Posted on 08/28/2003 8:53:05 PM PDT by woofie
Blair: truth in claims would have led to his resignation
A newspaper column in which Andrew Gilligan named Alastair Campbell as the man his source believed was responsible for the transformation of the Iraq dossier sent the government into "a complete and full storm", Tony Blair has told the Hutton inquiry into the death of David Kelly.
The prime minister said the article, published in the Mail on Sunday after Gilligan's controversial Today programme report, "added booster rockets" to the claims already made by the BBC defence correspondent because it specifically named Mr Campbell.
Linking the Downing Street communications chief to the allegations meant the issue "was no longer a small thing", Mr Blair said.
"Ever since then, that's been the issue and here we are three months on and it is still the issue," he added.
Mr Blair said by the following Monday the government was in "a complete and full storm" and that parliament was treating the story as if it were true.
But despite singling out the Mail on Sunday article, Mr Blair said the problem would have gone away had the BBC apologised. "It would all have been cleared up if the BBC had apologised...but the BBC shifted to say 'we are not attacking your [the government's] integrity", he said.
Mr Blair also said Gilligan's original claim on the Today programme that a senior source claimed the government had inserted the 45-minute claim into the September dossier was such a fundamental charge it would have merited his own resignation.
"We issued a strong denial which didn't really go anywhere," he said, adding that the allegations contained in the BBC report were "completely absurd".
He added: "This was an absolutely fundamental charge, an allegation that we had behaved in a way that, had it been true, would have merited my resignation," he said.
Mr Blair was in Basra with the British troops when he was told about the story shortly after it was broadcast on May 29.
"It was an extraordinary allegation to make and an extremely serious one," he said.
"The things that absolutely stood out and were extraordinary were firstly, that this 45-minute claim had been inserted into the dossier at the behest of Downing Street. Second, that it was done by us probably knowing it was wrong," he said.
"Third, that we had done it contrary to the wishes of the intelligence services and that this information had come from someone who was in charge of the process of drawing up the intelligence document."
Mr Blair stressed to the inquiry that the September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "owned" by the joint intelligence committee, and in particular its chairman, John Scarlett, although Downing Street was involved in presentational aspects of the dossier.
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