Hutton Report

Report in January 2004 of an independent judicial inquiry into the death of David Kelly, a UK weapons expert and defence official. Shortly before his death by suicide on 17 July 2003, the government had indicated that Kelly had been the source for a radio broadcast, on 29 May 2003, by the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, who alleged that the government had misrepresented a September 2002 intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons capabilities in order to make a more convincing case for war; the government denied this allegation. The report cleared the government of all allegations.

Lord Hutton, a senior judge and Law Lord and former chief justice of Northern Ireland, headed the inquiry, held in public between 1 August and 25 September 2003. More than 70 witnesses gave evidence in person. Senior ministers and officials, including Prime Minister Tony Blair and the head of MI6 (the intelligence service), were questioned. The three key issues at the heart of the inquiry were: did the government insert into the September 2002 dossier a claim that Iraq could deploy lethal weapons in 45 minutes which it knew to be probably wrong?; did the prime minister's office misrepresent the dossier to suggest a military threat posed by Iraq that was not consistent with known intelligence?; and did the government behave in an underhand way to reveal David Kelly's name to the media? Reporting on 28 January 2004, Lord Hutton concluded that the Blair government was innocent on all three issues and cleared it of direct involvement in Kelly's death. Hutton criticized the BBC for not checking the accuracy of Gilligan's report, which Hutton said was ‘unfounded’. The BBC accepted the need to improve its editorial procedures and Gavyn Davies, the chair of its board of governors, and Greg Dyke, its director general (head of broadcasting), both resigned following Hutton's verdict.

Opponents of the 2003 war in Iraq criticized the Hutton Report as an unbalanced ‘whitewash’, but much of this criticism derived from the inquiry's narrow remit. Its terms of reference did not include the broader questions concerning the reliability of pre-war intelligence on Iraq's weapons capabilities or the government's interpretation of it. However, in February 2004, following failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Tony Blair announced a new inquiry, headed by a former senior civil servant, Lord Butler, and meeting in private. This was to focus on the accuracy of pre-war intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, in the light of what was later known, and how this intelligence was used by ministers during the run-up to war.