When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  Lord Hutton explained that he had decided to limit the scope of his inquiry and completely ignore the crucial question of what sort of weapons of mass destruction the Government was warning us about in the dossier. With this one inexplicable decision Lord Hutton had wiped out key parts of the BBC’s evidence and a critical foundation of our case.697

  Another problem was that the BBC arguably underplayed the importance of the editorial process that Gilligan’s story had been put through by his producers and editors. The BBC’s preliminary statement to the inquiry made absolutely no mention of any process or checks between the date when Gilligan talked to Kelly and the day he went on air.698

  The other key person besides Caldecott in the BBC’s planning team was obviously the director-general himself. Dyke and his close advisers were based in Broadcasting House (BH) in Central London. The advisers had a background in legal and business affairs and brought a cool detachment to the process of putting forward the BBC’s case. The BBC News executives were based in the newsroom in Television Centre. More than once his BH team observed that Greg Dyke, never a shrinking violet, would become even more passionate, especially about Alastair Campbell, once immersed in the editorial hub of his organisation.

  It subsequently became conventional wisdom outside the BBC that Dyke was not on top of the detail and also did not question his own team hard enough because of his disputes with Campbell and a desire to show that, despite his own previous Labour links, he was now truly independent. But Kevin Marsh has subsequently written that ‘Dyke grilled Gilligan and he grilled me before he took up the fight with Campbell’.699 It is also clear that the BBC had, like Campbell, realised the potential significance of Gilligan’s one-off remarks at 6.07. Marsh has written that Dyke asked Gilligan outright whether Kelly had used the words ‘the government probably knew the 45-minute claim was wrong’. Marsh’s account is that ‘Gilligan assured him more than once that he had’.700

  On one of those occasions Marsh said Dyke told Gilligan ‘you’d better be fucking right’, then turned to the rest of those in the room and said ‘he’d better be fucking right’.701

  Internal tensions at the BBC

  The legal team was based in a third location, an office in the BBC’s White City complex in west London. It was here, amidst the boxes of files and papers and leftover food, that the decision was made that had the most impact on Kevin Marsh. He later recalled that when he first went there he did not feel especially welcome. The problem was the ‘draft appraisal’ email to Steve Mitchell on 27 June, which the BBC was having to disclose, along with countless other BBC emails and documents. Revealing it to Hutton meant showing it to Gilligan too, who had never previously seen this list of his faults. Marsh encountered Gilligan in the legal team’s office. The reporter said to his editor, referring to the email, ‘It’s surprising what you find out about people at times like this.’ Marsh replied, ‘But you knew that’s what I think, I’ve told you often enough. You know it’s true, too.’702 Such encounters did not exactly foster team spirit among those working for the BBC’s cause.

  The email raised the obvious question: if the editor of Today had these doubts about a reporter, why had he allowed the man to go on air with such a controversial story without the toughest of editorial controls? There wasn’t an easy answer but in Marsh’s mind he had, as editor, put the story through proper editorial checks. It subsequently became clear to Marsh that the lawyers didn’t want him to give evidence in Hutton’s courtroom for fear that he would be ‘ripped apart’ especially by Jonathan Sumption QC, counsel for the government and considered one of the most agile legal minds at the bar.

  Greg Dyke has said that the BBC didn’t put Marsh forward because

  our legal advice was that you didn’t nominate witnesses; you waited for the inquiry team to call them. This was based on our QC’s firm belief that all your bad days would come when your witnesses were in the witness box and all your best days would come when it was the turn of the government witnesses.

  Whether or not the BBC could have done more to get Marsh into the witness box, there was certainly relief among their Hutton team that the editor of the Today programme wasn’t called by the judge.

  Dyke later accepted that Marsh was therefore never given the chance to explain the editorial processes and ‘as a result Hutton has been allowed to create the myth that Gilligan’s report went to air without any proper editorial control being exercised beforehand’.703

  Marsh’s role became a backroom one helping the team preparing the BBC’s submissions to the Hutton Inquiry. In Marsh’s absence as a witness, the director of BBC News, Richard Sambrook, who had played no role whatsoever in the preparation or transmission of Gilligan’s report or in Marsh’s ‘draft appraisal’ of Gilligan, was now to answer in public for both.

  The Hutton hearings begin

  Once Lord Hutton’s hearings started Marsh was left unsure what, if anything, he was meant to be doing to help the BBC’s case. He was getting more alarmed by the BBC’s emerging strategy.704 He said he felt like botulinum, the most acutely toxic substance known to mankind.

  The BBC would have liked to have been able to prove that everything they had transmitted on the story was one hundred per cent correct. The ‘Preliminary Statement of the BBC’ made only one small concession: ‘The BBC accepts that on one occasion the source was described specifically as a source from the intelligence services. Although Dr Kelly did have access to intelligence material, this was an error which the BBC regrets.’705

  Apart from that the BBC did not accept any mistakes and made six headline submissions stating boldly either that they had ‘accurately recorded what Dr Kelly told’ them or that ‘the BBC was right to broadcast’ what they had.

  However, back in their offices it was becoming clearer to the BBC team that although most of what Today had broadcast was what Dr Kelly had told Gilligan, there were some mistakes. This left the BBC with two problems: one was being sure of what was true and what was a mistake before they went into the Hutton courtroom, and the other was deciding which mistake to admit to and when. Neither was going to be easy to solve.

  On 12 August 2003, Andrew Gilligan made his first appearance before Lord Hutton in a crowded courtroom in the Royal Courts of Justice in London. The transcripts of the cross-examination of Gilligan and other BBC witnesses reveal a constantly changing position on key issues.

  The most significant was Gilligan’s own position on his ‘government probably knew it was wrong’ allegation at 6.07. The counsel for the inquiry, James Dingemans QC, contrasted it with Gilligan’s note of Kelly’s quote: ‘It was real information but included against our wishes because they considered it unreliable.’

  Was this line from Kelly enough to support his own allegation about the government knowing the claim was probably wrong?

  Gilligan: Well, I think it is a reasonable conclusion to draw from what he said. But I have to say that with the benefit of hindsight, looking at it now with a fine-tooth comb, I think it was not wrong, what I said, but it was not perfect either, and in hindsight I should have scripted that too.706

  In just one exchange, the principal allegation by the BBC against the government, which Gilligan had ‘been told’ by his source, was now something that he hadn’t actually been told but which he had concluded and while ‘not wrong’ was ‘not perfect either’.

  In a later exchange Gilligan conceded more ground:

  I think in hindsight as I say, particularly that 6.07, quite unwittingly and unintentionally but I did give people the wrong impression about whether this was real intelligence or whether it was made up or not; and I never intended to give anyone the impression that it was not real intelligence or that it had been fabricated, but I think I must have done; and so in that sense I agree to that, I think.707

  It came as no surprise that when Gilligan returned at a later hearing Jonathan Sumption QC, for the government, took him back to that, by now infamous, line at 6.07.

  Sumption
: You accept, I think, that it was expressed by you as something that your source had said, whereas in fact it was an inference of your own?

  Gilligan: Yes, that is right, that was my mistake.

  Greg Dyke later listed Gilligan’s admission as one of the ‘particularly bad moments for the BBC’ during the inquiry. ‘This was not what we believed he had told us.’

  Kevin Marsh was asked about Gilligan’s belated admission on a radio programme nearly a decade later by the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson.708

  Marsh: To misattribute one of your key claims to a single, anonymous source the moment when you have to have maximum trust in your reporter, to misquote and misattribute something its journalistically criminal.

  Robinson: And yet the BBC didn’t find out until a judicial inquiry found out for them?

  Marsh: Well, Andrew continued to insist that those were exactly the words that Dr Kelly had used.

  In the hearings the bad news for the BBC kept on coming. It was put to their witnesses that Gilligan was wrong to say in some broadcasts that Kelly was a member of the intelligence services; he wasn’t. To compound the offence, the corporation had wrongly denied in a press statement that Gilligan had ever said that. It was suggested that Kelly had never told Gilligan that he had been one of those in charge of the dossier, that Gilligan had allowed an unsupported headline in the Mail on Sunday to go uncorrected, that the BBC governors had not been given the full facts. The charge sheet seemed endless.

  What the BBC didn’t tell Hutton

  In Marsh’s mind there was a much simpler story but the BBC weren’t telling it. It could be summed up in the five words which Marsh said he muttered to himself that morning in a minicab as he listened to Gilligan stumbling through that live interview: ‘Just read the fucking script.’

  Marsh subsequently wrote:

  I expected Gilligan to have his script in front of him for that 6.07 two-way. I expected to hear the allegations expressed exactly as they were in the script. I certainly didn’t expect him to use different words, changing both meaning and attribution. I would have liked to have explained this to Lord Hutton.709

  Although the BBC’s main submission to Hutton has never been published I have been able to confirm that it stated that the 6.07 broadcast was ‘unscripted’.

  That submission never mentioned any script for 6.07, no document was ever submitted as a 6.07 script and nor did any of the BBC witnesses who appeared before His Lordship ever mention any such script. Nor was there any mention of any agreement between Marsh and Gilligan that the allegations would, in Marsh’s subsequent words, be ‘expressed exactly as they were in the script’.

  Instead the BBC’s version that it had been an ‘unscripted’ broadcast was set out from the moment Gilligan was asked about 6.07 in his first cross-examination:

  Dingemans: Was this contribution to the programme scripted?

  Gilligan: No, it was not.

  Dingemans: So this was you speaking from the studio or from home?

  Gilligan: From home. I have an ISDN line at home because it is an early morning programme. This is me speaking live and unscripted.

  Lord Hutton: You are speaking?

  Gilligan: Speaking live and unscripted.

  Dingemans: Live and unscripted.

  Gilligan: Yes.710

  When Gilligan returned for further cross-examination the following month the subject came up again:

  Dingemans: This was a very serious charge, as it turned out, or a matter of great public interest, where you broadcast words simply unscripted. Do you accept that that was unfortunate?

  Gilligan: Yes, we should have scripted it.711

  In his book Stumbling over Truth, Marsh wrote that there was a script which Gilligan ‘was supposed to have in front of him as he did this live two-way with John Humphrys’.712 Marsh explained that he had been able to look at this script overnight from home using a laptop linked to the BBC’s computer system. His book has an appendix described as ‘Andrew Gilligan’s script for Today, 29 May 2003’. The words which are in that appendix match exactly the words which are in the BBC’s transcript of the 7.32 portion of Today which was submitted to Hutton. In other words there is no dispute that they are the words Andrew Gilligan spoke at 7.32. But nowhere in the BBC’s evidence was it ever suggested that these same words were what Gilligan should have used earlier at 6.07. Nor does Marsh explain when or how Gilligan agreed with him that the reporter would have a script ‘in front of him’ at 6.07. But it is clear that despite whatever Andrew Gilligan and the director of BBC News, Richard Sambrook, later told Lord Hutton, the editor of Today believed there was a script which Gilligan was told to ‘have in front of him’ at 6.07.

  Subsequently the BBC did a complete volte-face on this issue. In direct contradiction with its evidence to Hutton, a BBC internal disciplinary process held after Hutton’s report concluded: ‘In relation to the broadcast on the Today programme, on 29 May 2003, we are satisfied that a core script was properly prepared and cleared in line with normal production practices in place at the time, but was then not followed by Andrew Gilligan.’ It added: ‘We consider that the BBC’s evidence to the Hutton Inquiry could have been clearer in this respect.’713

  The full findings and rationale of the internal investigation by BBC executives Stephen Dando and Caroline Thomson, known as ‘the process’, have never been published. I have tried to get the BBC to release the details of how they came to this new conclusion but they refuse.714 But Kevin Marsh has been told the full findings and regards them as a vindication of his own position.

  So was there a script or not?

  So the BBC fought the Hutton Inquiry on one basis: that the 6.07 interview was ‘unscripted’ and then after Hutton it decided that there was a script after all? To try to get to the bottom of this I contacted the two main protagonists a decade later and after hearing both sides I have concluded that it all depends on what you mean by ‘a 6.07 script’.

  Andrew Gilligan told me:

  I have no recollection of producing any kind of script for the live two-way – we were generally told not to, because it made you sound stilted. Can I absolutely swear that nothing of that nature was done? No: it was ten years ago. But as you say, nothing of the sort appears in the copious documentation submitted by the BBC to the Hutton Inquiry.715

  Andrew Gilligan also pointed to what Marsh had later said about him in his 27 June ‘draft appraisal email’: that in future, among other things, they ‘agree on a script or on core elements of a script that he does not subsequently vary’. This, Gilligan said, ‘clearly suggests, of course, that no script was prepared for the offending 29 May item’.

  I then put Andrew Gilligan’s response to Kevin Marsh and the misunderstanding that the two seemed to have had for nearly ten years began to become a little clearer. In part of his reply Marsh said:

  Gilligan’s ‘script’ was the one he wrote for his 7.32 substantive piece – and that was the script the night editor approved and which, later, I read and the one which, in all material substance, he was supposed to keep to.

  He’s right to say that he wasn’t required to write a specific script for his 6.07 two-way – but he was required to deliver the allegations etc. in that two-way in exactly the form he’d scripted them for 7.32. If you think about it, anything else would be absurd.716

  So, to be clear; I read the ‘substantive’ or ‘core’ script on my laptop, the script that was going to be read in full at 7.32. I expected to hear the allegations in that form whenever Gilligan was on air, whether ‘live and unscripted’ or in the substantive piece. As you’ll know, he did stick to the ‘core’ script in some dozen and a half live broadcasts during the day. He only went off-piste the once – and that was in the 6.07.

  In summary – in my words not theirs – Marsh says he wanted Gilligan to use the 7.32 script as the basis of his 6.07 live interview. Gilligan says he didn’t know he was meant to.

  What a pity this couldn’t have been sorted o
ut a long time before. If it had been agreed between Marsh and Gilligan that the 7.32 script was also to be regarded as a 6.07 script and kept to, the BBC’s biggest problem would never have happened. But, now, months later in the middle of a judge-led inquiry it was becoming clear that there were other problems.

  Would it have mattered if the BBC’s evidence had been clearer from the start that there had been an editorial process but there had been a misunderstanding over a 6.07 script? The trouble is that this wasn’t the only ‘misunderstanding’ or mistake. Before the inquiry began, the BBC agreed there had been one mistake, that Downing Street should have been given advance notice of Gilligan’s story. In its ‘Preliminary Statement’ to Hutton the BBC admitted one further mistake, but by the end of Hutton the BBC’s own in-house magazine, Ariel, had counted four more:

  Gilligan’s 6.07 broadcast should have been scripted.

  The early broadcast did not distinguish sufficiently between what David Kelly had said and Gilligan’s interpretation of what he had said. The BBC accepted that Kelly did not say that the government had put in the 45 minutes claim when they probably knew it was wrong.

  A BBC reply to Alastair Campbell – made under considerable time pressure – contained some factual errors. Greg Dyke told the inquiry he should have taken longer to consider Campbell’s twelve-point letter and passed it to the programme complaints unit for investigation.

  Richard Sambrook said he should have looked at Gilligan’s notes earlier than he did.717

  In fact a close reading of the court transcripts suggests there were yet more admissions. But at the end of the day there was to be only one admitted mistake that really mattered.

  As the hearings came towards their end in late 2003 Lord Hutton made one telling intervention which signalled where he was coming from. He pointed out to counsel for the BBC that in June Alastair Campbell had asked Richard Sambrook in a letter if he stood by Gilligan’s story over the ‘government probably knew’ line. Sambrook replied that he did. Yet eighty-two days later Andrew Gilligan changed that story in court and accepted it was ‘my mistake’.718 It was therefore probably no surprise that Hutton’s very first conclusion in the BBC section of his final report was that the allegation was ‘unfounded’. But he also said that when the BBC management looked at Gilligan’s notes after 27 June they failed to appreciate that the notes did not fully support this allegation. The management ‘therefore failed to draw the attention of the Governors to the lack of support in the notes for the most serious of the allegations’.719