Blair Officials support High Court ruling to block BBC report
dubli...@gmail.com
By Alan Cowell
Sunday, March 4, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/04/news/bbc.php
LONDON: Senior government officials rallied Sunday to support a High
Court ruling that forbids the BBC, Britain's public service
broadcaster, to transmit news about an alleged campaign finance
scandal under investigation by the police.
But the BBC nudged its reporting of the proscribed story a little
further, saying it related to an e-mail between two close confidants
of Prime Minister Tony Blair. The details of the e-mail, the BBC said
on its Web site (www.bbc.co.uk) "could have been central to the
investigation into an alleged Downing Street cover-up" over the
financing scandal.
For the past year, the police have been investigating accusations by
Welsh and Scottish parliamentary legislators that major political
parties traded seats in the prestigious House of Lords for donations
and loans. The accusations have focused most recently on Blair's
Labour Party as it sought to raise money to fight the 2005 general
election, which it won with a reduced majority.
More recently, however, the police inquiry has shifted to embrace
suspicions that some figures in Blair's entourage may have, in British
legal parlance, sought to pervert the course of justice, meaning a
cover-up.
On Friday, Britain's attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, applied to the
High Court to prevent the BBC from broadcasting its contentious news
item, saying police investigators believed that their inquiry would be
jeopardized if the story had been made public.
The BBC argued that its reporting concerned a "legitimate matter of
public interest."
The conflict is familiar in Britain, where a range of laws forbid the
publication of material deemed prejudicial to pending court cases. In
several major terrorism trials, indeed, judges have imposed sweeping
restrictions on testimony that becomes public only when verdicts are
handed down.
Last month, when counterterrorism officers raided homes in Birmingham,
in central England, the police urged news media to restrict their
reporting of the event. Under British law, reporting restrictions are
routinely imposed when charges are brought in order to avoid
prejudicing the outcome of subsequent trials.
Most legal hearings, however, may be freely reported once the
proceedings have started. Indeed, in a current trial of six men
accused of plotting to bomb the London transit system on July 21, 2005
- two weeks after the London bombings in which four suicide bombers
killed 52 people - prosecution evidence showing the suspects'
movements captured by closed-circuit television cameras has been
released by the police once it has been seen by the jury.
The attorney general's move against the BBC drew support from
government ministers like John Hutton, the work and pensions
secretary, who told a BBC Sunday morning talk show: "The attorney
general has not acted against the BBC. The attorney general went to
court and the judge decided there should be an injunction. This has
been proper due process."
The incident has nonetheless inspired renewed attention on the likely
outcome of the alleged campaign finance scandal at a time when Blair
is mulling when to leave office.
Blair himself has been interviewed twice by the police investigating
the purported trade in honors. While he has been described by the
police as a witness, some of his closest aides - including his chief
fund-raiser, Lord Levy, and a senior official in his office, Ruth
Turner - have been formally arrested, though not held in prison.
The supposed scandal has cast a dark political shadow at a time when
Blair is seeking to create a legacy of achievements. Last autumn, he
said he would quit within a year, but he has not said precisely when.
For the first time on Sunday, Blair voiced regret about the
repercussions of his announced departure.
"It wasn't really my desire last year to have a situation where all
this uncertainty was created," he told The Observer, a Sunday
newspaper. "There is always a debate about whether I was sensible to
say I wouldn't fight a fourth election - though personally I think I'd
have had a load of different problems if I hadn't.
"It hasn't been easy, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been easier
if I hadn't said it," Blair added, comparing his planned departure
with the ouster of the Conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher, in
1990, when her party turned against her.
"Thatcher kept saying she was going on and on because people kept
asking her," Blair said, "and in the end she got absolutely belted and
chucked out."