Big guns today – literally. Sir Kevin Tebbit was permanent secretary – the most senior civil servant of all – at the Ministry of Defence from 1998 to 2005, a period spanning the build-up to the Iraq War all the way from Operation Desert Fox onwards.
Tebbit got a higher public profile than most Whitehall permanent secretaries ever ‘enjoy’ when he was called to give evidence to the Hutton inquiry into MoD scientist Dr David Kelly’s death. He told that inquiry that given his seniority at the ministry he felt a “deep sense of responsibility, not of culpability but of responsibility” for the circumstances surrounding Kelly being named to the press and his subsequent death.
Earlier in his career he was also briefly director of the UK government’s Spooky Doughnut aka the signals interception agency GCHQ. He’s now chairman of the defence technology company Finmeccanica UK and a visiting history professor at Queen Mary University of London.
If Sir Kevin led the MoD’s pinstripe regiments Michael (aka Admiral Lord) Boyce commanded the uniformed divisions. The Chief of the Defence Staff is the head of UK armed forces and the Secretary of State and the government’s most senior military adviser. A former RN submariner Admiral Boyce held the position between 2001 and 2003.
Since the war he got a peerage and was made something called The Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports,which I’m ashamed to confess was a new one on me.
The title of today’s session is ‘Military Planning’ and given the leaked documents the Sunday Telegraph splashed on just before the Inquiry started it could be quite a lively one. Evidence from 09h00, live-Tweets at http://twitter.com/iraqinquiryblog