Born: June 29th, 1931
Died: July 14, 2020
Some British public inquiries, such as the seven-year Chilcot inquiry into the UK’s role in the 2003 Iraq war, last a long time before their conclusions see the light of day. Others, such as the Franks inquiry into the origins of the 1982 Falklands war, are wrapped up in months.
The Hutton inquiry, named after Brian Hutton, an eminent judge and barrister who has died at the age of 89, falls into the second category. Still, the events surrounding his investigation into the death of David Kelly, a biological weapons expert at the UK defence ministry, marked a turning point in modern British history. They amplified voters’ mistrust of mainstream politics and institutions in a way that arguably culminated in 2016 in the Brexit referendum vote to leave the EU.
Tony Blair’s Labour government ordered the Hutton inquiry in July 2003. Hutton, a former lord chief justice of his native Northern Ireland, opened his investigation in August 2003 and published his report in January 2004, making it one of the shortest public inquiries since the second world war.
The speed of his work and his vindication of the government’s actions prompted accusations from Mr Blair’s critics that the inquiry’s unstated purpose had been to provide a political quick fix. At the time, Mr Blair was battling accusations that one of his chief arguments for joining the US-led invasion of Iraq – that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, ready for immediate use – had turned out to be baseless.
Kelly was the source for a BBC report that alleged the Blair government had deliberately embellished a dossier compiled by UK intelligence services about Iraq’s weapons capabilities. Eight days after his identity as the source was exposed in the British press in 2003, Kelly’s body was found in woodland near his home in Oxfordshire. Suspicions of foul play began to circulate, mainly among critics of the Iraq war.
BBC resignations
Hutton concluded that Kelly had taken his own life, the government was not to blame and the BBC report’s allegations were unfounded. This prompted the resignations of Gavyn Davies as BBC chairman and Greg Dyke as director-general. Hutton drew flak for not examining whether the government’s information on Iraqi weapons was reliable enough to justify war. He riposted that a “question of such wide import, which would involve the consideration of a wide range of evidence, is not one which falls within my terms of reference”.
James Brian Edward Hutton was born into a Presbyterian family in Belfast on June 29th, 1931, a decade after Ireland’s partition into a southern, Catholic-led republic and a Protestant-dominated north that formed part of the UK. He attended Shrewsbury, an English private school, read jurisprudence at Balliol College, University of Oxford, and completed his studies at Queen’s University Belfast.
During his legal career, he was part of the British defence team when the European Court of Human Rights indicted the UK government in 1978 for using “inhuman and degrading” techniques in the interrogation of Irish nationalist internees. In 1984 he sentenced Dominic “Mad Dog” McGlinchey, a notorious republican paramilitary, to life imprisonment for murder; the verdict was later overturned.
Nationalist bitterness
Irish nationalists who fought British rule in Northern Ireland remembered Hutton with bitterness. Danny Morrison, Sinn Féin’s publicity director in the 1980s, when the party was the Provisional IRA’s political wing, said: “Although in the Belfast high court Hutton occasionally acquitted republicans and dismissed the appeals of [British] soldiers, nationalists generally considered him a hanging judge and the guardian angel of soldiers and police officers.”
However, Anthony Lester, a left-leaning barrister and politician, once praised Hutton as belonging to “that special category of judges from Northern Ireland who are especially brave and noted for their fearless independence”. Hutton was shaken by the IRA murder of Maurice Gibson, a friend and appeals court judge, and his wife in a 1987 car bomb attack. Hutton’s own name was found on an IRA hit list in 1996.
A pillar of Northern Ireland’s pro-British establishment, Hutton was deeply religious but less dour than his public image suggested. Family and friends considered him kind and humorous. In 1975 he married Mary Murland, with whom he had two daughters, Louise and Helen. After his wife’s death in 2000, he married Lindy Nickols, who survives him. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2020