When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  The experiment ended in what one BBC executive at the time, Mark Damazer, called ‘a lot of broken glass’. Liddle was taken to task by the corporation over a column in which he criticised a Countryside Alliance march in London. The article was deemed ‘not acceptable’ and did ‘not square with the BBC’s obligation to be impartial and to be seen to be impartial’. Liddle stepped down as the editor of Today.

  At that point, Marsh was the editor of another major Radio 4 programme, The World at One, where he’d been involved in what amounted to a running battle with the director of communications and strategy at Downing Street, Alastair Campbell. Marsh was the obvious candidate to succeed Liddle but wasn’t sure about it. However, after Today had been without an editor for nearly three months, he made his mind up. ‘I decided I’d do it. For eighteen months. Two years max. Clear up the broken glass. And move on.’

  Enter Andrew Gilligan

  Among those awaiting him on Today were Liddle’s recruits including the defence and diplomatic correspondent, Andrew Gilligan. He had previously worked on the Sunday Telegraph and in an article headlined ‘The Extraordinary World of Andrew Gilligan’ his former colleagues were later to describe him as ‘insecure yet arrogant, teetotal yet over-indulgent, gentle yet controlling’ which made him ‘almost impossible to understand or empathise with’.661 One colleague was quoted as saying that Gilligan was ‘a brilliant writer and an extremely intelligent man’ but – and there were many buts in the article – ‘he was incapable of producing copy on time’.662

  According to this account, Gilligan was notoriously private, and rarely went to the Sunday Telegraph office, preferring to work at night in his flat in south London, where he ingested large amounts of junk food, left the packaging lying around and filed late copy.

  Kevin Marsh discovered early on at Today that it appeared that no producer worked with the very private Gilligan and no one checked his scripts. When Marsh read one script, about a British arms company’s dealings with Zimbabwe, it seemed ‘full of holes’. It was not a good start to their relationship.

  He also later wrote of Gilligan’s habits during this period: ‘He would routinely present his stories at the last possible moment and only occasionally at one of the routine editorial conferences. I always assumed he was hoping to smuggle them past an inattentive or indifferent editor.’663

  It was now December 2002 and all the British media were focused on preparing for what seemed an inevitable Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in the spring to overthrow Saddam Hussein and neutralise what, it was claimed, were his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD). Marsh said he was nervous when he discovered that Gilligan was the first, and so far only, BBC reporter to get a visa to go to Baghdad.

  He told his immediate boss, Steve Mitchell, that he was against Gilligan going. The reply was ‘tough’; if Gilligan was the only person with a visa he’d have to go. And when Marsh told Mitchell that he ‘wasn’t entirely thrilled he [Gilligan] was on the books at all’, Mitchell told him this wasn’t Fleet Street where they just fired people, Marsh would have to ‘manage him out’ using procedures that could take at least two years.

  Over in Downing Street they had been keeping an eye on Gilligan too. They disliked a story he had broadcast in November 2000 about whether discussions to codify the European Union’s treaties amounted to a draft constitution for a European superstate. To try to damage his credibility they christened him ‘gullible Gilligan’.

  The wider battle begins

  On the morning of 20 March 2003 Andrew Gilligan broadcast from Baghdad on the bombing of the Iraqi capital. The ‘Coalition’ of American and British forces hoped the bombardment would inspire ‘shock and awe’ in enemy troops before the land war began. About the same time a letter from Downing Street was arriving at the BBC possibly intending to inspire its own version of ‘shock and awe’. Tony Blair wrote to the director-general of the BBC, Greg Dyke, criticising the corporation’s coverage.

  According to Dyke, Blair wrote: ‘It seems to me there has been a real breakdown of the separation of news and comment. I know that Alastair has been pressing you to ensure more reference is made to reports from inside Iraq about the restrictions under which the media operate.’ The letter also complained that the BBC had not got the balance right between support and dissent.664

  No names were mentioned but undoubtedly whoever drafted the letter for Blair – most observers believe it was Alastair Campbell – had Gilligan’s reports partly in mind.

  Dyke’s reply began in robust style:

  Firstly, and I do not mean to be rude, but having faced the biggest ever public demonstration in this country and the biggest ever backbench rebellion against a sitting government by its own supporters, would you not agree that your communications advisors are not best placed to advise whether or not the BBC has got the balance right between support and dissent.

  The battle lines between a government and the BBC had been drawn, just as they had at so many times of conflict before, from the Suez invasion of 1956 to the Falklands War of 1982.

  How very different from much earlier times at the BBC, when during the Munich crisis of 1938 the BBC recorded that its role was to fall ‘into line with Government policy’.665

  This exchange of letters was to prove the opening of the latest front in Alastair Campbell’s battle with the BBC. Dyke came to the conclusion that Campbell was obsessed with the corporation. The two men each had a background in the media and in the politics of ‘New Labour’ but they were never friends and now they were on different sides.

  According to one shrewd political observer, Andrew Rawnsley of The Observer, Alastair Campbell had become ‘one of the most powerful non-elected officials ever to operate from 10 Downing Street’.666 With unrivalled access to the Prime Minister and almost unlimited freedom to operate, Campbell commanded respect, even fear, from Labour Party politicians for his ability to confront and sometimes to control the media. Originally a newspaper reporter himself, taming political reporters and their editors had become an obsession for Campbell. So much so that Tony Blair is said to have told one friend, ‘The trouble with Alastair is that he hates the media.’667 The BBC’s unrivalled position as the nation’s biggest news operation had made them an obvious target for him. Over at the BBC a different mindset developed. Campbell was now complaining so often that the default response to a complaint from him was that he was wrong; the BBC was right and must fight back with renewed vigour.

  Greg Dyke was the director-general of the BBC but he did not come from the dominant tribe of BBC lifers. Like his predecessor John Birt, his career had been mainly in commercial television and he had been recruited at a senior level by Sir Christopher Bland, who was then chairman of the BBC but had formerly been his chairman at London Weekend Television. Dyke’s appointment was controversial because he had been a donor to the Labour Party. Another Labour supporter, Gavyn Davies, became Dyke’s boss when he succeeded Bland as chairman of the BBC. Their mutual Labour connection was a coincidence, but it was to turn out to be a significant one.

  During the war in Iraq Dyke received many complaints from Campbell about Gilligan’s reporting, and on one occasion an identical complaint came from Gerald Kaufman, the chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport. Dyke concluded that Campbell’s department had written the letter for Kaufman. On another occasion, the BBC had to accept that Gilligan was wrong to talk about ‘more rubbish from Central Command’ in reference to the Anglo-American-led coalition.668 The director of BBC News, Richard Sambrook, wrote to Alastair Campbell: ‘This particular phrase was unacceptable, which I regret, and will take it up with Andrew Gilligan. Thank you for drawing it to my attention.’669

  A very short peace

  When American troops entered Baghdad on 9 April 2003 and helped to pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein, BBC executives might have been entitled to a measure of relief that their battle with Downing Street over Iraq was probably over. In fact the worst was yet to come.


  The first escalation came a few days later when Andrew Gilligan reported from the Iraqi capital that

  Baghdad may in theory be free but its people are passing their first days of liberty in a greater fear than they’ve ever known. The old fear of the regime was habitual, low level. This fear is sharp and immediate – the fear that your house will be invaded, your property will be taken away and your daughters will be raped.670

  Campbell and his team complained but the BBC stood by their man.

  Andrew Gilligan came home after the war. The director of BBC News thanked him, told him that some of his reporting had been very good, but that too often he went ten per cent too far. After a short break Gilligan went back to work and played a central role in what was to be a second, and much more significant, escalation in post-war hostilities between the government and the BBC.

  On 28 May the Today team who were planning the next morning’s programme prepared, as usual, their ‘master prospects’ list which they would hand over to the overnight team that evening. Item number six on the ‘foreign’ section of the list read:

  WMD: The dossier on Iraq which the government produced last September (24th) was jazzed up at the last minute to include new information based on dubious sources – including the claim that chemical and biological weapons could be deployed at 45 minutes’ notice. Live 0700–0730 Andrew Gilligan illustrated twoway. Gilligan has got this from a senior source who shall remain anonymous.671

  Kevin Marsh says that although the Today journalist in charge of the prospects list said Gilligan claimed he had spoken to Marsh about it, in fact this was the first time Marsh discovered that the story was being pursued. He was told that Gilligan’s source had said the government’s dossier published the previous September had been ‘sexed up’ in the week before publication. And the source had said ‘that was down to Campbell’.672

  Marsh has said he ‘rattled off’ to the Today journalist a series of questions which Gilligan would need to answer before the story could run, including more details about the source. She went back to Gilligan and then told Marsh enough to satisfy him. She didn’t have the source’s name because Gilligan hadn’t told her, but Marsh didn’t regard the name as essential.

  Marsh was shown two sides of paper which Gilligan had typed up after his meeting with his source. Only much later would it become known that Gilligan had been to the Charing Cross Hotel in London on 22 May 2003 to meet a Dr David Kelly. He was a British expert on biological warfare who had been employed to undertake certain tasks by the Ministry of Defence and had also been a United Nations weapons-inspector in Iraq.

  Gilligan’s two sides of paper were headed ‘What My Man Said’ and they appeared to be a full question and answer (Q&A) transcript of a conversation.

  The key section said:

  A: The classic was the statement that WMD were ready for use within 45 minutes. Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single source. And we believed that the source was wrong. He said it took 45 minutes to construct a missile assembly, and that was misinterpreted (in the dossier) to mean that WMD could be deployed in 45 minutes. What we thought he actually meant was that they could launch a conventional missile in 45 minutes. There was no evidence that they had loaded missiles with WMD, or could do so anything like that quickly.

  Q: So how did this transformation happen?

  A: Campbell.

  Q: What do you mean? They made it up?

  A: No, it was real information. But it was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable. It was a single source and it was not reliable. He said Downing Street had asked if there was anything else on seeing the full original dossier and had been told about this and other things.673

  Marsh thought it looked like a ‘good note of a good source. Enough to go with.’ Only later did it become clear that this document was not exactly a ‘note’. What the reporter had done was that while he talked to his source he tapped away at the miniature keyboard of a personal organiser device. He later typed up this as a ‘Q&A’ doubling the number of words and making it easier to read. This apparent transcript was regularly referred to by others as Gilligan’s ‘notes’, but in truth the words on his personal organiser were really his notes.

  As he reflected on Gilligan’s proposed story Marsh remembered conversations with a Cabinet minister and the head of MI6 which confirmed the doubts he’d had about the dossier when it was first published. This had been the first government dossier effectively preparing the case for war to be put to the British public. This is sometimes confused with a second dossier published the following year which became known as the ‘dodgy dossier’.

  The first, the September dossier, was titled ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction’ with a sub-heading ‘The Assessment of the British Government’. In the foreword by Tony Blair was a sentence which said of Saddam Hussein: ‘The document discloses that his military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.’674

  Marsh made his decision. He would go with the story but he wanted the allegations put to the government. He was told a Ministry of Defence minister was coming in to be interviewed live on the programme about another subject. Ministers were used to being asked additional questions about breaking stories. But no formal request for a response to Gilligan’s story was sent to the government.

  Separately, a Today producer began writing a background briefing for the presenters. Although it was headed ‘Gilligan and Campbell brief’, and the name of Alastair Campbell had appeared in Gilligan’s Q&A document written after his interview with Kelly, it wasn’t in this brief. Nor would it appear anywhere in the coming day’s coverage.

  That evening Gilligan worked late in his flat in Greenwich on his contributions to the Today programme. At about 1 a.m. he rang the team preparing the radio news bulletins for breakfast-time outlets and told them about his story. They asked for him to file copy and he did. A journalist suggested one small change to the news script; he agreed and then recorded a voice report for use on the various bulletins.675

  On air

  The first transmission of any kind was not on Today but on the 0500 BBC Radio News bulletins on Radio 2 and Radio 5 Live. On Radio 2 an announcer, Alice Arnold, read a short introduction to part of Gilligan’s voice report.

  Alice Arnold: Tony Blair is to become the first Western leader to visit Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. He will meet British troops when he travels to the country later this morning. BBC News has learned that intelligence officials were unhappy with the dossier published by the government last September which claimed that Iraq had the ability to launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes. Andrew Gilligan reports.

  Andrew Gilligan: One senior British official has now told the BBC that the original version of the dossier produced by the intelligence services added little to what was already publicly known but one week before publication, said this official, the dossier was transformed on Downing Street’s orders. The 45-minute assertion was one of several claims added against the wishes of the intelligence agencies who said it was from a single source which they didn’t necessarily believe.676

  There was no comment from the government because none had been asked for.

  At 6 a.m. Today itself went on the air and the opening news summary was also based on the copy Gilligan had sent through overnight. Gilligan’s major contribution to the programme – a full ‘package’, with extracts of his source’s quotes read by an actor – was not scheduled until about 7.30. The script for this had been seen and approved. However, as part of the usual Today format of reporters doing short live interviews looking ahead to later in the programme, Gilligan was interviewed live by Today presenter John Humphrys at 6.07.

  Humphrys was in the Today studio, Gilligan was talking ‘down the line’ from his flat. At one point in their live interview Gilligan went further than in any previous version of the story that he had written or recorded and said: �
�What we’ve been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier was that, actually the government probably, erm, knew that the 45-minute figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in.’

  In just two hours the story had gone from an allegation that ‘the intelligence agencies … didn’t necessarily believe the claim’ to one that ‘the government probably knew it was wrong’. In addition, the official who in the 5 a.m. news bulletin was ‘involved’ in the dossier had, by 6.07, been promoted to become ‘one of the senior people in charge of drawing it up’.

  Gilligan’s editor, Kevin Marsh, has said he was in the back of a minicab on his way to work as he listened to his reporter continuing to stumble through the live transmission:

  Well, erm, our source says that the dossier, as it was finally published, made the Intelligence Services unhappy, erm, because to quote, erm, the source, he said, there was basically, that there was, there was, there was unhappiness because it didn’t reflect the considered view they were putting forward, that’s a quote from our source and essentially, erm, the 45-minute point, er, was, was probably the most important thing that was added.677

  Nine years later in his book Stumbling over Truth, Marsh remembered his response in the back of the cab as being, ‘Just read the fucking script. What’s wrong with you? … It sounded as if Gilligan had got up late and was doing it off the top of his head. Bad call. He needed a bollocking for that.’678

  When Marsh got to the Today office he saw his deputy with a phone clamped to his ear. The deputy ‘pointed to the handset and mouthed the words “Downing Street”’. The battle had started, but Marsh’s priority at that point was overseeing the rest of that day’s programme, especially Gilligan’s main report, which went out at 7.32. At no point does it seem that Gilligan was challenged on or off air about the difference between what he had said in the interview at 6.07 and what he said in his approved 7.32 script. The government ‘probably knew it was wrong’ line was not repeated but nor was it corrected during the programme.