[A-List] UK state: Iraq crisis

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Tough reporter who has riled No 10

Patrick Wintour and Jason Deans
Friday June 27, 2003
The Guardian

Andrew Gilligan was hired by the BBC to add bite to the Today programme and
generate just the kind of row that has now broken over the heads of BBC
executives.

He works long hours, obsessively seeking out secrets in the defence
establishment. He has a reputation for being a loner, with some describing
him as arrogant.

Since joining Today as its defence correspondent from the Sunday Telegraph
three years ago he has repeatedly irritated Tony Blair's director of
communications, Alastair Campbell, and the Labour spin machine with stories
that the government would rather had not seen the light of day.

Hired on his reputation for breaking defence stories, he nonetheless
unnerves some colleagues and executives with his high-profile stories.

The BBC knows it needs to protect its reputation for impartiality and
sometimes the risk inherent in exclusives leads to accusations of loss of
objectivity.

Gilligan was introduced to the programme by the former Today editor Rod
Liddle.

Liddle describes Gilligan as "one of the most single-minded reporters I have
ever worked with", but admits that his aggressive story-getting style was "a
bit of a culture shock for the BBC".

The New Statesman's political editor, John Kampfner, who worked alongside
Gilligan when he was a political correspondent on Today, said: "On one side
the BBC are excited by the Gilligan phenomenon, because it plays to the
'make politics sexy' agenda that they have, and yet they are also deeply
uncomfortable with it."

Gilligan first clashed with Mr Campbell in November 2000 with a Today story
about plans for a draft EU constitution.

But it is over the Iraq war that he has really riled the government spin
machine. In April he claimed Iraqis in Baghdad were living in "more fear
than they have ever known" because of the lawlessness and looting that broke
out after the fall of Saddam.

"Try telling that to people put in shredders or getting their tongues cut
out" under the former Iraqi leader's rule, was the curt response from a No
10 spokesman.

Gilligan was also given access to an intelligence document refuting claims
that there were links between al-Qaida and Saddam. He alleged that Mr Blair
was making the link, something Donald Anderson, chairman of the foreign
affairs select committee, questioned.

------

Corporation and Campbell spin out of control

Emily Bell
Friday June 27, 2003
The Guardian

Somewhere in the BBC, maybe in the desk of Ann Sloman, its chief political
adviser, there is a dossier of correspondence between the government, or
more particularly No 10 Downing Street and the corporation.

This may be a slim volume or a bulging file. We know it exists because the
lobby briefing given to journalists yesterday mentioned "extensive private
correspondence" with the Beeb on the tricky issue of the document which may
or may not have been sexed up.

The interesting thing about Alastair Campbell's assertions and the BBC's
rebuttals is that we may never know what form this private dialogue took.
This despite the fact that the public both paid for Andrew Gilligan's
original story and also paid for the government time expended in seeking to
destroy it, and to some extent the credibility of the BBC.

Campbell's bravura performance showed his own contempt for objective and
truthful reporting with a slip here and an aside there: an unsubstantiated
and unprovable claim that the BBC had an "anti-war agenda", his description
of the Mirror newspaper as anti-war and his description of the Sun not as
"pro-war" but "passionately supportive". There is also his dark intonation
that there were serious concerns among senior people within the BBC about
the original story.

Journalistic antipathy towards a man addicted to spin is hard to suppress.
Particularly when one remembers that almost a year ago Downing Street was
dropping a submission to the press complaints commission against the
Spectator and Peter Oborne for claims that the prime minister had sought an
enhanced role at the Queen Mother's funeral.

Another humiliation for Campbell, this time on the Mail on Sunday, was an
incorrect rebuttal of the claims that Cherie Booth had taken advice from
convicted conman Peter Foster.

Campbell's arrogant desire to do for Andrew Gilligan what Norman Tebbit once
did for Kate Adie (compiling a highly critical dossier on BBC coverage
following her reports of the bombing of Triploi in 1986), makes one less
inclined to examine serious issues for the BBC.

It is quite legitimate to ask whether an independent licence-funded
broadcaster should run stories on the strength of one unattributable source.
Or indeed whether the corporation should be pursuing investigative
journalism at all, which, not only carries an agenda but shapes it too.

It is equally valuable to ask what kind of pressure a government puts on a
licence-funded broadcaster pre charter renewal through its "extensive
private correspondence". It is difficult to examine either of these very
important issues properly when the two participants are so closed in their
procedures and so opaque in their accountability.

Campbell and Blair do not demonstrate much respect for the free press and no
tolerance of the inevitable fact that as more reporters actually go to war
than cabinet ministers and special advisers, that their view is occasionally
going to be different.

Equally the BBC seldom apologises for anything and has an unfortunate
tendency to adopt its own spin instead of exposing its procedures to more
debate and analysis. Arrogance runs through the taps of White City every bit
as much as it flows into the gutters of Whitehall.

The attempts to discredit and humiliate Gilligan personally instead of
legitimately question editorial processes of the BBC is particularly
despicable. What the affair highlights more than anything else is that
unless and until we have a greater respect - or even proper legislation -
for freedom of information we will always have partial reporting.

But to deny journalists at the BBC the opportunity to investigate and break
stories makes a nonsense of its independent status.

Both the BBC and Campbell are communicators on a grand scale, but they are
both found wanting in terms of openness and accountability. This is the real
lesson at the heart of the dodgy dossiers.

· Emily Bell is editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited