January 28, 2004, 3:05 p.m.
Pity the Beeb
The Hutton call to action.

The BBC — best known in military circles for horrifically biased coverage of the Iraq campaign — took a mighty punch today when British senior judge Lord Hutton said that Tony Blair wasn't David Kelly's murderer. The Beeb's Andrew Gilligan created a firestorm in Britain by reporting that Blair's government had "sexed up" the intelligence information on Iraq's WMD programs, to justify joining what the BBC clearly saw as America's unjustified attack on poor old Saddam. David Kelly — a WMD expert who had talked to Gilligan — was hauled in front of a parliamentary committee and grilled over the Gilligan report. Though Kelly had spoken to Gilligan, Kelly denied he was the source of the "sexed up" allegation. Kelly's testimony said he couldn't have been the source of Gilligan's report, because the sensational allegation couldn't have been drawn from what he had told the reporter.

Tragically, Kelly, unused to the heat, killed himself shortly afterward. The Beeb, desperate to protect itself, accused Blair of leaking Kelly's name to parliament in order to keep himself out of the media spotlight. It conducted an internal investigation that simply drew attention away from the problem, and failed to do what it should have done: fire Gilligan, and discipline his editors.

In the past few months, the BBC was making every allegation against Blair it could think of, short of actually accusing him of slitting Kelly's wrists. The matter was so serious that Hutton, a senior "law lord," was commissioned to investigate. His report today says that Blair was innocent, and that the Beeb acted badly because it first didn't corroborate Gilligan's report, and then did everything it could to cover up its own errors.

The key reaction to the Hutton finding comes from the British conservatives. Conservative MP John Redwood (who has been called the Tories' "lean, mean, thinking machine") sent me this message earlier today: "The Hutton Report finds no guilt on the PM's part in relation to the allegations made about his conduct over the handling of the Dr. Kelly affair. The Leader of the Opposition accepted the Report and its findings on behalf of the Official Opposition, so there the matter should rest."

And there it should, at least as far as Tony Blair is concerned. Blair has been a faithful ally, but if a conservative government were in place in England, our relations would be even closer. England would shy away from the European Union, and its military linkage to the war on terror could be rebuilt. Blair's weaknesses (he won a very narrow-margined vote yesterday over university tuition fees) are so great that he would not now be able to lead Britain into another military campaign alongside America. His political days are numbered, and the number is getting small. But aside from Blair, the matter of the Beeb should not rest at all. Not for a minute.

The BBC is taxpayer-supported, and has failed abjectly to serve the public's interests. The Gilligan-Kelly episode is only one obvious symptom of a much larger problem. Their coverage of the war in Iraq was so absurdly biased, the sailors on HMS Ark Royal voted to throw BBC coverage off the ship and replace it with Sky News, the more fair and balanced network. You can watch the BBC any day, and its coverage is relentlessly anti-conservative and pro-liberal. Bush-bashing is its favorite sport. British taxpayers are wasting a lot of money to support a liberal propaganda machine.

Though the report has been accepted by the Conservatives, they should take up the cause against the Beeb. Britain is a free country. Why shouldn't its people be freed of the BBC tax, and let the airwaves open up to the marketplace? In addition to the rightness of this, it would be a great political banner for the Tories: free the people of the BBC tax, and free the airwaves. Just a thought: Elections have turned on a lot less than that.

— NRO Contributor Jed Babbin was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration, and is now an MSNBC military analyst.