MOOT COURT

Off the hook - for now: Blair's balancing act at the Hutton inquiry was adept, but Iraq could yet be his undoing (Polly Toynbee, August 29, 2003, The Guardian)

Deftly, he delivered a challenge to Hutton that was almost an affront. His words had an apparent ring of nobility when he said that if the BBC's allegation that he knowingly lied had been true, it would have "merited my resignation". "This was an attack that not only went to the heart of the office of prime minister but an attack on how our intelligence services operated ... and on the country as a whole."

Yet on reflection, this resignation remark holds a knife to the throat of Lord Hutton - "Back me or sack me." It suggests, none too subtly, that if this inquiry finds the BBC in the right and Downing Street in the wrong, Hutton will have prime ministerial blood on his hands. That's the kind of thing that gives unelected judges the constitutional heebie-jeebies. How else could this be interpreted? Blair spoke in the past tense - "it would have merited my resignation" - as if the inquiry was already done and dusted, the conclusion foregone and any danger to himself long past. It might have been more politic to assume Lord Hutton still has to make up his mind about that, even if the evidence is swinging Blair's way.

One thing was clear from the back-to-back evidence yesterday of the prime minister and the chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies. The ferocity of the enmity between the two sides remains unabated, a pair of stags with antlers fatally locked. The battle is still on and it has not been cooled one iota by the still perplexing death that brought all this to a crisis.

There was a laugh among the press when Blair described a private telephone call with Davies, a last-ditch attempt to make peace at the top. His "compromise" proposal? That the BBC should admit their story was wrong, and the government would admit the BBC had the right to broadcast it!

One needn't be too cynical to adhere to the view that when people take responsibility for things it generally means they think they didn't do anything wrong. Neither Mr. Blair nor George W. Bush has wavered one inch on their belief that the case against Iraq was dispositive and no Congressional committee or its Parliamentary equivalent is going to go to the mat with a head of government on a simple question of judgment. To do so would make a mockery of representative government. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 28, 2003 9:11 PM