.
But suppose some other type of document was published and an RTÉ journalist reported a claim by an anonymous civil servant that the Government inserted highly dubious material in the document against the advice of its own experts. A major row ensues, with the Government demanding a retraction. Then a civil servant steps forward and tells his superiors that he had spoken to the journalist in question.
It would have been a very serious matter for the indiscreet civil servant. The government of the day would have been very cross. But it is hard to imagine that whatever Taoiseach was in office would have felt under such pressure to get the civil servant's name into the public domain, for fear of being accused of a cover-up. It is even more difficult to envisage an Irish government adopting the bizarre strategy of leaking the name indirectly through a series of questions and answers supplied to its press officials (of course, all sorts of names would have been floating around the bars of Dublin within hours).
Therefore there was something slightly Kafkaesque about Tony Blair's description of his state of mind at his weekend retreat in Chequers after the name of David Christopher Kelly first became known to him. The Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons was due to publish a report on the Iraq dossier affair the following Monday and "suddenly here we were on the Friday with this information".
The simplest response would have been to inform the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. One imagines any normal politician picking up the phone or getting one of his or her minions to make the necessary call.
But not our Tony. Instead he calls in a virtual galaxy of top civil servants to chew and mull over the issue. Lord Hutton had previously indicated his puzzlement on this score and he took the opportunity to ask the Prime Minister: "Why were so many senior officials concerned with this?"
The answer could have come from the script of the TV series, Yes, Minister. When in doubt, Minister Jim Hacker turns to his trusty mandarin, Sir Humphrey. Blair's convoluted language suggests a man who was scared stiff: "I thought it was essential not in a sense to pass the responsibility to them - in the end I have full responsibility for the decisions that are taken - but in order to make absolutely sure that when at a later point, as I thought there would be, not obviously in the context which we are talking now, but people would say: when did you know? What did you know? Who did you tell? I would be able to say: we handled this by the book, in the sense of with the advice of senior civil servants.
"Not, as I say, in order to pass responsibility to them, but in order to make sure that this was not, as it were, the politicians driving the system but us taking a consensus view as to what the right way to proceed was."
As Sir Humphrey might say: Precisely.
Of course, Blair did not have full control of the Foreign Affairs Committee and feared the consequences of feeding it this precious morsel. Instead he tried to channel the information through the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), a much tighter and more discreet body, where the Prime Minister would still retain some control.
When the ISC told him to push off, Blair was left in a quandary. As he saw it, the name had to be got out before it came from some other source. But how, this was the question.
While the Prime Minister very wisely accepts overall responsibility for just about everything that happened, when it comes to the detail of who ordered which particular course of action, he retreats into vagueness. For whatever reason, whether in deference to Dr Kelly's wishes or due to a residual doubt that there might have been another BBC source, he did not want to release the scientist's name bluntly and openly and it was decided to issue a Ministry of Defence (MoD) press statement that a person had come forward and then leave it to journalists to play guessing-games with Ministry press officers to find out the name.
"I did not see the MoD Q and A, but I think the basic view would have been not to, as it were, offer the name but on the other hand not to mislead people," Blair told the inquiry. As for the press statement, he acknowledges that, "I may have scanned my eye over it myself, but I cannot absolutely recall that." Nor could he recall that his head of communications, Alastair Campbell, suggested leaking Kelly's name to a particular newspaper.
The Blair approach, though superficially different from that of his Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, was fundamentally the same. Blair accepts overall responsibility for everything, Hoon does not, but when it comes to the fine detail and the hard decisions, they both mysteriously disappear from the stage.
A major character in the drama who has now left the stage is, of course, Campbell himself, who announced his resignation yesterday. This had been expected in the aftermath of Lord Hutton's report but, in the event, Campbell decided not to wait. It was probably sensible from his point of view, as the inquiry chairman indicated that he would take "some time" to write his report, once the public hearings had concluded on or around September 25th.
It will also lower the temperature in the whole affair, as the "war" between the BBC and Downing Street had acquired a strong personal tinge and often looked liked a war between Campbell himself and the corporation.
Blair made clear in his evidence that he was still seeking a retraction of the original BBC report that a senior official (Kelly, as we now know) was accusing the government of "sexing up" the Iraq dossier.
The BBC chairman, Gavyn Davies, sent out several conciliatory signals in his own evidence this week and, now that Campbell has exited the scene, it should be considerably easier for the "Beeb" to consider what Lord Hutton called "a qualified withdrawal" of the original story, which many now believe to have been poorly presented at best.
But Blair's performance at the inquiry suggests that the departure of Campbell will make little difference to his mindset in relation to the media.
The Prime Minister came across as a man more than a little obsessed with the wording of tomorrow's headlines. Perhaps Lord Hutton's report, when it appears, will persuade Mr Blair to step back, stop worrying about the media "spin" and just get on with running the country.
Blair's fate should be of more than passing interest in Ireland. He has put hundreds, perhaps thousands, of man-hours into the thankless job of nursing the peace process along. If he goes, it is hard to imagine any likely successor taking the same personal interest in the future of Northern Ireland. The legendary "securocrats" may rejoice if Blair is removed from the peace process equation, but not many others. When it comes to the Hutton inquiry, it is a case of, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls ..."
Deaglán de Bréadún is the Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times