When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  Hutton’s verdict

  In Hutton’s mind there were effectively two counts of guilty, one of ‘defective’ editorial processes and the other being a failure of both management and governors to investigate Campbell’s complaints properly.

  Where Hutton went disastrously wrong in the opinion of most independently minded observers was in failing to give the BBC any credit at all for the journalistic enterprise which first surfaced the story and for the many facts Gilligan got right. The most common response in the next morning’s papers was that Hutton’s report was a ‘whitewash’ of the government.

  Some insight into why Hutton expressed his verdict the way he did has come from no less than Tony Blair himself. He has written that there was genuine amazement in Downing Street that from their perspective Hutton, having found for the government, ‘had had the courage not to dress it up for the BBC, but to call it as it was’. With his own background in the legal world Blair offered this rationale for what outsiders might call a ‘winner takes all’ verdict:

  When I was his pupil, Derry [Irvine] used to tell me that there were two types of judges: those who made up their mind, but left loose ends, something for the losing side to cling to, something that expressed the judge’s own inner hesitation about making a clear decision; and those who made up their mind, and once of that view, delivered the decision complete, unadulterated and unvarnished, with every allegation covered and every doubt answered. Lord Hutton was of the latter kind.

  A decade on from Hutton’s verdicts there is a further, wider and still relevant issue to consider: the BBC’s strategy in handling major complaints from governments of the day. The corporation almost conceded in their final submission to Hutton that they had played the whole row with Campbell the wrong way. In a very telling section, referring to Richard Sambrook’s reply to Campbell’s ‘yes or no’ challenges, the BBC said: ‘As to the drafting of the letter of 27 June Mr Dyke has stated that, with hindsight, if he were in the same position again he would have conducted a fuller investigation or else referred the matter to the Programme Complaints Unit.’720

  That Programme Complaints Unit option might well have worked. If Campbell’s complaints had been referred there as complaints from everyone else in the world were, the BBC would not have had to make replies by return of post, especially to those twelve questions.

  Back on 16 June – at the height of their row – Richard Sambrook had written to Alastair Campbell:

  I am sorry that we still seem far apart on the validity of our reporting on the concerns about the September dossier. I should remind you that we have a Programme Complaints Unit which functions completely separately from production arms of the BBC, such as BBC News and reports to the Director-General with a right of appeal to the Governors. If you feel it would help, you could make a formal complaint to the Head of the PCU, Fraser Steel.

  Alastair Campbell was never going to ‘feel it would help’ to go to the Complaints Unit. From his point of view he needed to keep the row in the public eye. But the BBC could have created some process that didn’t require his consent. Many of the detailed critiques of the BBC’s handling of Hutton can fairly be described as being ‘with the benefit of hindsight’. This ‘kick it into the long grass’ option cannot be so easily dismissed. It was always an obvious route, but one which the BBC chose not to pursue very hard. It is almost as if the two sides were enjoying the fight too much.

  The BBC could also have directed Campbell to the independent Broadcasting Standards Commission, in its final year before its absorption into the new Office of Communications (Ofcom). There was a third possible course: to have set up a special complaints inquiry headed by outside and independent figures, as Thames Television had done at the time of its dispute with Margaret Thatcher over the Death on the Rock programme in 1988, which reported on the shooting of an IRA team in Gibraltar.

  Either an internal process or some kind of independent inquiry would have isolated the BBC chairman and the governors from the row and probably ensured their survival. The regime change video need never have happened. As it was, the chairman resigned and the governors were later abolished and replaced by the BBC Trust.

  Counting the bodies

  If the chairman, Gavyn Davies, had hoped his own sacrifice would save his director-general, he was wrong. By the same time the next day, Greg Dyke was gone too.

  With hindsight was there an honourable deal he could have done to resolve the row with Downing Street?

  Greg Dyke said a decade later: ‘There were a number of discussions during this period that went on between Tony Blair and Gavyn Davies, who was then the chairman of the BBC. We then got phoned up by Peter Mandelson, who said “look, there is a deal to be done here”. But the deal required us to say that although we were right to broadcast the story when we did it actually the story was wrong. We were not prepared to do that.’721

  His director of policy at the time, Caroline Thomson, has said there was the possibility of a compromise ‘but the thing escalated and the more aggressive the response got from Alastair the less likely it was that the BBC was going to back off because it felt that its independence was at stake … This was part of a long series of complaints and this was the one where you finally had to see him off.’

  She said that with her former boss’s ‘pugnacity’ and Alastair Campbell’s background, ‘It was a car crash waiting to happen.’

  The former director-general prefers, perhaps understandably, to focus blame on the man who did the investigation into the car crash. ‘The mistake we made at the BBC was that we believed he would be an independent judge. And he did run a very interesting and independent inquiry, the only trouble is his conclusions in no way reflected the evidence that was given at the inquiry.’

  In his account of ‘Why Hutton Was Wrong’ Greg Dyke concluded:

  … most of the story broadcast on the Today programme on that May morning was right, and while Gilligan made mistakes they were nowhere near as serious as those made by Downing Street when producing the two dossiers warning about the threats from Iraq: the BBC was not sending British soldiers to war.

  Dyke’s principal adversary went too. Even before Hutton published his report Alastair Campbell had left Downing Street. Tony Blair had witnessed him ‘out of control’ and concluded that he would have to take a chance on life without Alastair. Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, invited Campbell back to Downing Street to help run what was to be an unsuccessful general election campaign. Campbell later went to work for an international public relations company.

  Back at the BBC Andrew Gilligan was soon on his way. He later wrote: ‘An internal inquiry into the Hutton fiasco concluded that I, the most junior person involved, was wholly responsible. I did wonder why, if that was genuinely the case, the BBC’s management had ever come to my defence in the first place.’722

  Some of the BBC management have told me the answer to this is that with hindsight they had been more concerned to protect Gilligan, who was seen to be under a lot of pressure, than to challenge him.

  Gilligan successfully returned to print journalism and became a regular broadcaster on commercial radio.

  He rarely appears on the BBC but there was an exception near the tenth anniversary of his broadcast. The Reunion is a BBC Radio 4 series which ‘reunites a group of people intimately involved in a moment of modern history’. One characteristic of the series is that the atmosphere of each reunion is nostalgic, even collegiate, among those brought together again from different perspectives.

  ‘The Hutton Inquiry’, the Reunion episode of Friday 10 May 2013, could not have been more different. The guests were Andrew Gilligan, Greg Dyke and from the government of 2003, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon and Downing Street spokesman Tom Kelly. Although a decade had passed since the events they were discussing, the mood around the table was argumentative and bad tempered. The presenter, Sue McGregor, at one point told her guests, ‘Gentlemen, nobody can hear what any of you are saying.’723

&
nbsp; As if to show nothing much had changed Andrew Gilligan was at the heart of it. When Tom Kelly asked Gilligan to stop interrupting him Gilligan said, ‘You’ve got to tell the truth, though, otherwise I will interrupt you.’

  Gilligan said in this programme that his 6.07 error had been ‘corrected within the hour’ and ‘swiftly corrected’. In fact the error was never corrected during the programme, it just wasn’t repeated.

  Kevin Marsh stayed on as editor of Today before becoming editor at the new BBC College of Journalism, set up following the criticisms of the BBC in the Hutton report. He left the BBC in 2011 to start his own company and write his book about how ‘my reputation had been trashed by Hutton’.724

  And what of the reputation of the man who unwittingly started all this, Dr David Kelly?

  In July 2004, a committee chaired by the former Cabinet Secretary Lord Butler concluded that the claim that Iraq could use weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes should not have been made in the government’s weapons dossier without explaining what the claim referred to. It recorded that MI6 subsequently believed that the intelligence report on the claim ‘has come into question’, with doubts cast about one of the links in the reporting chain. The Butler Committee also concluded that it was a ‘serious weakness’ in the dossier that the warnings from intelligence chiefs about the limitations of their judgements ‘were not made clear enough’.725

  At the later Chilcott Inquiry into the invasion, Michael Laurie, who had been a director-general in Defence Intelligence, commented on Alastair Campbell’s claim that the purpose of the dossier was not ‘to make a case for war’. Laurie said he ‘had no doubt at that time this was exactly the purpose and these very words were used’. A previous paper had been ‘rejected because it did not make a strong enough case. From then until September we were under pressure to find intelligence that could reinforce the case.’726

  So everything we have learned from this and other subsequent official inquiries and documents confirms that one man got it absolutely right in what he said at the Charing Cross Hotel in London on 22 May 2003. But he died. As Andrew Marr of the BBC reported at the time of the death of Dr David Kelly, ‘In the so-called war between the government and the BBC a useful, decent man today became a real casualty.’

  14

  THE HACKERS

  In November 2005 a royal prince and a former royal correspondent sat down at St James’s Palace and over a beer wondered if someone had been listening to the messages they had been sending each other.

  It began a process that over the following decade unravelled into the biggest media scandal of recent times, bringing about the closure of Britain’s bestselling newspaper, a long and controversial public inquiry into the press and the arrest of more than fifty journalists. What became known as ‘phone-hacking’ or ‘Hackgate’ illustrated all the downsides of an absence of clear lines in the news business.

  The unlikely origins of the royal trigger point were in the African state of Lesotho where Prince Harry did voluntary work in 2004 as part of a gap year. Tom Bradby, then the royal correspondent of ITV News, made a documentary about the prince’s time in Lesotho. The two men got on well and after the programme was transmitted Bradby made a video from pictures shot during Harry’s gap year, set it to music and presented it to him for his personal use.

  Bradby moved on to a new role as political editor of ITV News but kept up his royal contacts and had lunch with Harry’s elder brother, Prince William, whom he had also got to know from his time as a royal correspondent. The prince told Bradby that he had heard about the Harry video and that he would like a similar one about his own travels. But there would be a difference: Prince William would like to edit this video himself. The two men discussed how they would need Bradby’s employers at ITN to lend some editing equipment and how Bradby would teach him to edit. (Some of the reporter’s colleagues were later to comment that this idea sounded like the blind leading the blind.)

  In a series of texts and calls between Tom Bradby, Prince William and his closest staff it was arranged that the two men would meet on the evening of Monday 14 November. On the day before the scheduled meeting the ‘Blackadder’ column in the News of the World reported:

  If ITN do a stocktake on their portable editing suites this week they might notice they’re one down. That’s because their pin-up political editor Tom Bradby has lent it to close pal Prince William so he can edit together all his gap-year videos and DVDs into one very posh home movie.

  Tom Bradby was ‘pretty shocked’. The next evening he went to St James’s Palace as planned and set up the editing equipment in a room in Prince William’s private quarters. The prince came downstairs and before they started the editing lesson the two men discussed the story.

  Bradby later remembered the conversation:

  We basically sat there and discussed – look, how on earth could this have got out? We worked out that he and I and only two other people close to him had known about it.727

  When you’re in a situation where you’ve had a conversation with someone, and it’s confidential and then an aspect of it is splattered all over a newspaper, that is uncomfortable. So that was why I felt it was right to explore what really happened. We talked about it and we agreed that there was some potential security implication and it was then up to them to go to the police, as they did.728

  Prince William thought the theory that there had been a breach of security made sense because he was already baffled how a story about a sports injury he had picked up had appeared the previous week in the very same column. ‘Blackadder’ called itself ‘the snake in the grass of the rich and powerful’.

  Bradby had a hunch that stories like these might have been gathered by reporters hacking into mobile phones. He later explained:

  As ITV’s royal correspondent (a post I held a few years previously) I had heard that this was an absolutely routine way of doing business in tabloid newspapers. In fact, during the Diana years phone hacking was the least of it. How did the Squidgygate tape (in which Diana shared intimacies with a lover) get recorded and find itself into the public domain? And what about the tape in which we heard Charles asking Camilla if he could be re-incarnated as her tampax? One can only suspect that someone, somewhere did a lot worse than hacking voice messages.729

  A few weeks later Bradby’s hunch had been proven right. Scotland Yard detectives had checked with a major mobile phone operator and discovered that as many as nine ‘rogue’ phones were being used to call into the mobile inboxes of the two royal staff who had known about Bradby’s scheduled meeting with Prince William. One of those nine phones was the home number of a reporter on the News of the World. Detectives separately discovered that a man had been calling another mobile phone company, posing as a member of staff, trying to get details which would have enabled him to access the voicemails of royal staff. That inquiry led them to the offices of a private investigator.

  One year later, in January 2007, the royal editor of the News of the World, Clive Goodman, was convicted at the Old Bailey after pleading guilty to intercepting phone messages. He was sentenced to four months in jail. His employers were to describe him as a single ‘rogue reporter’ acting without any authorisation. A private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months. The judge, Mr Justice Gross, described their behaviour as ‘low conduct, reprehensible in the extreme’. Only Goodman and Mulcaire were charged at this time. It seemed that it was the end of the matter. It was not.

  The full sequence of events from this ‘rogue reporter’ defence through to the investigations into phone-hacking by Guardian reporter Nick Davies, his revelation that the News of the World had hacked the phone of missing schoolgirl Millie Dowler, the closure of the News of the World and the establishment of the Leveson Inquiry into the press are best set out in Dial M for Murdoch by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman. Watson was one of the parliamentarians who pushed for the truth when others, including most of the British press, decided
this was not a story worth pursuing.

  The whole phone-hacking episode is perhaps the best recent example of the confusion about if, when and where reporters are justified in crossing vaguely drawn ethical lines. The press has fairly put the case that phone-hacking was primarily a criminal matter. The editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, and the doyen of tabloid and mid-market editors, Paul Dacre, attacked the creation by David Cameron of Lord Justice Leveson’s Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press. At his very first encounter with Sir Brian Leveson at a preliminary seminar he told the judge, ‘The truth is the police should have investigated this crime properly and prosecuted the perpetrators.’

  But the phone-hacking scandal can’t solely be blamed on the police. There are a series of reasons why wider ethical ambiguity and confusion contributed to it.

  The first was the existence of a cultural issue in the media.

  In my own experience over four decades, the vast majority of British journalists respected and observed the law of the land. But occasionally, and it was only occasionally, a few of them believed that they had the right to opt in and out of observing certain laws as if these applied to ordinary citizens but not to journalists.

  Paul Dacre told the Leveson Inquiry that this was a thing of the past. He looked back on what the British press was like when he started in newspapers in the 1970s: