Not in the original draft(s)

After Tony Blair announced on 3 September 2002 that the government would finally publish a dossier on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) assessments staff began to rewrite existing material. They produced two drafts of the key intelligence-based section of the dossier, on 5 and 6 September, but chose not to include the 45 minutes claim. The same staff did however include the claim in a draft of a formal JIC assessment paper on 5 September. Lord Hutton acknowledged in his report that this was the first opportunity for the claim to appear "in draft assessments or draft dossiers".

This timescale shows that both Alastair Campbell and Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, had misled the Foreign Affairs Committee. Campbell had stated that the claim "existed in the very first draft" of the dossier (Q987). Straw had largely backed this up, insisting that the claim "appeared in the first draft after the intelligence was received" (Q1216).

But Hutton did not appear to realise the significance of this or the huge hole that it blew in the government’s case – that the claim appeared the "first draft" of the dossier, produced on 10 September by JIC Chairman John Scarlett, as a result of its inclusion a day earlier in the 'published' assessment paper. The idea that the assessments staff inserted the claim in the dossier after reading about in their own paper is so laughable it is hard to see how it was ever floated, let alone believed. There was never any requirement that the dossier should only include intelligence cited in formal JIC assessments – as witnesses repeatedly told Lord Hutton. The only thing that changed between 6 and 10 September was that the government’s spin doctors got involved.

The spin doctors get involved

We now know that the Scarlett draft was not even the first full draft of the dossier. The first full draft was produced by Foreign Office press secretary John Williams over the weekend of 7 and 8 September and dated 9 September.

Williams is the key figure in the production of the dossier. It is now clear - and Williams has admitted as much - that Williams was involved in drafting material for the dossier from the outset. On 5 September he attended the first meeting to plan the dossier. The same day, he redrafted the "capping piece" that at that time represented the dossier's foreword. On 6 September, he emailed a note to Campbell, stating that he had Straw’s permission to carry out a "media-friendly editorial job" on the dossier. He also offered the services of press officer Mark Matthews, who had "a very good eye for the kind of material which works with the media". This shows that Williams had the expectation that spin doctors would suggest material for the dossier.

It has now emerged that Williams based his draft on an electronic document sent to him by the Coalition Information Centre, a propaganda unit within the Foreign Office that Campbell set up to promote UK involvement in US-led wars. That document held text on Iraqi "WMD" drafted by the Joint Intelligence Committee assessments staff. It appears that the Williams draft does not make reference to the 45 minutes claim. This is because he was rewriting one of the early drafts of the WMD section that did not include the claim.

The claim is added to the dossier

On the morning of 9 September, Williams attended the second "planning meeting" for the dossier, chaired by Campbell and attended by Scarlett, amongst others. The next step in the process was a further meeting at 2pm that afternoon. This was the first meeting of the dossier drafting group. The email that reveals this meeting describes it as "a Cab Off meeting at 2pm today w John Williams on the dossier". It was at this meeting that Williams and other spin doctors saw the JIC assessment that contained the 45 minutes and "immediately after" the meeting that the claim went in the dossier.

Also at the meeting was Daniel Pruce, a Downing Street press officer and possibly other spin doctors. According to the Foreign Affairs Committee, the JIC assessment containing the claim was "discussed at a meeting on 9 September" (para 77). According to Scarlett's Hutton evidence (Section 135) the assessment was issued at 2pm – the starting time of the meeting. Julian Miller, Chief of the Assessments Staff and Scarlett's deputy, chaired the meeting. He told Hutton that the claim:

was added to the dossier immediately after it was included in the JIC assessment... of 9 September (Section 148).

Miller also told Hutton:

What we did was produce a new draft of the document in the light of discussion at those meetings. (Section 160)

On 10 September, Pruce sent an email to Mark Matthews discussing the Williams draft. It appears from this email that Pruce expected that Matthews would have input into subsequent drafts of the dossier, possibly the one that was produced on that day. It may have been Matthews who included "the kind of material which works with the media".

So the 45 minutes was added to the dossier soon after the spin doctors saw the intelligence at the drafting group meeting on 9 September. Whether it was added at that meeting or subsequently, the spin doctors' fingerprints are all over its inclusion. They were the only people to whom it was new.

There is other circumstantial evidence that suggests that either Williams or Matthews was responsible for the claim’s inclusion. In his letter to Tony Blair in June 2003 , Scarlett described the involvement of Williams, Pruce and two other Foreign Office press officers in the drafting of the dossier. Noticeably, he did not rule out the Foreign Office as having included the claim, stating only, "It's (sic) inclusion was not suggested by No 10." (Para 6)

And when agreeing to the naming of Dr David Kelly, who had first accused the government’s spin doctors of including the claim, Williams wrote, "nothing personal".

Next: How the 45 minutes claim became a judgement