Why Blair would love to play for time

Keen as we all are to know what underhand dealings went on in Whitehall over Dr David Kelly, we must not lose sight of a simple fact. His death was a miserable affair but it was only one out of 44 British fatalities suffered through the Iraq war (so far). And all our soldiers died in a venture launched because intelligence reports - at any rate when presented by the Prime Minister - grossly exaggerated the menace of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

The Big Question remains how and why did this blunder occur? Lord Hutton's inquiry may take him to the very edge of this issue. Whether he stops at that point is something we must wait and see.

The inquiry can obviously investigate the extent to which Dr Kelly was voicing more widespread concerns in Whitehall. Attempts by officials to play down his importance have already come under heavy fire.

Though not in the intelligence services, he was part of what one might call the 'intelligence village' of Whitehall where defence experts like him meet and talk with the security services. He was not just the 'technician' which No 10 claimed.

The role of Downing Street in the presentation of the main dossier cannot be avoided and it would seem to have only two possible outcomes.

Either the dossier was untouched, suggesting that we have intelligence services of abysmal incompetence; or the document was politicised to make the case for war. It is hard to see any alternative.

It is at this point that the inquiry, however much Lord Hutton himself might decline to be drawn too deeply into the Big Question, presses on the larger matter of the war's justification. The issue can hardly be left hovering in space.

The logical step would be for Hutton, unless it digs deeper and further than expected, to lead on to a wider inquiry.

We may find in due course that Tony Blair is less averse to this than he has been so far. Such an inquiry would be lengthy and it would allow him to play for time - which is now running very short for him.

One aspect of the spat with the BBC may well strike onlookers as impudence. The spectacle of politicians - of all people - in a frenzy because a journalist or journalists did not, allegedly, tell the full unvarnished truth in every detail is bizarre. Who are they to talk?

At the same time, you may rest assured that those newspapers which have been salivating at the opportunity to attack the BBC along the same lines are in no position to give lectures.

If they claim their own journalists are never guilty of ascribing undue stature to a source or a person - one of the allegations - then, believe me, that is sheer humbug.

Whatever the outcome of the Hutton inquiry or any other investigation, the fact that the Iraq venture has been so discredited may produce a future difficulty.

Suppose we are confonted at some point with a genuine need to take military action against a state which is aquiring WMDs with the genuine intent to use them.

The public here, and maybe in the U.S. in due course, would be very reluctant to support that. Iraq has discredited military intervention in general. There could one day be a fearful price to pay for this.

To find myself defending the BBC is something of a novelty for me. As it happens, I had been intending to have a go at the Corporation for its bias on the issue of the EU. However, it is an issue of great importance so let the evidence speak for itself.

Between September and May year, the Today programme carried 400 items on EU-related news. But only two reflected the view held by a significant proportion of the population that we should leave the EU.

The World At One also allows extraordinary statements to pass unchallenged. When our European Convention minister Peter Hain declared some months ago that three million jobs 'depend on our membership of the EU', it was allowed to pass.

In fact no job losses would be involved, unless you assume the rest of the EU totally lost their marbles and literally made it illegal to trade with Britain, their biggest export market - yes, bigger even than the U.S.

On second thoughts, that is not quite right. There would be job losses if we left, thousands of them. Our bureaucrats in Brussels and the army of regulators and snoopers over here who enforce those ridiculous EU regulations would be out of work.

But I suppose they would easily gravitate into the burgeoning sector of local authority schemes requiring facilitators, co- ordinators and monitors, target counters and similar absurdities.

Also, when The World At One 'analysed' the new European constitution, it gave Eurosceptics less than half the time allowed for Europhiles.

Moreover, it allowed to pass unchallenged a claim that Britain voted in 1975 to 'stay in the EU'. We did no such thing, since the EU did not exist then.

People voted to stay in the Common Market, then represented as essentially a trading arrangement. Never forget that.