A powerful statement by Andrew Gilligan, who was at the time at the centre of the ‘dodgy dossier’ scandal. Now of course, 10 years, hundreds of thousands of lives and countless billions of fiat currency money later, we are allowed to hear some truth.
Here are some gems from the piece:
What we now know is that on September 17 and 18 2002, a week before the dossier was published, Alastair Campbell sent memos to its author, Sir John Scarlett, saying that he and Tony Blair were “worried” that on Saddam’s nuclear capability the dossier gave the (accurate) impression that “there’s nothing much to worry about”.
No wonder a little tipping of the scales was needed – or, as Blair also put it in his book, “politicians are obliged from time to time to conceal the full truth, to bend it and even distort it, where the interests of the bigger strategic goal demand that it be done”.
[What ‘strategic goal’ might that be, I wonder.]
An explanation, if not an excuse, may rest in Campbell’s mental state: even Blair, in his memoirs, called him a “crazy person” who by that stage “had probably gone over the edge”. But that doesn’t explain the really scary part: how the machinery of government, in a mature democracy such as Britain’s, allowed itself to be captured by someone in that state.
[Why does that sentence make me suddenly think of Germany 1933?]
