Blair off the hook for now

Polly Toynbee Guardian News Service London

Crescendo, then anti-climax. That's the way it always happens when the enemy think they have finally got Tony Blair cornered. So the press came skulking out of the law courts hissing and spitting. The pressing crowd, mainly Blair ill-wishers and tricoteuses, queued from the early hours for seats at a public execution that didn't happen. This was not a slice of history.

Yet the prime minister trod a dangerous tightrope, with multiple perils both in small details and in big questions. There was barely a wobble -- even if myriad unanswered questions still hung in the air after he departed.

With an actor's and a lawyer's art, he can deliver scripted, finessed answers with insouciant pauses, thoughtful hesitations, casual language and no trace of late-night briefings, rehearsals or 900 documents inwardly digested. It was a masterclass in understated persuasion.

How lightly he sidestepped the vision of a leader unduly obsessed with media coverage. One Today program story, one Mail on Sunday article led to this courtroom: Why did Blair and his communications director Alastair Campbell lose the plot? Or was the story so nearly true it maddened them into losing all sense of proportion?

The master littered his evidence with vignettes from his diary to remind us that this was all a sideshow, while the real world seized most of his attention such as: The foundation hospitals vote in the Commons, a weekend of foreign heads of state, a 36- hour round-the-world trip -- mentioned in passing. He was involved, but not inordinately, he suggested. The buck stopped here. And yet there was no buck, since nothing incriminating stuck.

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 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. 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 of the PM and the chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies. The ferocity of the enmity between the two remains unabated. 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!

The government would trumpet its apology, but how the BBC should explain its right to broadcast a wrong story is a mystery. So the dangerous stand-off continues. Davies said everything was calming down until Alastair Campbell's incendiary evidence to the foreign affairs committee. Blair says the BBC only had to say sorry, and all would have been forgotten.

So why hasn't the BBC apologized? John Scarlett has scuppered the Gilligan story: He, the top spook, claims every word of the September dossier was kosher intelligence information. He had ownership; Alastair Campbell's minor presentational suggestions were insignificant.

Worse still, Gilligan is caught briefing opposition MPs on the foreign affairs committee with hard questions to make David Kelly, his own treasured source, squirm. Yet worse, he revealed Kelly was a BBC colleague's source.

Add to that the revelation that BBC governors were divided and the Today program's editor was himself confessing to flaws in Gilligan's reporting. The BBC's case is not one a no-win, no-fee lawyer would take a punt on. But the final result may be more of a lose-lose for both sides.

Big questions about the war and small disquiets about the Kelly tragedy still hang in the air. Blair is remarkably good at making details seem unimportant. Why was Kelly's name part-leaked to the press with easy hints by the Ministry of Defense?

Blair suggests it doesn't matter: The press was within hours of discovering who Kelly was anyway. There is much weaseling here: The press was only unearthing the BBC's source because of what was almost certainly a Downing Street leak to a favored newspaper.

It might have been better here to come clean and admit that Downing Street had no great obligation to Kelly, who was briefing battalions of journalists. Kelly was plain wrong in his lethal claim that Campbell added in the 45-minute WMD threat. However, the truth has emerged that Campbell did sex up its language significantly.

There is a smell of Downing Street closing ranks, its senior civil servants over-complicit in political expediency, words too carefully chosen. If the BBC made mistakes, the government's version is still not entirely right either: That is what stops the BBC groveling out an apology.

The BBC may come out of this injured, but for all the brilliance of Blair's balletic performance, the government will take a hard hit too. The sacred untouchability of Scarlett's intelligence dossier looks absurd since the WMD intelligence itself was such rubbish.

Blair said that the dossier was not intended to be a reason to go to war: Indeed it was not. At the time, though few believed him, he was pretending he had not yet committed Britain to fight when George Bush commanded.

If the PM had bought an evening paper as he stepped out of the law courts yesterday, there was the headline: "50th British soldier killed in Iraq as mob opens fire with guns and grenades."

News from Iraq gets worse by the day, aid workers are withdrawn and all the U.S. promises is that electricity might return to its pre-war inadequacy in a month or two. Why he took Britain to war gets more pressing every day. He is lucky the important questions are not on the agenda in the Hutton courtroom.

His performance helps get the government off the Hutton hook, but his greatest political danger now lies beyond his control on the dusty ground of Iraq.