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Secrets are like sex

Neal Ascherson, 2 April 2020

The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain 
by Richard Norton-Taylor.
I.B. Tauris, 352 pp., £20, March 2019, 978 1 78831 218 9
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... to Iraq’) and the devastating Scott Inquiry which that trial provoked. He followed the Hutton Inquiry into the government scientist David Kelly’s suicide and the ‘sexed-up’ intelligence dossier on Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq War. He dissected the grotesquely delayed Chilcot Report, which described ...

Diary

Chris Mullin: A report from Westminster, 25 June 2009

... talents aren’t urgently needed. Alan Johnson becomes home secretary. Bob Ainsworth replaces John Hutton at defence and Peter Hain returns as Welsh secretary. Not forgetting Alan Sugar, who has been appointed ‘enterprise tsar’ in place of the unlamented Digby Jones. Another classic piece of gimmickry which will inevitably backfire. Whatever next? Susan ...

Lachrymatics

Ferdinand Mount: British Weeping, 17 December 2015

Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears 
by Thomas Dixon.
Oxford, 438 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 19 967605 7
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... justice. Only this November, Mr Justice Dingemans, renowned as the remorseless counsel to the Hutton Inquiry, broke down in tears as he sentenced the stepbrother of Becky Watts for her murder. Eight members of the jury were in tears too. In this case, the crime was so peculiarly horrible that nobody thought the worse of any of them. In the Victorian age ...

More ‘out’ than ‘on’

Glen Newey: Chris Mullin’s Diaries, 27 August 2009

A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin 
by Chris Mullin.
Profile, 590 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 1 84668 223 0
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... has sanctioned the killing of thousands in Iraq. He votes against the war but celebrates when Lord Hutton sandblasts the government’s slate clean. He is a diligent constituency MP but dislikes his constituents, at least en masse. They seem not to have registered that things have got better, as the song foretold. After the 2005 election victory, he sits ...

It’s me you gotta make happy

Andrea Brady: John Wieners, 29 July 2021

Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners 
edited by Michael Seth Stewart.
New Mexico, 333 pp., £60, December 2020, 978 0 8263 6204 9
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... he writes about the heartaches of Joan Crawford, Jane Fonda and Bette Davis; imagines Barbara Hutton taken in a white silk crib to the White House followed by five hundred devotees; pictures Marlene Dietrich moving ‘majestically down the avenue to guard over/the war-torn refugees, waifs who lined the house’. Barbara Stanwyck is ‘a watchful, ever ...

He huffs and he puffs

John Upton: David Blunkett, the Lifers and the Judges, 19 June 2003

... of Section 29 of the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 with the Convention. ‘If a court,’ Lord Hutton said, ‘declares that an Act is incompatible with the Convention, there is no question of the court being in conflict with Parliament or of seeking to override the will of Parliament. The court is doing what Parliament has instructed it to do in Section 4 ...

Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher

John Gray: The Tory Future, 22 April 2010

The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 446 pp., £25, January 2010, 978 0 7456 4857 6
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Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection 
by Peter Snowdon.
Harper Press, 419 pp., £14.99, March 2010, 978 0 00 730725 8
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... opportunist’. Howard’s hope that Iraq could be used against Blair was quashed when the Hutton Report proved to be a whitewash: ‘Blair had escaped condemnation,’ Snowdon writes, ‘while the episode rebounded on the Tories.’ The Conservatives’ failure was more significant than was apparent at the time, for it revealed the difficulties they ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Exit Blair, 24 May 2007

... admiring, however reluctantly, of his unscrupulous cunning. But it emerged pretty clearly from the Hutton and Butler Reports that he had persuaded himself of both the practicality and the virtuousness of what he had made up his mind to do and had then arranged to be sheltered from any information that might have given him pause. (Alastair Campbell to John ...

On Marshy Ground

Fraser MacDonald: Fen, Bog and Swamp, 15 June 2023

Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis 
by Annie Proulx.
Fourth Estate, 196 pp., £16.99, September 2022, 978 0 00 853439 4
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... of drainage to those of water retention. These U-turns extend to our institutions. The James Hutton Institute is the UK scientific body behind the monitoring and measurement on which the Peatland Code depends, yet it was its predecessor, the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research, that boasted in 1968 that we could convert a million acres of ‘bog into ...

In real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled

Stefan Collini: ‘Cosmo’ for Capitalists, 6 February 2020

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the ‘Economist’ 
by Alexander Zevin.
Verso, 538 pp., £25, November 2019, 978 1 78168 624 9
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... younger figures, several of whom, such as Douglas Jay, a future Labour minister, and Graham Hutton, who had been a student of Harold Laski’s at the LSE, embraced progressive ideas and agitated for the paper to take a sympathetic view of alternatives to the insular conservatism of the Baldwin years.The Economist’s enhanced, if also more ...

The Enemy

Marian FitzGerald: The Great Prison Disaster, 18 December 2003

Prisongate: The Shocking State of Britain’s Prisons and the Need for Visionary Change 
by David Ramsbotham.
Free Press, 267 pp., £20, October 2003, 0 7432 3884 2
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... remarkably little attention. So, when the Civil Service belatedly came under the spotlight of the Hutton Inquiry, it was particularly frustrating to find media commentary relatively scant and, for the most part, surprisingly ill-informed. In the late 1980s and early 1990s senior mandarins still believed that ministers would come and ministers would go while ...

The Precautionary Principle

David Runciman: Taking a Chance on War, 1 April 2004

... so would be to suggest that the politicians are no longer in control. In an email released at the Hutton Inquiry, Jonathan Powell, the prime minister’s chief of staff, wrote to Alastair Campbell and David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, of an early draft of the September dossier on Iraq’s WMD programme: ‘I think it is worth explicitly stating ...

It’s me, it’s me, it’s me

David Thomson: The Keynotes of Cary Grant, 5 November 2020

Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend 
by Mark Glancy.
Oxford, 550 pp., £22.99, October, 978 0 19 005313 0
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Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise 
by Scott Eyman.
Simon and Schuster, 556 pp., £27.10, November, 978 1 5011 9211 1
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... into his roles, as if to concede that life is too damn difficult. Grant was married to Barbara Hutton for a few years. She was maybe the richest woman in the world, but not the most interesting, and if he despaired of what he was doing at her luxurious social events, then kissing Ingrid Bergman for a few minutes at a time in Notorious may have been ...

The BBC on the Rack

James Butler, 19 March 2020

... used it often, usually attributing it to Wheldon, most startlingly in his evidence to the Hutton Inquiry concerning Andrew Gilligan’s reporting on the Today programme of the Blair government’s ‘sexed-up’ Iraq dossier.The phrase is useful because it expresses something of the BBC’s relationship – in the minds of its senior staff at least ...

Not Iran, Not North Korea, Not Libya, but Pakistan

Norman Dombey: The Nuclear Threat, 2 September 2004

... the Ministry of Defence just before the invasion of Iraq last year, and who gave evidence to the Hutton and Butler inquiries, has emphasised that the development of nuclear weapons implies an enormous effort in scientific and technical personnel and a large infrastructure.3 This requires a national programme: it is extremely unlikely to be accomplished by ...

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