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Tuesday August 19 2003, Evidence from Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister’S Office

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Tuesday August 19 2003, Evidence from Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister’S Office Tuesday August 19 2003, evidence from Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister’s Office 10.30 am LORD HUTTON: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, Mr Dingemans. ALASTAIR JOHN CAMPBELL (called) examined by MR DINGEMANS MR DINGEMANS: Can you give his Lordship your full name. A. Alastair John Campbell. Q. What is your occupation? A. I am the Prime Minister's Director of Communications and Strategy. Q. How long have you held that post for? A. Since 2001, and prior to that I was his press secretary. Q. You will need to keep your voice up. A. Prior to that I was his press secretary. Q. When did you become his press secretary? A. In 1994. Q. Before that, your experience was? A. I was a journalist. Q. Can you give a brief description of your current role? A. My role is to assist the Prime Minister and the Government in the development of communication strategy for the Government as a whole and also on specific issues as they arise. Q. Throughout the course of your evidence I am going to be referring to some documents that you very kindly supplied to us. You have also supplied to us copies or redacted copies of your diaries. Can you just, first of all, explain how you keep your diaries? A. I write a diary not every day but several times a week. It is not intended for publication. It is a series of observations about what I do and what I witness. Q. When we come to those extracts, I will make it clear I am dealing with parts from the diary. Can I start off with the dossier, which was published on 24th September 2002 by the Government? When were you first aware that a dossier was being written or produced? A. I had been aware for some months of a different dossier on the general issue of WMD. Q. Right. A. On the specific Iraq dossier, I became aware of that during -- the intention of doing one during August, when the Prime Minister and I were both on holiday and we were discussing the way that the Iraq situation was developing. Q. Can I take you to a document, which is CAB/3/82, which is the first draft that we have seen of the dossier dated 20th June 2002. A. Hmm, hmm. Q. We know, from the dossier as published, this forms, I think it is chapter 2 or 3 of the subsequent dossier. A. Yes. Q. Did you see this document at the time? A. I was aware of that document on -- probably September 5th, at that first meeting that I had with John Scarlett and others about the dossier that subsequently replaced this. Q. Right. Was it ever intended to publish an earlier draft of the dossier? A. What was intended, several months earlier, was -- Q. Giving us a timescale; you have mentioned August. A. Easter -- I beg your pardon. In Easter there was a document commissioned on the general issue of WMD relating to four countries, one of which was Ira Q. At some time, I cannot recall exactly when, but a decision was taken effectively to drop that. Q. Right. A. Then, during August and into September, the decision was taken to do a WMD dossier focused exclusively on Iraq. Q. The decision to drop it, it has been suggested in various media outlets that was because there was nothing new in it. Was that the reason or what was the reason to drop it? A. No, there were two reasons really. The first was that it was not a terribly good document overall as a document, as something that you would want to put into the public domain. The other reason was that the fear that doing it at the time it was being suggested was actually going to ramp up, if I can use that phrase, the issue at a time when, in fact, the Prime Minister and the Government were trying to calm it. And then the September -- by September the Prime Minister took the view that this Iraq -- exclusively Iraq dossier should be put into the public domain. Q. Can I just take you to an article in The Guardian on 5th September 2002 which is BBC/4/59 which in the column on the left-hand side, it is an appalling reproduction, suggests that: "A dossier on Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical warfare capabilities was drawn up in March by the Cabinet Office's joint intelligence committee..." Then after some discussion, it was not published. Then it goes on to say: "Last Monday, a Whitehall source said that the long-awaited dossier 'would no longer play a role'. There was 'very little new to put into it', he said. The following day, Mr Blair announced that a dossier would be published in a matter of weeks." Were you aware of any discussions with the media about the publication of the dossier at this stage? A. No, I was not. Q. Do you recall when the Prime Minister's announcement that there was going to be a dossier was made? A. I think it was made on September 3 at a press conference in Sedgefield. I cannot remember if that is the exact date. It was the first press conference he did following a visit to Africa. Q. You had discussed with him beforehand, in August I think you told us about, the proposal to put together a dossier. Had there been any discussions between you and the Prime Minister leading up to his announcement? A. There had. The background to those discussions was the fact that, as I say, during August this issue had really built up quite significantly and seriously, particularly in the United States, and the Prime Minister came back from holiday and there was really a sense of frenzy in the media about the issue of Iraq. I can remember, on the flight out to Mozambique it was, discussions about how we could try to calm that because the sense was being given we were about to take military action. And then on the flight back to Sedgefield there was a further discussion about how the Prime Minister would deal with the issue at the press conference. That was where he said: look, I think we are going to have to make clear that we are going to publish this dossier focused on Iraq's WMD; and he duly announced it at the press conference. Q. If I may turn to your diary extracts. A. Hmm, hmm. Q. For 3rd September, what were the questions, towards the bottom of your entry, that you considered to be the toughest at this stage? A. The: why now? Q. In what sense do you mean that? A. Why was this such an important issue to the British Government now? Why Iraq? Why only Iraq, as it were, that was being singled out? The answer which I think the Prime Minister gave was that it was a unique threat. And I think -- what the Prime Minister sought to do in his answers was to explain -- this is something I think he had been trying to explain for a considerable period of time, that he was seeing all this intelligence material coming in, which made him more and more concerned about Iraq as a threat, Iraq's WMD as a threat. And he wanted to put some of that into the public domain. Q. Was there anything that you identified as being the toughest question? A. You have obviously -- this is September 3 -- I beg your pardon: what new evidence was there? That is right, I beg your pardon. Q. Can you help us: what was identified as the toughest question? A. Sorry: what new evidence was there? He said the debate had got ahead of us so we were going to do the dossier earlier, in the next few weeks. Q. Right. What was meant by that that sort of recording? Obviously when people record diaries they are not writing everything down. A. That refers back to the point I made earlier, that the debate, particularly in the United States, had really moved on to a different level; and there was a real sense of this now moving ahead of us, and the public, I think through the media, getting the sense we were about to take military action. And what he was saying there was that any case that we make for why Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious and credible threat has to be based on evidence, and he wanted to share as much of that evidence as possible with the public. Q. Turning then to 5th September, can I take you to a document called CAB/11/13? This appears to be a memo from John Williams, you can see that at the top, of the press office -- in fact we have heard from him -- dated 5th September 2002. It is copied to, amongst others, you. A. Hmm, hmm. Q. If you go down the page it says: "I have looked at the 'capping' piece for the Iraq dossier as a newspaper sub would. I offer the following suggestions and would be happy to discuss why I believe they will make the document easier for Ministers to defend in interviews." A. Hmm, hmm. Q. Was that a document that was produced for your meeting on 5th September? A. Was that dated the 5th? Q. Yes. If you look at the top right-hand corner. A. It may have been, but the -- by then -- what the meetings of the 5th and the 9th are about were agreeing the process by which the WMD dossier was going to be produced.
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