Even 24 hours after receiving the report of the Hutton inquiry released on 28 January, the BBC was still visibly in a state of shock. The director-general, Greg Dyke, first recorded an enigmatic holding statement, rather than face the world's news media. In it, he questioned the severity of the verdict Lord Hutton had passed on the BBC, and denied there would be any further comment. The next day, he resigned, admitting the BBC's "errors of judgment" and affirming the need for "closure". In an email to all BBC staff, he said: "it will be hard to draw a line under this whole affair while I am still here".
Within minutes of Dyke's initial reaction, his chairman, Gavyn Davies, had resigned, issuing as he did so a series of barbed questions to Hutton, but remarking that "you cannot choose your own umpire".
It was a curious choice of phrase. For much of the previous four years, the BBC had vehemently defended its unique regulatory structure – whereby a Board of Governors both controls the BBC and then passes judgment on its performance – against a rising tide of opinion that it should fall under the aegis of the new industry regulator, Ofcom (the Office of Communications), like all other UK broadcasters.
See Anthony Barnett's Editor's Note on the part Alastair Campbell played in the affair
By the time the current BBC royal charter expires in 2006, this arrangement will have lasted eighty years. The BBC's unique status and strength are often attributed to the complete independence of the governors (as well as to the licence fee funding system that supposedly insulates the BBC from direct governmental pressure). But what might have suited the early 20th century is increasingly anachronistic in an age of stricter corporate accountability.
Digging for defeat
The Hutton report is widely regarded as blinkered and unfair, in castigating the BBC whilst letting ministers and civil servants off the hook. Dyke and Davies are understandably astonished that the overwhelming evidence of the government deliberately misleading the public about the Iraqi threat – much of it submitted in irrefutable testimony and documents to Hutton – was completely ignored in his verdict. Nor was the enormous public service performed by the BBC in opening up the truth about the September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction acknowledged by Hutton.
Yet it would be a mistake to allow this frustration, or the widespread admiration of the BBC as an institution, to blind us to the simple truth. What Hutton identified as faults in the BBC's reporting and editorial controls was spot on. There was a series of failures, journalistic, editorial, managerial, presentational and gubernatorial, which resulted in the most damaging verdict on the BBC in its history.
It could so easily have been avoided. The editor of the BBC radio programme where the entire saga originated, Today, knew that his defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, was an unconventional reporter, operating as a lone wolf, rarely in the office. His despatches from Baghdad after the war, cataloguing Iraqi frustrations and coalition missteps, had infuriated Downing Street, triggering many complaints.
After his return from Iraq, Gilligan contacted the biological warfare expert, David Kelly, a previous informant, for a mutual exchange of information. He appeared to bring no pen, notebook or tape recorder to the meeting. When Kelly made some interesting disclosures, Gilligan attempted to record them in his electronic personal organiser. Subsequently, he claims to have transcribed his notes, but no copy survives.
Read David Elstein's 'Caught in the crossfire: broadcasting in wartime' critique of media coverage of the Iraq war.
The fatal broadcast was not made till a week later, yet the editorial team at Today do not seem to have imposed the discipline of a script on Gilligan in that interval, despite his reputation as a maverick, and despite the significance of his story. He stumbled on to the air in a live two-way interview with Today's host, John Humphrys, after a sleepless night, and made an allegation that he could not sustain, even though it later turned out to contain an element of truth.
A swift retraction in response to the first government complaints would have ended the affair promptly, and perhaps saved David Kelly's life. However, the BBC – rightly or wrongly – is reluctant to admit error, and has inadequate machinery to deal with error. Various supervisors in the news editorial chain failed to interrogate Gilligan's story and sourcing, but simply retreated behind the barricade, regarding the barrage of abuse from Tony Blair's key advisor, Alastair Campbell, as typical bluster that would blow over.
But the rage did not subside. Greg Dyke personally intervened to help the director of news, Richard Sambrook, write a strong rebuttal to Campbell. At this stage, he had not even read the transcript of the original broadcast. He is the BBC's editor-in-chief, but claims that it is impossible to supervise output that includes 40 hours of news a day across multiple channels in the way that could have avoided the Gilligan problem.
This is a weak position. A fierce counter-attack, without checking your defences, is foolhardy. Yet not only did the BBC raise the stakes, they inaccurately described their source and were then flummoxed when Kelly outed himself to his superiors as Gilligan's source. By this time, the chairman, Gavyn Davies, was involved, but he repeatedly declined to back down, relying on the assurances provided by Dyke and Sambrook.
He even induced the board of governors to write in defiant terms, citing the BBCs independence as grounds for refusing to apologise or even investigate the complaint. Yet one of his fellow governors, with longer experience of both the BBC and government, urged him to invoke the complaints procedure as a means of defusing the crisis. So Davies led the Governors into the pit which Dyke and Sambrook had dug.
In advance of Hutton's conclusions, Davies and Dyke ordered a number of cosmetic changes in BBC procedure. Today's "two-ways" were to be more strictly policed. Single-sourced stories were to be more rigorously checked. BBC journalists were no longer to write for newspapers (Gilligan had compounded his offence with an article for the Mail on Sunday in which he claimed Kelly had named Campbell as the architect of hardening the September 2002 dossier). A deputy director-general was to be appointed to run a reinforced complaints unit. The governors were to have a dedicated support unit to make them less reliant on management for information.
High stakes, high opportunity
None of that, of course, addressed the central issue: the BBCs lack of accountability and consequent sense of immunity. Many complainants to the BBC have experienced the arrogance and dismissiveness that flow from the self-regulatory arrangements. Where BBC accountants are subject to strict internal and external audit, journalism is much more loosely supervised.
I have seen an 80-year-old retired civil servant – the victim of multiple breaches of the BBCs producer's code when he was interviewed – dragged through fifteen months of interminable correspondence and denial by a recalcitrant BBC, whose own "independent" complaints unit even accused him and his lawyers of lying. No apology is yet forthcoming for the most blatant piece of journalistic malpractice I have encountered in forty years in broadcasting.
Not until Hutton was there ever anyone in sufficient authority to challenge the BBC's culture of non-accountability. He may have written a hopelessly skewed report, but his critique of the BBC was devastatingly accurate. There will surely be more resignations.
More importantly, the process of reviewing the BBCs charter ahead of renewal takes on a new dimension. The pressure for Ofcom overview will now be joined by much more radical proposals for restructuring the BBC and delivering real accountability. The sheer size and dominance of the BBC, which have caused so much complaint from other parts of the creative industries, have helped make the BBC a target (the government did not even bother to complain about the Mail on Sunday article) rather than provide a bulwark. The board of governors itself may not survive.
This should not cause undue dismay. The BBC needs to change. Its defensiveness, its all-embracing presence and its funding mechanism are becoming liabilities rather than assets. The best of the BBC may actually benefit from the process of deep scrutiny to which the corporation will be subject over the next 12 months. Ofcom is conducting a wide-ranging survey of public service broadcasting. The government has retained a retired senior official and economist, Terry Burns, to advise on charter renewal. The Conservative party has commissioned a group of broadcasting experts (chaired by this author) to write a report on the future of the BBC, which will appear on 24 February.
The debate has begun. The stakes are high. The BBC, much-chastened by the Hutton verdict, will be under much greater pressure than hitherto to respond to the various critiques offered. 28 January 2004 may well mark a turning-point in the history of one of the UKs most successful institutions: and there is every chance that the ensuing change will be very much for the better – for the BBC, for the creative economy, for Britain as a whole.
