Banging the table he said: "I find it incredible, and I mean incredible, that people can report - based on one single anonymous uncorroborated source - that the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, the intelligence agencies [and] people like myself connived to persuade Parliament to send British forces into action on a lie That is the allegation. I tell you, until the BBC acknowledge that is a lie, I will keep banging on - and they had better issue an apology pretty quickly."Two days later, he was hammering out the same point during his unscheduled appearance on Channel 4 News, that nothing less than a public, humiliating apology from the BBC would do.In the long history of public rows between the BBC and successive governments, there has never been a spat quite so public as this one. It seems that it can only end in humiliation, either for the Corporation or for Mr Blair's most powerful adviser.One theory aired yesterday is that Mr Campbell has finally lost his grip on himself. Sir Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary, suggested that he had "flipped his lid, completely gone crackers, or is demob happy". Alan Duncan, the Tory MP who briefly acted as a spin doctor for William Hague, similarly suggested that "he has completely lost the plot and is now in a vicious personal vendetta against the BBC".On the other side, there are a lot of people in Parliament, including several in the Cabinet, who think it is time the Government gave the BBC a kicking.
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Mr Campbell has even had supportive phone calls from Tory MPs who do not agree that he "lost the plot" at all.Privately, Mr Campbell sees himself as the victim not the aggressor in this particular spat, a man who endures a great deal of criticism from newspapers and broadcasters and very rarely hits back. He claims to have tried to have his differences with the BBC settled quietly, through a private exchange of letters, which he hoped would produce a brief correction read out on the Today programme.Instead, he encountered BBC executives determined to stand by their defence correspondent, and faced the prospect of being censured in a report by a Commons committee for something he adamantly insists he did not do. It appears that he has the backing not just of Mr Blair, but of the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, and other senior intelligence figures.The conclusion of this extraordinary story will probably be provided by one or both of the reports from Commons committees. The Foreign Affairs Committee looks likely to give a definitive verdict on whether Downing Street did or did not "sex up" intelligence reports, based on what it was told by Mr Straw, even though it has been denied access to the original intelligence documents on which the Government's published dossiers were based.The Intelligence Committee, because it meets in secret, will probably have access to more sensitive material, and will therefore be in a better position to pass judgement. In the unlikely event that either committee endorses the BBC's allegations, Mr Campbell would have to resign.
Indeed, it would be difficult to see how the Prime Ministerhimself could survive a scandal of that magnitude.In the more probable event that the committees come down on Mr Campbell's side, that will be enough to satisfy most of the House of Commons, and will put the BBC in a difficult position, although whether it will issue the apology demanded of it remains to be seen.There is, however, a third way of looking at the whole debacle, which could be called "the Robin Cook way". Mr Cook, who has established himself as the most incisive critic of the Iraq war, has had nothing to say in public about the more entertaining but less significant war, between Mr Campbell and the broadcasters. He is said to be privately irritated with the BBC for making too much out of something that may not be true and is not the main issue. "For me, the real issue is that we were told things as a justification for war which have plainly turned out to be wrong since the war was over," Mr Cook said on Friday.He has compiled a list of claims made by the Government before it went to war, all of which remained unproven, including that Iraq had rebuilt its chemical weapons factories, was developing nuclear weapons, and was trying to buy uranium from Africa. All were in the definitive government document of last September, which Mr Blair and his communications director still insist was accurate, which was based on what the intelligence services said, and which provided the justification for war "All of those were in the September dossier," said Mr Cook.
