When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  Meanwhile other BBC outlets were reporting the story in slightly different ways. The new allegations had variously originated from ‘a security source’ or ‘security sources’ or a ‘senior official involved in preparing the dossier’. Sometimes changes to the dossier had been ‘at the behest of Downing Street’, sometimes ‘ordered by Downing Street’ or ‘asked for’, and on one occasion ‘Downing Street asked for it to be hyped up to help convince the doubters’. This had apparently either been done ‘against the wishes of the intelligence agencies’ or ‘the security services’; but in other broadcasts the agencies were merely ‘unhappy’. As to the government’s role, in some reports it had asked ‘can we make this a bit more exciting please’ or for it to be ‘hyped up to help convince the doubters’, but in other outlets the document had been ‘transformed on Downing Street’s orders’ or ‘at the behest of Downing Street’.

  If this was to become some kind of BBC campaign against Downing Street, the inconsistency in the allegations suggested it wasn’t a very well-organised one.

  Significantly, what had been the strongest allegation reported by Gilligan – that the government probably knew the claim was wrong – never appeared again in any BBC news bulletin on that day. At the time no one seems to have found that odd.

  Given the prominence Gilligan’s story was getting on BBC Radio, it is striking how little coverage it got on BBC Television.

  Some of those who worked in BBC TV news have told me that scepticism about Gilligan’s work had grown over the previous months and they steered clear of the story.

  However, the BBC Ten O’Clock News, regarded as BBC One’s flagship news, commissioned a report not by Gilligan but by one of its ‘special’ correspondents, Gavin Hewitt. He reported: ‘I have spoken to one of those who was consulted on the dossier.’ Understandably he did not disclose who this person was, nor did he know at the time that this source, Dr David Kelly, was the person who had talked to Gilligan. After an off-the-record conversation with Kelly, Hewitt concluded: ‘In the final week before publication, some material was taken out, some material put in. His judgement, some spin from No. 10 did come into play. Even so the intelligence community remains convinced weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq.’679

  With hindsight, this was a significant paragraph. A senior BBC correspondent had looked into a story originating from another part of the corporation, had carried out his own checks and come to a much less dramatic conclusion. Hewitt’s ‘some spin from No. 10 did come into play’ was a contrast with the way the newsreader had introduced his report. The introduction mentioned ‘accusations that the government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons was distorted by Downing Street’.

  Downing Street’s response to all this coverage on the BBC was to deny the whole basis of Gilligan’s story, although it had accepted that the 45-minute claim was indeed single sourced. At this stage the complaints about the story were being made to the BBC by Alastair Campbell’s team rather than by the man himself. Gilligan’s remarks at 6.07 were not highlighted for particular complaint by Downing Street.

  ‘We don’t seem to meet too often’

  As this row between the BBC and the government began to develop, the relationship between Kevin Marsh and Andrew Gilligan remained distant. The two men had hardly spoken before the transmission of the report and nothing much seemed to change afterwards. What, for instance, ever happened to that ‘bollocking’ that Marsh thought Gilligan needed? According to Marsh he bumped into Gilligan later that day in a corridor in BBC Television Centre. He told Gilligan it was a good story and well done but that he had been ‘fucking awful’ at 6.07. They needed to talk.

  Rather than deliver a full ‘bollocking’, the following day Marsh sent Gilligan an email which struck a rather different tone:

  Statement of the obvious I guess but it’s really good to have you back here in the UK. Great week, great stories, well handled and well told. Course it’s meant Today has had a great week too, and that has lifted everyone. We still have to have that conversation [which is my annual appraisal] but since you are entirely nocturnal while I’m a normal human being we don’t seem to meet too often. Maybe you could creak the coffin lid open next week during daylight hours. Anyway, it’s great to have you back on your beat. Talk soon.680

  Marsh’s subsequent explanation of this email was that Gilligan had been avoiding him, but he thought insincerity might encourage Gilligan to open that coffin lid a little. Gilligan’s response was to go on holiday; Marsh could hardly say no. His need to do an ‘annual appraisal’ of Gilligan would turn out to be more significant.

  Before then there would be a new twist in their relationship. In their encounter in the corridor the previous day Gilligan had told his editor that he wanted to write a piece for the Mail on Sunday. Marsh said the idea ‘didn’t thrill’ him and as he, Marsh, would be away that weekend Gilligan would have to get another BBC News executive to vet the article.681

  Marsh said Gilligan told him his piece for that weekend’s Mail on Sunday would ‘add nothing’ to what he’d already broadcast on the BBC. In fact he added one very significant word and this was the first time he had used it in public, since he typed up his notes after seeing Dr Kelly. The word was Campbell. The Mail on Sunday were not slow to spot it and so that no one missed the point they put the word into capital letters in the headline: ‘I asked my intelligence source why Blair misled us all over Saddam’s weapons. His reply? One word … CAMPBELL.’682

  Gilligan’s article told of his meeting with his source and their conversation: ‘I asked him how this transformation [of the document] happened. The answer was a single word. “Campbell.” What? Campbell made it up? “No, it was real information. But it was included against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable.”’

  This wasn’t quite the same thing as what the Mail headline claimed, but it was certainly enough to infuriate the Downing Street enforcer. Many listeners would have guessed that Gilligan referring on air to ‘Downing Street’ was probably a proxy for saying ‘Alastair Campbell’, but for him to be named in a headline that talked of how ‘Blair misled us’ was a major escalation in the story. Perhaps it was inevitable it would come out at some point because the name had been in Gilligan’s notes from the start, but oddly it had never been mentioned on the air before. For it to be done now, not by the BBC – in their own way and in their own time – but by a BBC reporter without BBC permission and in a newspaper hostile to both the BBC and Campbell was bizarre.

  Gilligan has since admitted that, in Marsh’s absence that weekend, he did not get another BBC News executive to vet the article before it was sent to the Mail on Sunday; but nowhere in his book does Kevin Marsh record reprimanding Gilligan face to face for this, or even email to email.

  His view of their relationship seems best summed up in the six words which Marsh uses about a later conversation they had as they walked around the circular open space of Television Centre. ‘We walked. He talked. I despaired.’ This was not exactly what the BBC would call ‘talent management’.

  The row between No. 10 and the BBC had been slowly building up. Campbell only got directly involved in the process himself about a week after Gilligan’s broadcast. Greg Dyke and Richard Sambrook, who had both been away at the time of the broadcast, also began to get involved.

  In an email to one of his bosses on 9 June, headed ‘Campbell letter’, Marsh was derisive about the complaints from Downing Street, writing ‘it’s all drivel’; of Campbell he wrote ‘the man is flapping in the wind’. Marsh defended Gilligan’s story without reservation; there was no mention of any mistakes in what Gilligan had broadcast.683

  Nearly three weeks later Kevin Marsh sat down and composed a very different email to his BBC boss, Stephen Mitchell. It was headed ‘From here’:

  Some thoughts: clearly I have to talk to AG early next week. I hope by then my worst fears – based on what I’m hearing from the spooks this afternoon – aren’t realised. Assuming not, the guts of
what I would say are:

  This story was a good piece of investigative journalism, marred by flawed reporting – our biggest millstone has been his loose use of language and lack of judgement in some of his phraseology.

  It was marred also by the quantity of writing for other outlets that varied what was said and was loose with the terms of the story.

  That it is in many ways a result of the loose and in some ways distant relationship he’s been allowed to have with Today.

  He then set out eight bullet points for how Gilligan’s working methods could be changed for the better. For example:

  That he works substantially in the office

  That he comes in to TVC684 to put his pieces together and to file (he usually files from home)

  That all his proposed stories are discussed with me, in detail as early as possible in the process – face to face if possible

  The email ended, ‘Does this sound too harsh?? Thoughts?? I’d like anything I say to him to be consistent with anything anyone else above me in the hierarchy. K.’685

  Kevin Marsh has since explained that the email was a ‘draft appraisal’, the first stage of an annual BBC process where staff eventually get told what their bosses and colleagues think of how they are performing in their jobs. Marsh has said that his draft appraisal for Gilligan was just one of a ‘dozen and a half’ he’d prepared and they were ‘pretty dull except to the reporter concerned’.686

  That may well have been Marsh’s intention and he had signalled in his previous email to Gilligan that an appraisal was coming up, but to an external reader there was little to indicate that. The email appeared to be an update on Marsh’s latest thinking about what had been transmitted and the lessons learned from it, including editorial and managerial shortcomings. Whatever he meant by sending that email, being honest with his boss about his views on Andrew Gilligan turned out to be one of the worst things Kevin Marsh ever did.

  At the time it seemed to the BBC that after the opening volley of complaints this particular row with Downing Street just might die down and fizzle out like so many others had before. BBC News executives even went to lunch with Tony Blair at Downing Street and the dispute wasn’t mentioned then, although it was commented on afterwards by one of Campbell’s team, showing that the issue hadn’t entirely gone away.

  Then over the next month there were a series of dramatic developments.

  Campbell raises the stakes

  On 25 June, Alastair Campbell appeared before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, where he was expecting a tough time over his role in the second dossier, the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ of February 2003. Some of this document had been plagiarised without attribution, including extracts from one graduate student’s thesis which were reproduced with typographical errors uncorrected.

  Campbell chose the committee hearing to re-ignite the row with the BBC, thumping the table and almost shouting: ‘I simply say, in relation to the BBC story, it is a lie … that is continually repeated, and until we get an apology for it I will keep making sure that Parliament and people like yourselves know that it was a lie.’687 In Marsh’s view Campbell had decided to re-open the attack on the BBC as a diversion from the pressure he was likely to be under at the committee because of the ‘dodgy’ dossier.

  Campbell followed up the next day with a letter to Sambrook posing twelve very specific questions and asking for ‘yes or no’ answers to many of them.

  Question number three to the BBC was: ‘Does it still stand by the allegation made on that day that both we and the intelligence agencies knew the 45-minute claim to be wrong and inserted it despite knowing that? Yes or no?’ Campbell had put his finger right on what was to turn out to be the BBC’s weak spot, late in the day but not too late for Campbell.688

  The next day Sambrook’s reply to the twelve questions included a very straightforward answer to number three: ‘Andrew Gilligan accurately reported the source telling him that the government “probably knew that the 45-minute figure was wrong” and that the claim was “questionable”.’689 Sambrook had stood by the story unreservedly. The BBC’s case was clear. The source had spoken those words.

  But in fact nothing in Gilligan’s notes – either the version on his personal organiser or the ‘Q&A’ he typed up later – can be interpreted as quoting Kelly as saying that the government probably knew the 45-minute claim was wrong.

  Having got Sambrook’s reply, Campbell immediately engineered an opportunity to press home his attack by appearing on that night’s Channel 4 News for what turned into a bad-tempered encounter with presenter Jon Snow.690 If there had been any doubt before it was clear now: Campbell had become the story.

  On 6 July the BBC governors convened a special meeting, which was most unusual as it was a Sunday. They had been sent an email the previous day by Richard Sambrook headed ‘How we reported what the source said and what we know’.691

  After a detailed discussion they concluded that ‘BBC journalists and managers sought to maintain impartiality and accuracy during this episode’.692

  On 8 July there was a meeting in the Prime Minister’s study in Downing Street. Andrew Rawnsley of The Observer has written that this meeting ‘put Tony Blair at the heart of a devious strategy which would lead to Dr David Kelly being outed less than forty-eight hours later’. Rawnsley wrote that Blair had sanctioned a ‘naming strategy’ which ‘guaranteed that the scientist’s identity got out while making it hard to prove that Downing Street had done the deed itself’.693 The government released enough individual pieces of information to allow journalists who knew this patch to guess the identity. If the right name was put to the Ministry of Defence they would helpfully confirm it. One reporter worked out the name of Kelly by typing various clues into a search engine, another – according to Rawnsley – put twenty-one names to the MoD before he got the right one confirmed.

  On 9 July Dr David Kelly was named in the press as Gilligan’s source. A week later he was up before a Commons committee. It was a messy affair with confused questioning. One MP told Kelly he was a ‘fall-guy’ and ‘chaff’. A Liberal Democrat MP, who in an extraordinary development had been secretly briefed by Andrew Gilligan, asked Kelly if he had been the source of a different BBC story, one by Susan Watts of Newsnight. Kelly said no. He lied to Parliament.

  According to Andrew Rawnsley, the outing of Kelly had not worked out the way Alastair Campbell hoped. ‘It did not fuck Gilligan.’ Campbell, he says, concluded that with other troubles on the government’s horizon ‘this was something which we were going to have to sort of put behind us and forget’. It would not be as simple as that.

  On 17 July Dr Kelly left his home in Oxfordshire and walked five miles into the local countryside. According to the official account, he sat down, swallowed some painkillers and cut his left wrist. He bled to death. The next day his body was found. As a writer on the BBC website later observed, ‘British politics – public life even – would never be quite the same again.’694

  Lord Hutton is sent for

  A visibly shaken Tony Blair promised a full inquiry and his close friend and Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, set about choosing someone to hold it, someone ‘utterly impeccable, impartial, someone who no one could allege was New Labour or even knew us’.695 Tony Blair has recalled that Falconer came with the suggestion of someone ‘who definitely fitted the description’. Brian Hutton was a Belfast barrister who had worked his way up to become Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland and then a Law Lord in London.

  Lord Hutton was portrayed in the press as a slightly conservative, often cautious judge who had sometimes demonstrated his independence in the courts.

  The media welcomed the open way in which Hutton went about his business. Hundreds of previously confidential and often embarrassing emails from the main players were disclosed. In recognition of the arrival of the digital age, most of the documents were available to press and public on the Hutton Inquiry website, preserved for posterity on the National
Archives website. Hutton’s courtroom would become a forum for the inquisition of leading BBC and government figures. It would be the best show in town.

  To prepare for it, the BBC formed what was effectively their Hutton squad. The core team were two of Greg Dyke’s most trusted advisers and two of the most senior executives in BBC News. They were supported by BBC lawyers, public relations professionals and past and present BBC journalists who were set specific tasks. Some of them made themselves experts on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.

  The only true outsider was probably the most influential member of the team. Andrew Caldecott QC would be the barrister to stand up in front of Lord Hutton, putting forward the BBC’s case and questioning key witnesses. He would be supported by junior barristers from his chambers.

  In the same way that a news organisation would hire a QC to fight a libel case for them and leave it to him or her to decide the courtroom tactics, the BBC looked to Caldecott to lead their Hutton strategy. Caldecott already had an impressive track record in defamation cases. His website lists tributes such as ‘the best libel barrister around bar none’, equipped as he is with ‘more grey cells between his ears than you or I will ever have’.696

  Being at heart a libel lawyer he fought the case like a libel trial – to prove that what the BBC had said about Downing Street and the WMD dossier was true. It was as simple as that. As it turned out, there were a number of problems with this strategy of focusing so much on WMD. Greg Dyke later realised one of them: