Had Blair been the lead decision taker, would he really have chosen

WE need time to digest all of Lord Hutton's 328 pages, but his extensive summary shows his main judgments. He had let the hearings range widely, revealing a wealth of material that raised hopes among political junkies of sweeping indictment of Government workings and the Iraq war. But he concentrates on what bears directly upon the Kelly tragedy.

His remit was not directly about blame, and he distributes less of that than many had forecast. A central villain, however, is the BBC's Andrew Gilligan.

The calumny against the Government lit the whole bonfire, and the tipoffs to MPs - flagrantly against professional ethics - about dealings with another journalist ambushed Dr Kelly in the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.

Alongside Gilligan stands the BBC's top brass, who without proper inquiry backed a reporter known to be dodgy. And Kelly himself - whom I liked and respected - is inescapably there too. He gave media briefings which he knew to be unauthorised, he talked beyond his responsibilities, he concealed the scale and nature of these contacts. (Only recently did the Ministry of Defence learn of the television interview shown last week on Panorama.) He knew that a painful discrediting loomed.

Some commentators had suggested that Alastair Campbell let justified indignation get out of proportion, and that the Ministry of Defence mishandled the emergence - which Kelly already recognised as near-inevitable - of his identity. The report does not sustain such views, though it holds that the Ministry should have kept Kelly more closely informed. Lord Hutton dismisses charges of incompatibility between the Prime Minister's denial of involvement in the naming and what the Ministry's Permanent Under-Secretary told the inquiry. A shade more unexpectedly, Mr Hoon is not censured: Lord Hutton does not assert divergence between his disclaimers and what became known about his enthusiasm for getting the name out and his awareness of the process.

Lord Hutton is not infallible, and his conclusions are not court verdicts.

In the round, though, they look balanced and fair. He has managed better than Sir Richard Scott did over "arms for Iraq" to grasp that government is a complicated business in which people with overflowing in-trays have to tackle urgent problems without hindsight to warn them which actions, decided in an unavoidable hurry, will have their significance hugely magnified later by unforeseeable outcomes.

Attention should now move on from blame over Kelly.

Some of what deserves that attention flows from the Inquiry evidence, like organisation and practice at the centre of government, and the relationship of the intelligence services to the policy process. At No. 10, the informality - or lack? - of system is eyebrow- raising, especially given the growing concentration of power there. So is the patchiness of record-keeping, and the apparent imprecision of responsibilities.

Had no one short of the Prime Minister the authority to tell Campbell to cool down? Should leading the dialogue with the intelligence services about the September 2002 dossier - by any reckoning a major policy document, and an unusual departure - have been left with the public-relations function?

Lord Hutton does not criticise the dossier, but its history prompts questions. For all the emphasis on "ownership" of the dossier by the intelligence services, if a stream of questions, comments and suggestions from No 10, however legitimate in themselves, does not constitute pressure, what would?

The services have to be attuned to the environment if they are to be relevant. Even if (like the rest of us) they were not aware how far Mr Blair had committed himself to going along in the end with whatever President Bush decided to do, they will have known that he was profoundly convinced that something radical had to be done about Saddam Hussein and that, among the justifications, the prime political and legal weight would have to be borne by "weapons of mass destruction". It is unjust to doubt the sincerity of Mr Blair's belief in Saddam's possession of these, but he surely wanted to believe.

IF intelligence gets too close to presentation after policy decision, as distinct from providing information beforehand, it risks sliding towards the selectivity and advocacy that sometimes corrupt its use in the United States . If, however, it retreats into an ivory tower over-hedged with "Probably" and "Perhaps" and "Pending further evidence", it may lose value to ministers with little choice about whether or when to make up their minds. There is a real dilemma here, made sharper as we look back at the Iraq instance because the services got their central factual judgment wrong. But we need to be very wary of doing things this way another time.

And there is still the deep issue of whether war was right. For all the pain of an individual's death in despair, the Hutton Inquiry was a sideshow, almost a diversion. We do not know, and governments have not wanted to estimate for us, how many Iraqis died, but unofficial studies suggest up to 15,000, and on the occupation side the tally climbs towards four figures. Was this massive human cost justified?

No government could refer that ultimate question to a judicial inquiry - it lies at the heart of political debate, and must be confronted there. Mr Blair believed deeply (and rightly) that Iraq had an appalling ruler whom the world would be better without. But would he, had he been the lead decisiontaker, really have chosen regimechanging war? The suspicion remains that the real balancetipper was not Saddam's iniquity but the importance of transatlantic solidarity.

. Sir Michael Quinlan is former Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence.

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