In a vigorous critique of the media coverage of his report, which was published in January 2004, the retired law lord says that he would have been failing in “one of his cardinal duties as a judge” if he had written a report critical of the Government.

This, he says, would neither have accorded with the evidence nor taken account of his limited terms of reference.

Dr Kelly took his own life in 2004 within days of being identified as the source of a story that the Government had “sexed up” a dossier about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, claiming that these could be used in 45 minutes.

Judges almost never comment on their conclusions in any case. But Lord Hutton has set out his detailed views in an article just published by Sweet & Maxwell in the Winter issue of the journal Public Law (www.sweetandmaxwell.co.uk).

Although he found the Ministry of Defence to have been at fault for not helping or protecting Dr Kelly, he also found the Government not guilty of publishing information about weapons of mass destruction that it knew to be wrong and not guilty of dishonourable conduct towards Dr Kelly.

If, he says, he had “delivered a report highly critical of the Government in terms which conformed to the hopes of some commentators I have no doubt that it would have received much praise. However, in reality, if I had written such a report I would have been failing in one of the cardinal duties of a judge conducting an inquiry into a highly controversial matter which gives rise to intense public interest.

“That duty is to decide fairly the relevant issues arising under the terms of reference having regard to all the evidence and not to be swayed by pressure from newspapers and commentators or from any other quarter.”

The media criticism failed to take into proper account his terms of reference, which prevented any investigation of the reliability of the intelligence supplied to Government, he says. It also failed to take into account all of the evidence concentrating only on those parts that could be regarded as harmful to the Government.

“If all the evidence at my inquiry was fairly taken into account, there was no reasonable basis on which my conclusion that the Government did not know that the 45 minutes claim was wrong and had not ordered the dossier to be sexed up could be described as a whitewash.”

There was “strong support” for the Government’s view that it had no option but to reveal that a civil servant had come forward to the Ministry of Defence who might be the source of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme story alleging that the Government had “sexed up” a dossier about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Lord Hutton said.

In the event the MoD confirmed that a civil servant had come forward to admit that he was the source of the story, and a day later confirmed the name. Days later Dr Kelly committed suicide.

Lord Hutton concluded that the Government did not have a “dishonourable strategy” in relation to the naming of Dr Kelly and came under fire for being too ready to believe the Prime Minister’s evidence.

But Lord Hutton says that although a judge’s job is to be alert to the possibility of witnesses being untruthful, some commentators “appear to adopt an attitude of predetermined bias against certain witnesses”.

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