Some random thoughts:

If the Government is not-guilty of changing the intelligence and the intelligence was quite clearly wrong. It’s about time someone took responsibility and was fired (or resigned!) That someone is probably the head of our intelligence services.

The BBC really needs to fix it’s complaints system. In my view, the making of the mistake is not the issue. The issue is that the Government’s complaint was handled so badly. It was right and proper that Gavin Davis resigned. Others should too.

Does anyone else worry that the top of our Government (10 Downing St) doesn’t minute their meetings? Clearly Lord Hutton took the narrowest view of his brief that he could otherwise there would have been some comment on this. I was actually amazed that the Government didn’t come in for one bit of criticism for the shambles that releasing Dr Kelly’s name became. From what I can tell, it only didn’t because Lord Hutton only looked at if the release was duplicitous (it wasn’t) and not whether it was incompetent…

On the whole, I think that the criticism of the BBC was generally fair, but that the Government got off lightly because of the narrow brief.