Burned

by Sam McBride

  As Bell rose, the two allies who had joined him – the politician’s father, Pastor Fergus Bell, and an intriguing business character called Ken Cleland – slapped him on the back. But while the scene added a layer of spiritual intrigue, which even for Northern Ireland’s religiously infused political landscape was rare, the two protagonists in the studio knew that a brutal political defenestration was about to begin. Bell, a self-confident character who had always been disliked by many of his colleagues, had been around politics for long enough to understand that his words would critically destabilise his party leader, already embroiled in a financial scandal that had been leading news bulletins for more than a week.

  Seated opposite the Strangford MLA was a big beast of broadcasting: Stephen Nolan, BBC Northern Ireland’s aggressive and populist presenter, whose daily radio programme reached more people than any other outlet.

  For an audience who had been given teasers about the dramatic nature of what was to be said in the interview recorded a day earlier, the first image they saw of the politician – kneeling in a television studio – was compelling. A few moments later, seated languidly across a studio desk from Nolan, Bell’s opening words were dramatic:

  I have undertaken before God that I will tell you the truth and yes hundreds of millions of pounds has been committed and significant amounts of money has [sic] been spent. I am authorising every detail, every document, every civil service document that I signed, every submission that I signed to be made publicly available and to be examined exactly as the truth I now give you.

  By Wednesday, 14 December 2016, the day the interview was recorded ahead of broadcast the following night, Bell had been talking to Nolan for a full week. When he arrived at the BBC’s Ormeau Avenue headquarters that afternoon, it was amid unusual secrecy. Rather than coming through the front entrance, he drove into the internal car park and was brought into the building through a side entrance. From there, it was a short distance to Studio 1 – a rarely used windowless studio, which had been commandeered for what would be one of the most dramatic political interviews in the history of Northern Ireland.

  Inside the studio, one of BBC NI’s most senior editors, Kathleen Carragher, was crouched behind a screen, unseen by the cameras, following what was being said. A few yards away, BBC NI’s veteran political editor, Mark Devenport, and a handful of senior production staff were crammed into a tiny nearby room under a staircase, which had been hastily rigged to receive a live feed of the interview as it was recorded.

  Bell was a willing interviewee and quickly got to the point. He was there to unburden his soul about his role in keeping open a disastrous green energy subsidy – the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) – when it could have been reined in or shut. By now, much of Northern Ireland was aware that the decision to keep the flawed scheme open was projected to cost taxpayers about £500 million.

  Pressed by Nolan on why he, as the minister in Stormont’s Department for Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI), did not close RHI at the first opportunity, Bell replied: ‘Other DUP spads involved themselves in the process … I was then informed by my special adviser in the department that other DUP spads were not allowing this scheme to be closed.’

  The word spad, an abbreviation for ministerial special adviser, would have meant little to most viewers. But to anyone familiar with Stormont it was instantly clear what Bell was doing: he was accusing some of the DUP’s most powerful figures of deliberately wasting vast sums of taxpayers’ money. Within the DUP’s ultra-centralised structure, spads were people of immense power.

  Bell went on to name the two spads as Timothy Johnston, the DUP’s most senior backroom figure, and Andrew Crawford, the long-standing adviser to Arlene Foster. Foster had been Bell’s predecessor as DETI minister and had set up the scheme. By now she was both DUP leader and First Minister.

  It was a clever move by Bell to seize the initiative. He was putting himself up against one of the most aggressive interviewers in Northern Ireland. However, as much of the information was new, Nolan did not yet have the full picture as to what had gone on. Bell’s story was particularly compelling because he was committing to full publication of every document and demanding a judge-led public inquiry – the most rigourous investigation possible under British law. Why would he be doing that if he had any doubts as to the accuracy of what he was saying?

  The constant references to God gave Bell’s interview a confessional quality, which attempted to elevate it above the dirty world of politics. By underpinning the drama with theology, Bell was making it harder for the DUP to make him the scapegoat for what had happened. Some people – even some Christians – viewed the prayer scene at the start of the broadcast as a gimmick that undermined Bell. Standing in the studio, Bell had asked Nolan if he could pray before they began and the broadcaster agreed. It is unclear whether Bell knew at that point the cameras were rolling; he soon did because producers were concerned that a decision to air that scene could appear to be intrusive. At the conclusion of the interview Bell was asked if he wanted that segment to be broadcast. The politician gave his consent and that was the first image a quarter of a million viewers saw the following evening.

  The interview was littered with the insistence that he was telling the truth; the late Ian Paisley had exhorted him to tell the truth, his wife that morning had told him to tell the truth, even God had told him to tell the truth.

  The broadcast contained a slew of remarkable allegations, including the claim that the second-most senior civil servant in his department had come to him to whistleblow about Bell’s spad. According to Bell, the civil servant had been asked ‘behind my back’ to ‘cleanse the [departmental] record’ by removing Foster’s name and a reference to the Department of Finance from a departmental submission about RHI.

  He then spoke of the period just after cost controls were introduced, where Stormont received confirmation from the Treasury that it would have to bear the full bill for the overspend – a colossal sum for a devolved administration. At that point, in January 2016, Bell said that he had been advised by the civil service to shut RHI immediately, which he wanted to do, but he was ‘ordered’ by a ‘highly agitated and angry’ Foster to keep the scheme open. He said: ‘She walked in and shouted at me that I would keep this scheme open. She shouted so much that then Timothy Johnston came into the room.’ Breaking down, he said he had tears in his eyes because ‘children are dying’ as a result of the NHS losing money: ‘The regret that I ultimately have now, when we’re seeing terminally ill children being sent home from hospital, is that I didn’t resign … I think we all should hang our heads in shame for what has occurred.’

  It was an explosive, gripping performance. But although some of what Bell was revealing was accurate, sceptical viewers might have wondered why he had not thought to tell the public about this for almost a year – until the point where he thought he was going to be blamed. Nolan asked the 46-year-old politician: ‘Are you involved in a coup to take Arlene Foster down?’ Bell replied: ‘Nothing, as God is my judge, could be further from the truth.’

  But all was not quite as it seemed. What Bell presented as a straightforward case of political corruption was more complicated. The public inquiry Bell demanded would ultimately dissect his ministerial career and expose an unflattering portrait of a minister who took limited interest in the work of his department, while acting in ways which did not sit easily with the devoutly religious image he had cultivated.

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  Almost a year later, at the opening of the public inquiry into the cash for ash scandal, a section of the Bell interview was played on video screens in Stormont’s old Senate Chamber – where for 111 days witnesses would give evidence about the scandal. Counsel for the inquiry David Scoffield QC described it as ‘gripping television’ that had an ‘explosive’ impact. The lawyer said: ‘It’s probably unprecedented in contemporary Northern Ireland politics as an example of a former minister turning on senior party colleague
s, including his party leader, the then First Minister.’ But until now the story behind that theatrical – and bitter – split with his party has never been told.

  It began a full week before he recorded the interview. Bell rang Nolan, who on his morning radio show had picked up on the scandal after the broadcast of an exposé by colleagues in BBC NI’s Spotlight team the previous night. Nolan had a sharp eye for spotting the significance of a story but his instinct was reinforced by quantitative evidence. Whereas a good Nolan show would involve about 150 calls from the public, in the days after Spotlight, the programme was getting upwards of 300 calls a day, with most of the callers – unionist and nationalist alike – expressing fury. Responding to the sense of anger and interest in the story, the programme would break multiple revelations about the scandal for weeks.

  Bell was eager to talk, and he had gone to the man who could deliver his words to a bigger audience than anyone else in Northern Ireland. Nolan invited Bell to his salubrious home on the shores of Strangford Lough that day. That in itself was indicative of the story’s significance because Nolan valued his privacy. Although an ebullient media personality, only one politician – Martin McGuinness – had ever been to his rural home.

  Bell did not hold back. What he had would blow the government wide open, he claimed, and the former minister spoke candidly about what he knew. What Nolan did not know was that the man in front of him was secretly recording him, something he would admit to several days later.

  The following night, Bell returned to Nolan’s home. This time the broadcaster was joined by his senior backroom team, composed of his editor, David O’Dornan; producer, David Thompson; and BBC’s Ireland correspondent, Chris Buckler, an old friend of Nolan’s from their days at the Belfast’s Citybeat radio station.

  Bell, who agreed for the meeting to be recorded so that the journalists could fact-check his claims, positioned himself at the end of the dining room table. With a tape recorder in front of him, the MLA opened up. At points, he would veer off to relate tales that were irrelevant to RHI but revealed the level of distrust that now existed between himself and DUP colleagues. He had brought tape recordings and bulky paper files from his old department to back up his riveting tale. Some of what he said has never been broadcast for legal reasons and because it is not clear whether it is accurate. He referred to allegations that one senior DUP politician had been having an affair with another politician and that another senior DUP member had taken drugs. Seamlessly, he would shift from those lurid tales of alleged iniquity to impressing upon his listeners the fervency of his faith. Over coming days, Bell would repeatedly tell Nolan that God had told him to come to him with the story.

  Demonstrating the vanity which had not endeared Bell to many of his party colleagues, he spoke about himself in the third person, with the journalists attempting to steer him back to the topic in hand. Showing remarkable trust in the journalists, at Bell’s own suggestion he handed over the password for his personal email account, which he had used for government business, and gave them permission to search through it for any relevant material.

  Over the coming days, the small team moved into the office of a BBC executive who was on holiday and began going through Bell’s paperwork and recordings. Nolan, who flew to Manchester every weekend to present phone-ins on BBC Radio 5 Live, withdrew from those programmes and worked round the clock to get the story on air.

  But the MLA still had not committed to going in front of a camera. He wanted the BBC to do the story – but he did not necessarily want to be seen to be their source. Bell told them that if they did the story he would then come out after it to confirm that what had been said was accurate. Several days into the contact with Bell, he arranged for Nolan to meet him in an isolated spot near his County Down home. Nolan parked beside Bell’s car and the MLA got into the passenger seat. After a brief conversation, he handed over another audio recorder containing a secret recording of a senior civil servant.

  As Nolan drove back to Belfast he listened to what he had been given. Whether deliberately or inadvertently, the recording finished and another conversation played. This time it was a conversation between Bell and former First Minister Peter Robinson. They were discussing what Bell was doing and whether he should go to The Times or to Nolan with his story. Robinson sounded cautious in what he said, with Bell driving the conversation. Nevertheless, the involvement of Robinson – just a year after he had stepped down as DUP leader – added a new layer of intrigue to what was unfolding.

  By Monday evening, it seemed that Bell would not do an interview, though he had given enough material for a one-off TV programme. Nolan and Buckler went to meet Peter Johnston, BBC NI’s controller, to make their case for bringing the story to air. Now less than a fortnight to Christmas, Johnston asked: ‘Can this hold until after Christmas?’ Convinced by the journalists’ arguments for urgency, Johnston gave them the green light. He now sent for Carragher. As the most senior editor in the BBC’s Belfast newsroom, Carragher had frequently clashed with Nolan – who operated within a silo and was as fiercely competitive with BBC colleagues as he was with rival organisations. One senior BBC source said that there were ‘massive tensions’ between them but they quickly agreed to work together professionally and agreed that they could press ahead without Bell speaking on the record.

  The following night there would be a furtive meeting between the journalists and Bell, which would be decisive. The BBC had booked a room in the Holiday Inn, a mid-market hotel across the road from Broadcasting House. Arriving separately, the politician, Cleland and the BBC men – Nolan, Buckler and Thompson – gradually entered the bedroom. Cleland, an adviser and religious companion, was a figure whose role has not been fully understood and who would crop up again in the story. It was clear to the journalists that Cleland was very influential in Bell’s decisions. One BBC source described him as ‘the strategist’ who referred throughout to himself and Bell as ‘we’, and it appeared to the journalists that Cleland was the key figure who had to be convinced if Bell was to talk.

  During the half-hour meeting, a deal was struck, with Bell giving his word that if The Nolan Show revealed parts of the story the following morning, then he would do a TV interview. The next morning The Nolan Show made a series of revelations based on Bell’s conversation, his secret recordings and the paperwork he had turned over to the BBC. The story threw the Executive into a tailspin. Stormont Castle released a statement to the programme, which said that no one from the DUP or the Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister had sought to delay closure of the scheme. But within an hour, Stormont Castle had contacted The Nolan Show to retract its own statement, which then only came from the DUP – not the joint office shared with Sinn Féin. Cleland was delighted with the coverage and Bell agreed to now come and be interviewed.

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  On the night the Bell interview was broadcast, what viewers did not know was that his allegations were heavily reliant on a secret recording of one of Stormont’s most senior civil servants just two days earlier.

  Four days before the interview was broadcast, Andrew McCormick, the permanent secretary of Bell’s old department, was at home on a Sunday afternoon when he received a phone call from his former minister. Now five days after the Spotlight programme and amid a fevered political atmosphere, Bell wanted to exercise his right to view ministerial papers about the scheme, which had come to him as minister. Unknown to McCormick, Bell was taping the exchange.

  In a lengthy conversation, the politician said that the attempts to rein in RHI when it had been out of control the previous year had been delayed by Johnston, the DUP’s most powerful backroom figure. When Bell asked if there was documentation that would show that, McCormick said it was unlikely because ‘people know when to use emails and when not to’, and went on to admit that ‘the actual to-and-fro of what’s really going on very rarely goes down on paper, you know’.

  During the conversation, McCormick inadve
rtently – perhaps out of nothing more than politely attempting to hurry the conversation along – agreed to Bell’s suggestion that delays were the responsibility of the First Minister’s spads. That bolstered Bell’s belief that there had been a hidden hand interfering in his department – and he was now potentially going to be thrown to the wolves to protect that unseen individual or individuals. In fact, McCormick had at that point no evidence that the First Minister’s advisers were involved and instead believed the delays to have been primarily the work of Foster’s spad, Andrew Crawford.

  Parts of the conversation revealed Bell to be hopelessly confused about the key timeline of the delays. At one point he suggested that the spike in applications – where claimants piled in before cost controls – had come after cost controls. McCormick agreed to meet him the following day and Bell said he would bring ‘one of my researchers’ with him.

  By this stage, the DUP was suspicious of what Bell might do. Prior to McCormick allowing Bell to view documentation in his office, the mandarin spent more than an hour with Timothy Johnston and Richard Bullick, the First Minister’s two key lieutenants, who had asked to go through the material with him in advance.

  In that meeting, McCormick told Foster’s closest advisers that he had understood that Crawford had worked in the background to delay cost controls. The civil servant felt exasperation at what seemed to be a reluctance by the DUP spads to accept the evidence of delay from someone in their party. By the time McCormick left that meeting and travelled a mile across the Stormont Estate to his department’s Netherleigh House headquarters, Bell was already waiting to see him.