World News 23-09-2003 Hoon is a Four-Letter Word who: Downing Street spokesman Alastair Campbell what: Wanted a "clear win" over BBC in dodgy dossier affair, diary reveals where: The High Court, LONDON when: Yesterday snippet: "The private diaries of Alastair Campbell revealed yesterday how he and Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, were desperate to expose Dr David Kelly in [the government`s] conflict with the BBC," says The Independent, "and to try to shore up the crumbling credibility of the Iraq arms dossier." "The spin doctor makes it clear he saw the emergence of the source as a golden opportunity to force the BBC to retract the claims made by reporter Andrew Gilligan," reports The Financial Times. And a four-letter diary extract spells out a bleak future for Mr Hoon, who is described "as fully supporting this approach, voicing none of the ethical and procedural qualms ascribed to Mr Blair." "If the Campbell diaries are ever published, they may one day achieve the same notoriety as the White House tapes of Richard Nixon," says Magnus Linklater in The Times, "their vocabulary similarly rich in four-letter words and schoolboy slang." Most of the papers use asterisks to save our blushes in quoting extracts from evidence presented to the Hutton inquiry into Dr Kelly`s death at the High Court yesterday. On July 4th, on hearing that Dr Kelly had admitted to meeting BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, Mr Campbell, the prime minister`s press chief at the time, confided in his diary that "GH [Geoff Hoon] and I agreed it would f*** Gilligan if that was his source". Campbell hoped for a "clear win" against the BBC, vainly hoping that they would back down over Mr Gilligan`s suggestion that the evidence justifying the war in Iraq had been secretly "sexed up" by Downing Street spin doctors. Meanwhile, president George W Bush told a TV interviewer yesterday that going to war was "the right decision", reports the BBC. But, says The Financial Times, UN secretary generay Kofi Annan will today "launch a broadside against the unilateral pre-emptive use of force" and will accuse the coalition leaders of calling into question "the entire philosophy of collective action forged after the second world war". [... more]

What The Papers Say is delivered to thousands of readers every morning by web, WAP and email. Sign up today!