Thursday, January 29, 2004

The Hutton Report

I'm not going to bother parsing this, but I do have this observation. I always assumed Hutton would condemn the BBC and exonerate the Blair government. The BBC's reporter did screw up somewhat - there's no question of that (though, frankly, it wasn't exactly a Gerth-level screwup). And, Blair made a genius pre-emptive strike when he promised to resign if Hutton came out against him - essentially giving Hutton the power to bring a government down.

But, the report was such a ridiculous whitewash that it oddly ends up condemning Blair. A "naughty naughty BBC" combined with a "yes, mistakes we're made, but these things happen" with respect to Blair would have preserved the status quo and no one could have found too much fault with it. But, Hutton has tried to play us all for fools and destroyed his own reputation in the process.