It is the BBC's political agenda that should be investigated

What is the point of Lord Hutton's inquiry? He is to look into the specific circumstances of David Kelly's death, but has declined to look into the original dispute between the Government and BBC over the wider circumstances that helped bring it about. This will ensure he keeps his judicial skirts clean and also that he addresses no question worth addressing.

It has been suggested that Dr Kelly needed to be "protected" by the MoD from exposure. Why? If Kelly was giving his unauthorised spin to journalists, then the MoD had every right to be firm. If he revealed information that he had reason to believe might be covered by the Official Secrets Act, why would he expect to be protected?

However, the MoD seems to have created all sorts of problems for itself by issuing statements that it need not have made. It claims to have reassured Kelly that his pension and job were in no danger - but why should they not be endangered if Kelly had overstepped the professional boundaries? Having made such pronouncements, it will find itself in difficulty if it did strong-arm Kelly.

Kelly himself sounds like the sources most of us in investigative journalism have encountered: such people tell tales out of school. Some of the tales are true and some not, and very often they themselves are the ones who "sex" things up. Some talk out of a psychological need to please and tailor their stories to what they believe the listener wants to hear. Good luck to the journalist trying to sort it out. Kelly may have talked for any number of reasons, ranging from ideological to messianic, but we will never know as only he could tell us - and even that might not be reliable.

My bet is that the BBC wanted to get yet another anti-war story. The war being won, the corporation's present stance is focused on attacking the reasons for it, especially the non-discovery of WMD. The fact that this is a side-issue and the BBC's position is being superseded by emerging intelligence is neither here nor there. This was the BBC's angle. An investigative journalist can usually find a source that corroborates the desired slant on a story and Kelly probably gave it to the BBC, even though he ended up denying it.

The inquiry will probably find that Kelly was not truthful, that the MoD lied on several counts, that Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon was complicit in naming Kelly and that BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan over-reached himself.

The BBC will claim vindication. The real problem will once more have been swept under the carpet: namely the BBC's political agenda. The only way to document the agenda at BBC news and current affairs is to let it speak for itself. Tonight will see the second programme of the new radio series Spinning to Win on the World Service - which BBC governor Dame Pauline Neville-Jones described a couple of months ago as the finest broadcasting service in the world. Last week's programme looked at strategies used by Britain and America to win support for wars in the past. Hosted by Robin Lustig, the contributors on it were Sheldon Rampton, Phillip Knightley and Elaine Windrich.

Sheldon Rampton, a PR analyst and self-described "activist", is on all three programmes. He is the co-author of the books Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War On Iraq; Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the PR Industry; and Trust Us, We're Expert: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future. Unsurprisingly, he is anti-war, anti-Bush and has an unhappy if not conspiratorial view of how governments in the West get voter support.

Phillip Knightley is the author of The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker. On April 2, he expressed his anti-war feelings in the Guardian. "Why did we go along with it?" he asked. "If Tony Blair really wanted to win Iraqi hearts and minds, he could begin by telling them the painful truth: 'In order to liberate some of you, we're going to have to kill a lot of you. It's just a matter of getting the balance right.'\u2009" A week later, Baghdad had fallen without a fight. The number of Iraqis killed in both Gulf wars combined did not amount to one per cent of the Iraqis killed by Saddam.

Elaine Windrich is a visiting scholar at Stanford in South African Studies and the author of The Cold War Guerrilla, which analyses US policy in Angola during the 1980s. It is dedicated to "the Angolan Victims of the Reagan Doctrine". Her contribution to the programme was only three or four sentences long. These backed up the notion aired by presenter Robin Lustig that Ronald Reagan saw "tentacles of what he called the evil empire just about everywhere", and then won support for Savimbi's Unita movement by hiring PR firms to blitz America's political elite.

The rest of the programme consisted of short bites from war correspondents and BBC personnel, almost all of whom were used to imply that something very dubious was going on in America and Britain regarding war reporting.

Where was the balance? Where was anything apart from innuendo and tendentious, common, inelegant anti-war views? Knightley's comment on the last programme sums the pottage up: "I suspect it will emerge that the crisis over Iraq was an invented crisis." If the BBC gave a fig about its mandate, it would tackle the clash of propaganda and information in war from a neutral perspective - and more representatively.

When a government believes a course of action is desirable for the nation, it must argue its case. Of course, it will try to put its best foot forward. Their arguments will be spun according to the country's culture, the ethics of the government and the personal ethos of the individuals involved. To present radio programmes that make no references at all to such distinctions - tonight's programme equates the spin from the Iraqi Minister of Information with allied military briefings from Dohar - and then to envelop everything with the fog of moral equivalence is in itself blatant spin.

The BBC is indeed "spinning to win". It wants to continue shaping political opinion in this country in its own skewed 1960s Leftism. And this blow-up with Alastair Campbell is not necessarily a detriment to that. BBC chairman Gavyn Davies has been quick to raise the spectre of the Government using the row to destroy the "independence" of the BBC "out of revenge". Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell is already on the defensive, promising that no "overhaul" would be "forced" on the BBC. This row can be turned to good account by the grand spin-masters of Broadcasting House.

Guaranteeing the independence of the BBC assumes that the institution will be meticulously even-handed, objective, above partisan politics and committed to nothing but journalistic excellence. But what to do when such an organisation is hijacked by the Left or, for that matter, the Right? If Parliament allows the BBC to represent the Kelly matter as a battle for its editorial independence rather than a fight for its relentless bias, the BBC will continue to substitute its own policies for those of the elected officials in determining the success or failure of foreign policy.