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,