Conor Gearty is Rausing Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, Professor of Human Rights Law at the LSE and a barrister at Matrix. In the latest edition of The London Review of Books, he has a 5000 word piece reflecting on the Hutton Report. (Link via Memex 1.1.)
At first sight, the Hutton Report seemed to provide further evidence of Tony Blair's intuitive political genius. It was extraordinary to have reaped from the appointment of Lord Hutton a set of findings which transformed a crisis that threatened to be overwhelming into a vindication of every aspect of the government's conduct, and of the prime minister's moral probity in particular. But when the full implications of the report sank in, as the opinion-makers and others who had already commented on it got round to reading it, the true extent of its partisanship sank in too. As Lord Hutton ploughed on, turning a messy political story into an occasion to destroy the BBC, so the political skills that had created the stage for this report began themselves to look increasingly debased. In the immediate aftermath of the report's publication, the Napoleonic posture of Alastair Campbell, proclaiming his integrity from some sort of throne against a grand imperial backdrop, contrasted with the BBC employees' mobbing of their departing director general to give us the two images with which Hutton will now always be associated. It is possible in politics to be too clever by half ...
