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To Sue
And to Matthew, Christine, Alice, and Joe
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE Three Days in January
CHAPTER TWO The First Thirty Years
CHAPTER THREE Into Television
CHAPTER FOUR A Year at TV-am
CHAPTER FIVE TVS and Back to LWT
CHAPTER SIX Running and Losing LWT
CHAPTER SEVEN Joining the BBC
CHAPTER EIGHT The BBC Years (1)
CHAPTER NINE The BBC Years (2)
CHAPTER TEN Why Did They Cry? (Culture Change at the BBC)
CHAPTER ELEVEN Television and Sport
CHAPTER TWELVE Gilligan, Kelly, and Hutton
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Why Hutton Was Wrong
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Some Final Thoughts
Index
P.S.
About the author
Leading by Example
LIFE at a Glance
Top Ten Favourite Films
Top Ten Favourite Tracks
About the book
A Collective Failure? by Greg Dyke
A Day in the Life of Greg Dyke
Read on
If you loved this, you’ll like…
Find Out More
Acknowledgements
About the Author
From the reviews of Inside Story:
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE Three Days in January
As I left home on the morning of Tuesday 27 January 2004, I had no idea that within thirty-six hours my career as Director-General of the BBC would be over. I didn’t even see it as a remote possibility that I would be fired by a board of BBC Governors behaving like frightened rabbits caught in the headlights – a board unnerved by a combination of the resignation of their Chairman, Lord Hutton’s infamous report, and the prospect of the revenge the Government might seek to take against the BBC.
Of course very few people knew then that Lord Hutton’s report, due to be published the following day, would so damn the BBC and would so totally exonerate the Government of any mistakes or wrongdoing. It was our view that the BBC had made some mistakes and was likely to be criticized but that the Government would deservedly suffer at least as much. Nor could anyone have known that within forty-eight hours the acting Chairman of the BBC would do lasting damage to the BBC’s reputation at home and abroad by issuing the most grovelling of apologies to a vitriolic Government.
And who could possibly have foreseen that thousands of BBC employees, in all parts of the United Kingdom, would have taken to the streets to support me, or that they would have clubbed together to pay for a full-page advertisement in the Daily Telegraph backing me and challenging the Governors to defend the independence of the BBC? And how could anyone have known on that Tuesday morning that by the end of the week Lord Hutton’s report would have been so comprehensively ridiculed by media and public alike, its findings dismissed as a crude whitewash of the Government and yet another example of Number Ten spin?
Nevertheless, as I left home that morning I certainly knew that it was going to be a lively week.
With the publication of the Hutton Report imminent, the photographers and reporters were already camped outside my house in Twickenham, so even the most innocent of passers-by would have known that something was up. My partner Sue was away in Suffolk for the week, real evidence that we didn’t expect a major crisis: if we had, then there was no way she would have gone. Only Joe and I were there that morning. Joe was sixteen at the time, the youngest of our four children and the only one at home. He was used to journalists and camera crews turning up outside our house and we both smiled when we saw them there that morning.
Our house backs onto nine acres of parkland that we share with forty or so other houses. This gives us numerous choices for getting in and out, making it virtually impossible for any reporter, photographer, or camera crew to catch me. We saw avoiding them as a game that we had been playing, on and off, for the four years I’d been Director-General. On some occasions Joe or my daughter Alice, who in January was away building a school in Africa, used to take pity on them and would tell them that I’d already left, but the journalists never believed them. Joe, Alice, and I quite enjoyed the game. Sue, on the other hand, hated these people intruding into our privacy in this way.
Because I had expected the press to arrive, I had already arranged for Joe to spend the next couple of days at a friend’s house, so on that Tuesday morning we left together through the back door, with Joe pushing his bike and carrying a bagful of clothes. We got onto the road through the garden of Number 10a and when we got there I rang Bill, my driver, and he drove around the corner and picked me up. Meanwhile, Joe cycled off to college. An easy win that morning. The next time Joe and I were to meet was on Thursday evening, when I was no longer the Director-General and he had already started making jokes about leaving home if I was going to be there full time.
That Tuesday was Hutton publication day minus one, the day when all of those involved in the inquiry were to get an advanced copy of the report. We were to receive it exactly twenty-four hours before Hutton pronounced, which meant we would get it around lunchtime. A total of twenty-two of us at the BBC had signed confidentiality agreements and we had agreed a timetable for the day. I was going to read the report alone in my office. Richard Sambrook, the Director of BBC News, and his deputy Mark Damazer would read it in the meeting room next door, along with Magnus Brooke, my acting business manager. Magnus was a lawyer whom I had picked from relative obscurity within the BBC for this job, and he was brilliant. During the summer he had gone back to the legal division for a period to help out on Hutton. The rest of the people entitled to read the report that day would be in rooms nearby. Andrew Gilligan, the journalist at the centre of the row, and his legal team also had a room allocated in the building.
We had all set aside four hours to read the report knowing that it was likely to be nearly 700 pages long; but as it turned out, we didn’t need anything like as long as that. Halfway down page three I knew we were in trouble. It was on that page that 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 they had published in September 2002. With this one inexplicable decision Lord Hutton had wiped out key parts of the BBC’s evidence and a critical foundation of our case. The following week we were to discover perhaps the most damning fact of all: that the Prime Minister himself had no idea what sort of weapons of mass destruction he had referred to, even though he’d used the so-called evidence of their existence as the central theme of his own introduction to the dossier and a reason for going to war.
There was a crumb of comfort for everyone at the BBC at the bottom of page three when Hutton said he was satisfied that no one involved in the row, including the BBC, could possibly have realized that Dr David Kelly, the Government expert on weapons of mass destruction who had been the BBC’s source for its original story, might take his own life. But these were virtually the only kind words about the BBC in the whole report, and even that reference was far kinder to those in 10 Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence than it was to the BBC. It was Number Ten and the MOD who had hounded Dr Kelly, not the BBC: we had gone to great lengths to keep his identity secret.
I tried to plough on through the report but rapidly discovered it was a cut and paste job. It felt like Hutton, late in life, had learnt how to use Microsoft Word: the report was largely made up of tracts of evidence given to the inquiry with Hutton’s opinion simply tacked on at the end, often without any explanation as to how or why he had reached his conclusions. When writing about the report later, the former editor of The Times, Lord Rees-Mogg, agreed. He called it a defective document in which the conclusions did not follow from the evidence.
I began to skim the document at about the same time as Mark Damazer stuck his head round the door to tell me that I only had to read the seven pages that made up Chapter 12 because the guts of the report was all there. This was the summary of Hutton’s conclusions and I read them in total disbelief. This man wasn’t on the same planet as the rest of us. Hadn’t he listened to the evidence? Hadn’t he listened to his own QC during the inquiry? How could he possibly have reached these conclusions?
Forty minutes after I started reading the report I walked into the adjoining meeting room where Sambrook, Damazer, and young Magnus Brooke were all sitting looking shell shocked. They tell me I said something like, ‘Well, boys, we’ve been fucked, so what are we going to do about it?’
In the week or two before publication we had worked on a whole range of scenarios for what Hutton might say and how we should respond. The problem was that none of our scenarios was as bad as the reality. In our scenario planning it had only crossed our minds once, and then only fleetingly, that Hutton might find that the dossier had not been ‘sexed up’ at all. We all laughed and dismissed it, as the evidence was so clear cut. But that was exactly what Hutton had decided. There had been no sexing up; even worse, he had found against the BBC and for the Government on virtually every single count.
The four of us rapidly and prophetically agreed that this report was so one-sided we didn’t believe it would turn out to be such good news for the Government as initially appeared to be the case. It was so much in their favour people would find it hard to believe. After all, dozens of journalists had sat through the inquiry and listened to the evidence. Surely they would see Hutton’s findings as completely inconsistent with the evidence? And what about the wider public? They had followed the inquiry in large numbers and would surely see the same inconsistencies. Interestingly, over at The Sun newspaper, which, unbeknown to any of us, had illicitly obtained a copy of the report, the reaction was very similar. There the paper’s editor, Rebekah Wade, and her team immediately saw that the report might be seen as a complete whitewash.
The problem we faced on that Tuesday was: how long would it take before this happened, and what would our defence be in the meantime? We discussed a strategy and decided to stick to the plan we had developed in advance. We would say that most of the criticisms of the BBC had been acknowledged during the inquiry; that, as a result, we had taken steps to improve our procedures; and that we would soon announce changes to the BBC’s editorial guidelines. However, I did add a new line. We would also say, on the crucial issue of reporting a confidential source, that we had real doubts whether Lord Hutton had got it right, that he had misunderstood the law, and that his conclusions were a threat to free journalism in the UK.
Around 2.30 p.m. we went down one flight of stairs to see the BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies. He was with the two other BBC Governors who had been allowed to read the report in advance – Pauline Neville-Jones and the Vice-Chairman, Lord Ryder. Both were very Establishment figures. Richard Ryder had been Chief Whip in the last Conservative Government and Neville-Jones had been a career civil servant at the Foreign Office and was a former Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). She had left the Foreign Office when she was not appointed Britain’s Ambassador in Paris.
I can’t say I liked Pauline Neville-Jones, but I did have some respect for her. She was one of a number of Governors who had fought against my appointment as Director-General four years earlier and was still a powerful voice on the current Board, which was a bit short of people with authority. She certainly worked harder than any other Governor in my time at the BBC, was obviously very clever in a manipulative Foreign Office sort of way, and had successfully sustained the BBC’s close relationship with the Foreign Office. This mattered because it was the Foreign Office who funded the BBC World Service.
But neither I nor the two BBC chairmen I worked with, Christopher Bland and Gavyn Davies, ever totally trusted Pauline. She applied to be Deputy Chairman of the BBC when Lord Ryder was recruited and was turned down. She was incredibly ambitious but I always suspected she had not been as successful in life as she had wished or expected.
On the other hand, I did like Richard Ryder. I first met him at the Conservative Party Conference a decade or so earlier when I was Chief Executive of London Weekend Television and found him quiet and thoughtful, unlike most politicians. He had been one of the people who had worked with the public relations guru Gordon Rees back in the late 1970s transforming Margaret Thatcher’s image, so he’d been around the fringes of politics for a long time. When he became Deputy Chairman of the BBC he was still on the Board of Ipswich Town Football Club, and as a former Director of Manchester United I had plenty to chat with him about. The problem with Richard was that he had been recruited as Deputy Chairman to help build a relationship with the Conservative Party but quite clearly disliked many of the people now leading it. He had failed to make a single speech since he was elevated to the House of Lords in 1997 and seemed reluctant even to attend, let alone host, lunches and dinners in the Lords in support of the BBC. People in both Public Affairs and the Secretary’s office at the BBC complained all the time that he didn’t work hard enough to be the Deputy Chairman.
When we met up with Gavyn, Pauline, and Richard they, too, seemed shocked. Pauline said she was horrified by the report; Richard said very little. Gavyn told us that he had been told by a close friend that we had made a mistake co-operating with Hutton in the first place and that from the moment this particular judge had been appointed the result was a foregone conclusion. Our only hope, according to Gavyn’s friend, had been to attack the way Hutton ran the whole inquiry at every available opportunity: that way we would have been able to demonstrate that he had been appointed by the Government to deliver a verdict that would favour them. It was an interesting perspective but hardly relevant to the position we were now in. In the middle of this discussion Tara Conlan, a journalist on the Daily Mail, rang Gavyn on his mobile phone and asked him openly what was in the report. We all laughed as he gave her a very polite brush-off.
By late afternoon we moved to a bigger room, where we were joined by our legal and press teams. Our QC, Andrew Caldecott, turned up with a comprehensive argument detailing how Hutton had completely misunderstood the law on ‘qualified privilege’, which covered the rights journalistic organizations now possessed. In the end we split into two groups, one to plan strategy and the other practicalities.
I worked on a comparatively aggressive statement, which we would put out the following day and which we’d all agreed Gavyn was to deliver. Together we watched the result of the parliamentary vote on tuition fees, which took place around 7.00 p.m. We got even more depressed when the Government narrowly won, thanks to Gordon Brown delivering his supporters at the last minute. Our reaction was nothing to do with the pros and cons of the issue; we simply thought we’d get an easier time the following day if the Government had another crisis on its hands.
The whole team then had dinner together. I remember being pleased that someone had ordered something other than sandwiches. At the time I was on the Atkins diet, and January is also one of the two months in the year when I don’t drink alcohol, so as I munched through two or three pieces of chicken, and drank my bottled water, I was feeling very virtuous.
By now Gavyn had begun to talk privately about resigning. I was strongly against it, but I thought it had to be his decision. As the hours went by he became more and more convinced it was the right and honourable thing for him to do. I certainly had no intention of resigning. We discussed the position briefly with Richard Ryder before he disappeared for the evening and we talked over the whole strategy with Pauline Neville-Jones later in the evening after she had returned from a drinks party.
The three of us – Gavyn, Pauline, and I – sat privately in a room together and weighed up the options, a conversation that was to take on greater importance later given what happened the following day. Gavyn said he believed it was right for him to resign because the Governors had been criticized for the actions they had taken. I disagreed and said that if someone had to go, then we should discuss whether it should be him or me, given that Lord Hutton had also criticized the management. I didn’t believe it was necessary for either of us to go. I didn’t believe then, and still don’t believe today, that the BBC had done enough wrong to merit such a drastic response.
My view was that if Lord Hutton’s criticisms required resignations, then the Chairman, all the Governors, the Director-General, and several senior people in BBC News should all go at once. Since I also knew that Tony Blair had told Gavyn in a private telephone conversation that, whatever happened, Number Ten would not be calling on either Gavyn or me to go, I was of the view we should all sit out the coming storm.
While Gavyn hadn’t finally made up his mind he was of the view that at least one resignation was essential. As he says now: ‘I was willing to resign in preference to apologizing for doing nothing wrong, indeed for telling the British people the truth about the September dossier. I was never going to grovel but I am not sure that a strategy of “no apology and no resignation” was ever viable after Hutton.’
Once Pauline realized that Gavyn was likely to go she turned to me and said it would be impossible for both of us to go at the same time. I agreed. Given what she did the following day, this was an interesting position, one that both Gavyn and I clearly remember her taking. I said that, in those circumstances, I would need the Governors to make it clear they supported me, and she agreed with that.
During the evening, Richard Sambrook took a call from the BBC’s political editor, Andy Marr, who told us that The Sun had got a comprehensive leak of the report that made it very clear that Downing Street had been cleared and that the BBC had got the blame. It was a good scoop and the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News reported the story in full. Tuition fees were now yesterday’s news and, a day earlier than expected, Hutton was now the big story.
But where had the leak come from? I and a million others immediately assumed it was Alastair Campbell, that it was payback time for The Sun in recognition of the support they had given Tony Blair and the Government during the Iraq war. During his time in Downing Street Campbell had regularly given exclusives to The Sun, sometimes when they were other people’s stories. As Alastair was no longer on the staff at Number Ten, my view at the time was that he had little to lose by leaking the document even if he was caught, and there wasn’t much chance of that. Despite having spun his exit brilliantly we knew that Campbell had been pushed out. I had absolutely no evidence to support the view that Campbell leaked the story, and I now believe my immediate response was wrong. What I do know is that Downing Street was very scared that it would be blamed for the leak and that evening demanded that Rebekah Wade, The Sun’s editor, put out a statement making it clear that it wasn’t Downing Street or Campbell who had leaked it.
Since then, it has been suggested to me that the leak might have come from someone on our side who was playing a very Machiavellian game to make it look like it originated with Campbell. I don’t buy that because it would have taken such a peculiar sort of mind to think that way, and what would have been the point? Another theory is that The Sun got the report from the printers. Lord Hutton set up an inquiry to try to discover who leaked his report, but I suspect we’ll never know who actually did it.
At around 11 p.m. we all decided it was time to pack up and go home. I took the back way out of Broadcasting House to avoid any journalists but I did notice that Tara Conlan was still in reception. She rang me in the car about twenty minutes later, still digging.
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Tara, the Daily Mail’s TV editor. She was my bête noire when the Daily Mail was attacking me and the BBC virtually every day. She used to ask ridiculous questions at press conferences. I once replied to her by saying that her paper had already run the story in question on at least three separate occasions and yet she was now asking about it for the fourth time. Her answer was wonderful. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, ‘but my editor likes the story.’ Later, when our relationship with the Mail improved, I grew to respect her. She worked incredibly hard, and when other journalists gave up she was always there.
On that Tuesday night I told her very politely that I was still bound by the confidentiality agreement we’d all signed and that I wouldn’t break it (even though by then someone had broken it quite spectacularly). The only unauthorized person I had told about the contents of the report was Sue when I rang her in Suffolk. She asked what it was like. I answered in one word, ‘Grim’, and that was all I told her.
The next morning saw the same pattern as the day before. I left home early, escaping from my house via the back door and walking down to 10a, where Bill picked me up. There were even more journalists and crews outside my house than the previous day. I was glad that Sue was away and that I’d arranged for Joe to stay with a friend. Why should they have to put up with all this hassle simply because I was a public figure? I’d chosen that life, they hadn’t.
It was an odd morning in the office. My PA for the past sixteen years, Fiona Hillary, arrived back from a holiday in Cuba not knowing that both our days at the BBC were numbered. By that evening she was in tears – not something I’ve seen from Fiona during the years we’ve worked together. She was also in a particularly difficult position: she is a close friend of Tony and Cherie Blair (her husband, Barry Cox, the Deputy Chairman of Channel Four, had previously been their next-door neighbour).
I didn’t really have enough to do on that Wednesday morning and yet I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. So I hung around chatting to various people. Sally Osman, our ever smiling Head of Communications, wandered through. For me, one of the joys of working at the BBC was working with Sally: we managed to laugh our way through almost every crisis – and you get a lot at the BBC. Mark Damazer also joined us and, at one point during that morning, all three of us were in with Gavyn Davies trying to persuade him not to resign or, at the very least, to wait until later in the day. I did get him to agree that he wouldn’t announce anything until after Hutton had made his public statement at lunchtime. Gavyn also made it clear that, as he was likely to resign, he would not now be able to be the person who responded to Hutton on behalf of the BBC. I would have to do that instead.