Spin doctor became man obsessed

If Alastair Campbell had never been born, Dr David Kelly would still be alive today.

That is not the same as saying that Campbell was to blame for Kelly's death. But it is emphatically the case that - whether cleared by Lord Hutton or not - Campbell helped set in motion the events which ended with Dr Kelly's death in the Oxfordshire woods.

Campbell was the brooding presence who ignited the war between the Government and the BBC. Without Campbell, Tony Blair would have calmed things down, not stirred them up.

Kelly was a brave public servant, who had defied Saddam Hussein's hired thugs. But once he was caught in the killing zone between government and the media he became defenceless.

He lacked the body armour of Campbell - his hard carapace of cynicism and self-justification. It was a deadly sequence of events. Andrew Gilligan's original broadcast in late May, alleging Downing Street had "sexed up" claims about weapons of mass destruction, passed relatively unnoticed.

There was the usual splutter from Campbell. Two private letters were fired off to the BBC. Two weeks after the broadcast, BBC bosses, including Richard Sambrook, the head of news, lunched in Downing Street with Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair. The Gilligan story was not even mentioned.

Hostilities only broke out when Campbell was called to give evidence in front of the Commons foreign affairs committee. It was at this meeting with MPs, on 25 June, that Campbell went thermonuclear and issued his broadside against the integrity of BBC journalism. Only at this point did he dispatch his insulting public letter to Mr Sambrook, demanding a full apology.

The BBC suspects that Campbell's attack on it was a deliberate diversionary tactic to make people forget about the missing WMD. That would fit in with Campbell's previous behaviour. But there was no doubting the extremity of his anger. It was at this moment that Dr Kelly came forward to identify himself as the potential source for Gilligan's story. The timing was disastrous.

As soon as Campbell got to hear about this, he was beside himself with fascination. Above all he understood that he could use Kelly to win his war with the BBC. "It was double-edged," Campbell sagely recorded in his private diary, "but GH [Geoff Hoon] and I agreed that it would f*** Gilligan if that was his source."

Campbell was obsessed by the mystery figure who had come forward. He lived in a brutal world. He has rarely hesitated to destroy the careers of individuals in service of the New Labour cause.

His diary on 6 July records how he "spent much of weekend talking to TB [Tony Blair] and GH re the source." The issue of the source soon came to possess not just Campbell but the whole Government.

The diaries describe how Campbell, backed by Hoon, argued fiercely that the source should be outed. They record their frustration ("GH and I felt we were missing a trick") when Whitehall officials prevented Mr Blair from going straight out and naming him.

There were two main reasons why Campbell wanted Kelly's identity known. He wanted to destroy Gilligan's reputation by showing that his "source" was a mid-ranking official not close to the dossier.

This trashing of Kelly continued after his death when one of Campbell's junior officials told lobby journalists Kelly was a "Walter Mitty figure". But the strategy failed when it emerged that Kelly was perhaps Britain's greatest expert on WMD.

The second objective was to get Kelly to deny making many of the remarks attributed to him by Gilligan. This came off the rails when it emerged that Kelly had expressed his doubts not just to Gilligan himself, but also to Newsnight reporter Susan Watts.

Kelly told Watts that he blamed Campbell's No10 press office for meddling with the September 2002 dossier. Evidence handed to the Hutton Inquiry showed how right he had been to do so.

It emerged that Campbell had been allowed to chair a meeting, on 9 September 2002, on the preparation of the dossier. He had asked for and got a number of changes, and toughened up the claim that Saddam could deploy WMD within 45 minutes.

It may have been the agonising consciousness that he had told Watts and Gilligan a different story than he told his Whitehall bosses that put Dr David Kelly CMG into the depths of turmoil.

That was nothing to do with Campbell, not his fault at all. Furthermore, if it is true, as reported, that Lord Hutton exempts Campbell from "sexing up" the dossier, then his supporters will claim that he was wholly justified in taking the strong stand that he did.