http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1432555,00.html

"The Answer is no"


When the film-maker Peter Kosminsky began his drama about David Kelly he
didn't assume the government would cooperate. But neither did he expect
it to stop him speaking to any army personnel, bar him from all military
bases and even prevent him from filming at museums. What, he wonders,
could it be so afraid of?

Tuesday March 8, 2005
The Guardian

I remember the day I was asked to make a film about David Kelly. It was
July 24 2003 and the day of my mum and dad's 50th wedding anniversary.
It ought to have been a very happy day. But my father had died a few
weeks before, leaving us nothing to celebrate. The image of him on his
deathbed, mouth partly open, half-lidded eyes staring up at me, haunted
my sleeping and waking dreams. I suppose I was starting to realise that
I would miss him very much.

I had gone to stay in the Languedoc at the house of a friend to regroup.
It stands on a bluff in what is known as the Valley of Winds. Above it
lies a ruined Cathar castle. Below it, a dozen ancient stone cottages -
their arched, terracotta roof-tiles flowing down the hillside in waves.
Even in July, Pyrenean winds lay siege to the house, rattling the
bottle-green shutters by day and night.

I remember the moment quite vividly. I was standing on the balcony. In a
gap between the houses below, an elderly man stared up at me. The hairs
stood up on the back of my neck. He bore an astonishing resemblance to
my father, as he had looked before his illness. I watched him, afraid to
blink or look away in case he vanished. But he remained firmly
corporeal, staring up at me with a neutral expression. That's when the
phone rang with the offer of the job.

Now, almost two years later, I can't be sure whether my decision to
accept was influenced by memories of my dead father. It seems likely
that it was. In purely practical terms, however, I was the worst
possible person Channel 4 and the production company Mentorn could have
chosen to make a film about David Kelly and Why We Went to War.
Researching it would require the active assistance of the government,
and my relations with No 10 were atrocious. The Project, my last film
for television, had been a BBC drama about the Labour party that was
most notable for the fact that Labour refused to have anything to do
with it.

The writer of that film, the late and much-missed Leigh Jackson, had
wanted to write about how Labour had won the 1997 election and what had
happened to its army of young activists once power had been achieved.
Our first step therefore had been to approach as many of those activists
as possible. There was only one problem; none of them would talk to us.
We tried ministers, advisers to ministers, MPs, members of the Policy
Unit, the Rapid Rebuttal Unit, the Media Monitoring Unit, the Key Seats
Unit, the Last Seven Days Unit, pretty much every kind of unit that had
existed in Millbank in the run-up to the 97 election. In every case, the
answer was no. In the end, one Millbanker took pity on us and let us
into the secret. A letter had gone out from Alastair Campbell's
department to all who worked for the party; don't talk to Kosminsky.

Eventually, I was permitted a cup of tea with Lance Price, the author of
the letter and then Labour's director of communications. I suggested to
him that the party's policy was self-defeating. Hard as he might find it
to believe, we were approaching the subject with an open mind, but his
strategy of silence was driving us into the clammy embrace of the
disaffected, those who were more than happy to speak because they'd been
sacked or left Labour under a cloud. I needed Price's help to achieve
some balance. He looked pained and sipped his lukewarm tea. Later, he
left his job and retreated to a farmhouse in France.

The whole sorry episode ended when, after transmission of The Project, I
appeared on Newsnight with David Hill. Hill was then a political
consultant but, in the run-up to the 97 election, had been Labour's
chief press officer at Millbank. We had written to him on two occasions
asking him to talk to us without success. Now I had to sit and listen
while he told Kirsty Wark how wrong we had got it. And how he had never
been approached to advise on what the programme might contain.

Like most of the nation, my first contact with Kelly was through the
medium of television. I sat at home and watched him give evidence to the
foreign affairs select committee on an airless summer's day in July
2003. There had been a bomb scare in Westminster and Kelly had had to
make his way to the Commons on foot, running the media gauntlet at St
Stephen's Gate. As a result, he kept the "high court of parliament" (as
Andrew MacKinlay was later so famously to put it) waiting and was
flustered and on edge when he finally sat down at 3.05pm. But neither
the dash from the cabinet office nor the fact that the fans in the
committee room seemed to drown out many of his words could explain the
discomfort we witnessed that day.

It was as if a creature used to the shadows had been revealed,
squinting, by the over-turning of a stone. And yet Kelly was used to the
media spotlight; he had given interviews while a weapons inspector in
Iraq in the 90s and knew what it was to be questioned on camera. Why did
he seem so ill at ease, so uncomfortable with the role he had to play?
Why did some of his answers seem to support the government in its war
with the BBC, while others were actively unhelpful? I suppose those
questions were still somewhere in my mind when, three days later, I
watched Tony Blair's chastened reaction to the news that his
government's chief weapons inspector had been found dead in the woods.

The prime minister asked Lord Hutton, a former judge in the non-jury
Diplock courts of Northern Ireland, to investigate the circumstances
surrounding Kelly's death. Clearly our first priority would be to absorb
the vast amount of material certain to be thrown up by his inquiry. For
that reason, we attended every day of Hutton and read every one of the
10,000 pages he posted on the internet. But Hutton, perhaps inevitably,
skated over many of the themes that would preoccupy a drama - character,
motivation, the minutiae of daily life. And he was almost completely
silent on Kelly's seven years as a weapons inspector in Iraq, years that
seemed to me, increasingly, to be key to understanding why Kelly sat
down with Andrew Gilligan at the Charing Cross Hotel in May 2003. So we
would have to conduct our own interviews, and for that we would need the
help and support of the government.

Initially, the signs were encouraging. The Hutton report might have
criticised the BBC but it had exonerated the government utterly. The
prime minister's declared approach to the death of Kelly had been one of
openness and transparency. Since we seemed likely to be the one drama
made for British television about that subject, there was every reason
to hope that Downing Street would assist us in constructing as accurate
a picture as possible. And there ought to have been one, even mightier
factor in our favour. The same David Hill who had regretted the fact
that we hadn't come to him for help on The Project was now director of
communications at No 10.

"Dear Mr Chinn," (that's Simon Chinn, our co-producer), "Thank you for
your letter ... We have no inclination through the medium of the drama
you are producing, to further engage on the issues you intend to cover.
Yours sincerely, David Hill."

I wrote to Hill, reminding him of our conversation on Newsnight and
asking him to reconsider. I pointed out that it was hardly fair to
criticise the media for getting it wrong on transmission when requests
for help and guidance at an early stage are greeted with a blank
rejection. I awaited a reply. None came.

Next, Chinn tried to contact Campbell to see if support from him would
unlock the door. This is a rough note of their brief conversation:

SC: Hi, I'm calling from Mentorn, which I expect you know of from
Question Time. I sent you a letter on June 7 about a drama we're
producing on the David Kelly affair. I expect you receive lots of mail
but ...

AC: ... Oh yes, I remember. The answer is no.

SC: Um, but I didn't ask you a question.

AC: Yes, but I don't want you to waste your time, or me to waste mine.

SC: Couldn't I just put the question?

AC: Could we meet to talk about it? The answer is no.

SC: Perhaps I could just tell you a bit about the project and why I
think talking to you would be worthwhile ...

AC: No. Thank you very much, goodbye. [Hangs up].

This seemed like a minor set-back until we began to explore the
ramifications of these exchanges. All requests to interview civil
servants who had any connection with or knowledge of the dossier or the
Kelly affair were greeted with a curt no. All official requests to the
MoD to interview military personnel were denied. This was particularly
surprising given that I had previously made films about the wars in the
Falklands and Bosnia with the full cooperation of the MoD. Even a
request to the first sea lord, whom we had interviewed when still a
humble sea captain for our film about the Falklands, was politely
declined. All requests to film in or near any government building were
denied, as were requests to film on any Ministry of Defence property,
including in any military vehicles or aircraft. This made many of the
sequences we were planning effectively impossible to achieve. We
eventually tried privately owned aircraft museums, but even those with
the most tenuous links to the military were surprisingly reluctant to help.

Of course, all who make drama are used to knock-backs when it comes to
securing locations. But this was something different; a comprehensively
enforced, total ban on any cooperation whatsoever.

For me, the government's attitude to our little drama was summed up by
one incident. A scene in our film required a military band. We scoured
the country, trying to identify a band that would be prepared to appear.
In every case we were rebuffed. Then, at the last minute and when we
were on the point of cutting the scene, we heard back from the Normandy
Band of the Queen's Division, based at Catterick. For some reason,
London's writ seemed not quite to run in North Yorkshire. The officer in
charge spoke to us on a number of occasions and was very keen for his
band to appear. We began to plan for their arrival and to accommodate
them in our filming schedule. That's when we received the call. The
officer had himself received a phone call and would now, unfortunately,
have to withdraw. He cited the subject matter. He didn't sound happy at all.

Of course, the programme got made. Simon and his team of researchers
spent 18 months finding those, at home and abroad, who were prepared to
talk to us. Many had known Kelly personally. Others were involved in the
sequence of events that led to the decision to go to war in Iraq and
felt strongly enough about the issues raised to speak to us despite the
government's strictures. Some 120 interviewees in all, to whom I would
like to pay tribute, particularly those who agreed to meet us at
considerable professional risk to themselves. And I'd like to be able to
say that the government's attempt to prevent an examination of this
subject in no way limited the programme we sought to make. But, of
course, that would not be true.

The causes of Kelly's death are complex and our film makes an attempt to
unravel some of them. Whatever may have gone before, the government
behaved honourably in the aftermath of his death, setting up an inquiry
that was as publicly accessible as it could be. Though some are
uncomfortable with his findings, none can doubt that an eminent judge
exonerated the government from blame for Kelly's death. So why are they
so defensive? Is it that, for all their "freedom of information"
posturing, this is a profoundly secretive government, alarmed by the
concept of scrutiny, peopled by lawyers and yet shy of due process,
fundamentally incapable of allowing information to be promulgated
without first having the chance to spin it? Or is it that, like all of
us, it was troubled by the sight of an old man in a noisy committee
room, browbeaten into the service of a dishonourable cause, and feared
the effect that the resurrection of that image might have on the eve of
an election?

· The Government Inspector is on Channel 4 on March 17.