There was no news in the Hutton report. Anyone who followed the evidence without prejudice or wishful thinking would have anticipated the judge's conclusions, which are grounded in his brief and in the facts.
But the interests that for six months sought to use Dr Kelly's suicide to undermine the British prime minister are determined to pursue their pound of flesh. Up until last Wednesday Lord Hutton, like David Kelly before him, was a means to an end, the one who was going to deliver Tony Blair's scalp on a shovel. Now, those who hitherto emphasised his integrity are hollering "whitewash!"
Before he began his inquiry, Lord Hutton took the unprecedented step of establishing a website, on which the evidence to his hearings was posted every day, and on which his report became available last Wednesday. I observed six months ago that he did this to communicate to the public over the heads of the vested interests and prevent the evidence being misused by those with the power to do so. He did it to make himself accountable to something beyond media-created public opinion.
Now the media reminds us that there are two kinds of court: the court of law and the court of public opinion. The word "whitewash" is followed fast by another, "backlash". What they mean is that, since the judge has proved unhelpful, we should ignore him and go with our guts - our guts, of course, having been informed by those who decided this time last year that Tony Blair should be made an example of. This saga got under way, remember, with one journalist, speaking for the many, accusing Blair of having David Kelly's blood on his hands.
Blair's sin was that he exercised authority in accordance with principle. In this he went against one of the key informal ideologies of the day, which can be characterised as radical cynicism arising from the collateral power of the media.
Any thinking person who watched Greg Dyke being feted by BBC staff on the day of his departure from office must have had a sense of something seriously misplaced. Here was a man who having been brought, belatedly, to confront the logic of his situation, was leaving office because of a massive failure to do his job. While it is true that nobody was "to blame" for the death of David Kelly, it is also true that Dr Kelly would probably still be alive if Greg Dyke had called Andrew Gilligan to account. And here he was, behaving and being treated like some kind of hero.
For this to occur it has been necessary for almost the entire public debate to lose honesty and perspective. The past five days have again made obvious how this happened. A media pack that waited panting for Lord Hutton to agree with them that Tony Blair was guilty of, in effect, a murderous cynicism, listened churlishly to the facts and then explained that the facts didn't matter. Anyone interested in the health of democracy must find this worrying. When media people talk about the "court of public opinion", what they mean is the resource of conditioned opinion, created by themselves, on which they rely to apply undemocratic leverage to democracy.
There are several layers to this process. One element is that the public generally is relatively uninformed about the detail of most things. Sustained largely on soundbites and medicated with key mantras that amount, in effect, to capsules of emptiness, the public's view of things can generally be described as exhibiting certainty in inverse proportion to understanding. The mantras that have so successfully been used against Tony Blair include "Spin!", "Trust?" and "Bliar". In an ignorant society, 328 pages of fact is a poor match for such powerful banalities.
In the David Kelly saga, as in many others, the media planted a fantasy in the mind of a lazy and gullible public, the purpose of which was to create marketable instability. This fantasy related to unrealistic notions of accountability in democracy, which, by virtue of being unrealistic, are themselves dangerous to actually existing democracy. And yes it is true that Hutton interpreted his brief narrowly in not examining the context in which Britain went to war; it is also true that he did not examine the context in which it might be argued that a media ratpack drove David Kelly to his death. In this respect, as in others, his report was quite balanced.
Anarchism used to be a fringe activity, professed and perpetrated by forces or individuals who, by definition, were on the outside of things. In the Kelly saga we have observed that anarchism thrives at the centre of our cultures and systems, the inevitable consequence of radical cynicism fusing with the power without responsibility that the modern media confers on its controllers and operators.