Word: hutton
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...path of a bill to charge students more to attend university. (He'd staked his premiership on the outcome, and a loss could have led to a vote of confidence against him.) The very next day, Blair and the rest of his government were comprehensively cleared by Lord Hutton's inquiry into the death of government weapons-expert David Kelly, who killed himself last year after being named as a source for a BBC report that Blair's government had "sexed up" the case for war against Iraq. Hutton's verdict confounded widespread expectations that some blame, perhaps enough...
...until he deals with the issue Hutton skirted: that while the British government might not have lied about its intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, that intelligence was still dead wrong. Blair, even more than George W. Bush, based the argument for war on the absolute certainty that Iraq had such weapons. The White House is now backing away from those claims; Blair has not. He outsmarted the executioner, but still has some explaining to do. Give him time. For now, Blair was grinning widely as he sped away unscathed from his near-death experience. He could see plenty...
...Hutton was certainly on solid ground in castigating BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan (who has also resigned) for making "very grave" and "unfounded" charges when he accused the government, in an unscripted, unedited broadcast he made from home, of "probably knowing" that a central claim in its dossier on Iraqi WMD - that some were deployable in 45 minutes - was false and inserted over the objections of the intelligence community, allegedly at the behest of Blair's powerful communications director, Alastair Campbell. The testimony to Hutton showed that top spies put it in, and believed it at the time. Hutton also condemned...
...Greg Dyke BBC director general Resigned, but is sure to contest Hutton's report from the wings...
...wanted to signal deep frustration that Downing Street policy wonks don't consult them enough before uncorking big bills. "There's been too much policy by laptop," admits James Purnell, a former Downing Street wonk who is now an M.P. Government whips hoped that the peril Blair faced from Hutton would forge party discipline for the vote on tuition fees, but rebels dismissed that as scaremongering. They doubted that Hutton, an establishment figure whose every judicial inclination has been to avoid meddling in politics, would really blast the Prime Minister so fiercely that Blair would have to resign. Blair...