Tim Blair

BBC JUSTIFIES SELF

Melanie Phillips checks out the BBC’s internal inquiry into the Gilligan goofiness, and summarises the BBC’s view -- that it has little to apologise for:

Because as all right-thinking people know, the Gilligan report, although wrong in virtually every particular, was actually right in virtually every particular. And that is because everyone knows for a certainty, don't they, that simply everything that Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon and John Scarlett ever said which had any bearing on the war on Iraq was a lie -- even though the evidence to Hutton (as opposed to the reporting of the evidence to Hutton, which was a bent cherry-pickers' paradise) clearly demolished every aspect of the case made against them -- because the war on Iraq was wrong, and so everyone who opposed the war is honest and truthful and brave and everyone who supported the war is a dishonest, dangerous, insane neo-con lickspittle.