Whatever Hutton reports, there is no case for getting rid of Andrew Gilligan

Within the next few weeks Lord Hutton will publish his inquiry. None of us can know where, if anywhere, his axe will fall. Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, may be feeling his neck a little anxiously. So too will Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter whose story about Downing Street ‘sexing up’ the September 2002 dossier lies at the very centre of this drama.

It is certain that the Hutton report will be at least mildly critical of Mr Gilligan. He has himself admitted, or almost admitted, to having made some errors. He was unwise to suggest on the Today programme on 29 May — since he had no proof — that the government inserted into the September dossier its claim about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction being deployable in 45 minutes while knowing it to be false. He should not have sent an email to some members of the Commons foreign affairs committee suggesting that the source of his BBC colleague, Susan Watts, was Dr David Kelly. It would have been better if he had named Alastair Campbell as the ‘sexer-up’ of the dossier on the Today programme rather than in the pages of the Mail on Sunday.

But these, as I and others have argued in these pages, are relatively minor offences if you accept Mr Gilligan’s central thesis. This is that the government considerably exaggerated in its September dossier the threat posed by Iraq. During the inquiry, support for the Gilligan view was expressed by Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, and more particularly by Dr Brian Jones, a recently retired senior analyst in the defence intelligence department. Dr Jones told the inquiry that the government had ‘over-egged’ the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and prevented experts on chemical and biological weapons from expressing widespread disquiet about the language and assumptions of the September dossier.