How
Blair betrayed me - and the BBC
Greg Dyke was at the centre of a battle that pitted him against an
old ally - the Prime Minister. For the first time, he reveals the full
truth about Blair, Campbell and Hutton
Sunday August 29, 2004 , The Observer 2nd part (the
first)
I Gilligan was in Iraq for the whole of the war, and his reports were not always popular with Campbell. When the war ended and Gilligan returned, Richard told him that while some of his reporting had been very good, he often went 10 per cent too far. A period of relative quiet in our relationship with Downing Street followed. Then on 29 May Today ran a report by Gilligan, preceded by an unscripted 'two-way' [interview with a presenter]. The report, extensively cross-checked by Gilligan and Today's editor, Kevin Marsh, told of deep concern in the intelligence community that the Government's 2002 dossier had been 'sexed up'. I returned from Ireland on 30 May, and went into the office the following Monday. There was a bit of noise around about the Today story, but nothing particularly unusual. By then I had read an article by Gilligan in the Mail on Sunday in which he had crucially added that his source had told him the September dossier had been 'sexed up' by Campbell himself.
The first complaint from the Number 10 communications director was sent on 6 June. His letters were often very long. He clearly suffered from verbal diarrhoea, which I always thought strange given his background as a tabloid journalist. Sometimes it was quite difficult to work out what he was actually complaining about. Over four pages he protested that Gilligan had failed to understand the role of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), and said we had broken our own BBC guidelines by the use of a single unattributable source. Sambrook replied on 11 June that the BBC had several sources who expressed concern about the way intelligence was used in the September dossier. A day later another letter came from Campbell, again to Richard, repeating his complaints. At my suggestion Richard offered him the chance to use the BBC's official complaints process. Campbell never replied to that invitation.
After this spurt of letters there was complete silence from Campbell for 10 days. We all assumed the complaints had gone the way of so many others. Richard received letters like these so regularly that when he got the second letter he described it to me as 'just another Alastair rant'. At around this time the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee was holding hearings on the decision to go to war, and its members wanted Campbell to appear. In particular they wanted to know about the 'dodgy dossier', which Campbell's staff had taken from the internet, changed to improve the case for war and published in February 2003 as their own work. Putting out documents of selective information to improve the government's case was food and drink to Campbell and his Number 10 team. Whether you should be doing that as a government information organisation is debatable; whether you should be doing it when the stakes are as high as people being killed in a war is not.
When the Prime Minister discovered the truth about how the dossier had been produced, he should have been outraged and fired Campbell. That he didn't, tells us a lot about Blair. To understand how all this came about, one has to understand the whole psyche of Blair's Number 10 and the enormous power wielded by Campbell. In many ways Campbell is a political genius but over seven years he turned Downing Street into a place with overtones of Nixon's White House. You were either for them or against them. And if you opposed them, you became the enemy. Campbell finally appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee on 25 June, and launched a full frontal verbal assault on the BBC, accusing it of lying and running an anti-war agenda. It was an unprecedented attack on the BBC's journalism by a civil servant with unprecedented powers. So why did Campbell do it?
It looked to me as if his assault was a means of diverting attention from the 'dodgy dossier'. He decided attack was the best means of defence; and, in the short term, it worked. I suspect that Campbell had been wanting to 'get' the BBC for a long time. In particular he wanted to get Gilligan and Today. Campbell had told me personally how much he disliked the programme, and we knew that in particular, he disliked its main presenter, John Humphrys. The dislike of Gilligan went back to 2000 when the correspondent had warned that a new European law could form the basis of an EU super-state. Campbell called him 'gullible Gilligan'. At the select committee, Campbell personalised his attack by saying we had accused the prime minister of lying, which was completely untrue. Again, this was a typical Campbell ploy.
No one had ever mentioned the prime minister, but it suited Campbell to claim that criticism of Number 10 or the government meant directly accusing the prime minister of lying. To his discredit, Blair later went along with this. On the day of Campbell's attack, the BBC Executive was away at a strategy conference in Witley Park in Surrey. As usual we had some bonding activity, in which executive members did silly things to make them feel more of a team. We were halfway through an 'It's a Knockout' competition when Sambrook took a call on his mobile phone. He told me it was from Campbell, who had gone ballistic, attacking the BBC. But we decided to carry on with the game, probably because my team was winning. We were still ahead until the last round when we all had to do country dancing.
At that moment Alan Yentob [director of drama] came into his own, and his team won on 'artistic merit'. What a joke! I got home from the conference to find a fax that Campbell had sent to the office. It was clearly an attempt to be friendly, saying he had always admired me, and he 'was sorry' he had had to attack the BBC. I didn't believe a word of it. It was very clear to me that Campbell was not interested in a proper investigation of his complaint: he wanted a bust-up for political reasons. His fax to me looked like part of his game, and I didn't want to play along with it. I decided not to respond. Richard Sambrook had received another three-page letter from Campbell, demanding answers to a series of questions and a reply that day. Next day I helped draft the BBC's response.
Replying quickly was a mistake, my mistake. We allowed ourselves to be driven by Campbell's timetable, and sent a detailed response that only upset him even more. He received it while he was watching the tennis at Wimbledon, and immediately drove to the studios of ITN. He demanded to be interviewed live on Channel 4 News news, and laid into the BBC once more in a quite extraordinary fashion. He had told Blair what he was doing, and the prime minister reluctantly agreed. Even Campbell later accepted that his behaviour had been excessive; Blair clearly had little control over him. We all thought that by then Campbell was completely out of control, and we were not alone in this.
In one of a number of conversations Gavyn Davies had with the prime minister over this period, all initiated by Blair, Gavyn said he thought Campbell's behaviour was over the top. Blair replied: 'Don't we all.'
L'articolo tradotto in Italiano.
by www.osservatoriosullalegalita.org
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