I had arranged for most of the members of my seventeen-strong executive team, which was known around the BBC as Exco, to watch Lord Hutton deliver his findings in a room in Broadcasting House where my office was based. We had arranged for lunch to be delivered and once again the Atkins dieters, of whom there were at least two others on Exco, were well provided for. So far Atkins had survived the crisis, and so had my abstinence from alcohol.
I warned my team it was bad news and on a confidential basis told them that Gavyn was seriously considering resignation. We all watched Hutton and then the statements in the House of Commons from the party leaders. I marvelled at how good Blair was. It is a great shame that his skills at people management and strategic leadership have never matched his skills as an orator or in public relations. If they had, he would have been a great Prime Minister.
The new Conservative leader, Michael Howard, had an impossible task, having only had the report for four hours; but I believe he made a crucial mistake in accepting Hutton’s findings immediately. If he had delayed and given himself another forty-eight hours I believe he would have taken a different approach. In particular, he accepted Hutton’s view that Blair had said nothing inappropriate to journalists about the naming of David Kelly when he was on the plane from Shanghai to Hong Kong. Anyone who had followed the inquiry would have known that Hutton never questioned a single witness on that issue.
My own team were pretty badly shaken. I remember John Smith, the Director of Finance, saying something about resignations being needed (though I don’t think he was referring to me) and Jenny Abramsky, the Director of Radio, sitting looking terribly serious in the corner, in the way that Jenny did. We all discussed the proposed statement I and the team had written. Virtually everyone wanted me to take out the more aggressive paragraphs, one of which said: ‘We do have serious reservations about one aspect of the report which we believe could have significant implications for British journalism.’ In effect I let them water down the proposed response. In retrospect I wish I hadn’t because I believed then, as I do today, that the BBC had got the story largely right and that Downing Street’s behaviour had been unacceptable. I was also convinced, as were our legal team, that Hutton had got the law wrong.
At 3.30 p.m. I recorded the statement and made it available to all news outlets. On BBC News 24 it was immediately interpreted as ‘a robust response’ from the BBC. Personally I thought it was conciliatory, but then being conciliatory is not necessarily one of my stronger points so perhaps I wasn’t the best person to judge. I certainly wasn’t going to roll over in the way Lord Ryder did the following day. Like Gavyn, I’d rather have resigned. I remember thinking at the time that it was a good job News 24 hadn’t seen my original draft.
What did make me and the BBC look foolish later in the afternoon was the final paragraph of my statement, which said: ‘The BBC Governors will be meeting formally tomorrow and will consider Lord Hutton’s report. No further comment will be made until after that meeting.’ Everyone had agreed that paragraph, but within half an hour of the statement being broadcast Andy Marr was back on the screens saying that he had it on very good authority that Gavyn Davies had resigned. Of course he only had a single unattributable source for his story, so under Lord Hutton’s rules of journalism one wonders whether he should have broadcast it without corroboration. His source was a pretty good one though. It was Gavyn himself.
Gavyn was taking advice from his wife Sue, one of Gordon Brown’s inner circle. Sue was very much of the view that it is better to resign on principle after being criticized than to be forced out later. As a strategy it only made sense if you believed you would be forced out in the end, which Gavyn now did.
Gavyn believed that by resigning quickly it would be contrasted with the Government’s ‘awful’ behaviour and help turn the tables on Hutton, which in many ways it did. And as he had made clear the night before, he was not going to apologize because he still believed the BBC had largely been right. Some people believe Gavyn’s early resignation cost me my job and that he should have done a deal with the Governors that I should stay before making his resignation public. That may or may not be true, but he took his decision for the best and most honourable of reasons.
It was by complete chance that the Governors were due to meet that evening in a private session starting at 5 p.m. The meeting had been set up some time in 2003 when the annual BBC calendar was drawn up; when I discovered, a week or two earlier, that the meeting coincided with the publication of the Hutton report I urged Gavyn to cancel it. I told him I feared the Governors would rush around and make rash decisions, which is exactly what they did. Gavyn was against moving it and so was Simon Milner, the BBC Secretary who organized the Governors’ meetings. Simon should have had the political nous to understand the dangers but unfortunately, while Simon had many talents, he lacked political judgement. Despite my efforts, the meeting stayed in the diary and I continued to tell them both it was a mistake.
The Governors started their meeting at 5 p.m. and virtually never left the room until the early hours of the following day. They didn’t see Jon Snow on Channel Four News at 7 p.m. raising the question of whether Hutton was a whitewash. This was significant because throughout the inquiry we thought that Channel Four’s news coverage of Hutton was the most authoritative, better than the BBC’s Six O’Clock News. The Governors didn’t see the same theme continued on Newsnight; they didn’t see the BBC’s former chairman Christopher Bland saying that one resignation was enough; and they didn’t see the early edition of The Independent with its blank front page simply saying ‘Whitewash’.
The Governors didn’t want to see anyone. They wouldn’t even meet Andrew Caldecott, the BBC’s own QC, who sat outside all evening waiting to be called in to give his detailed and informed legal opinion on Hutton, which was very critical of the report. Andrew knew more about Hutton than all the Governors put together, but they never saw him. After waiting for five hours he went home. At Andrew’s hourly rate, keeping him waiting outside the meeting was criminal.
Later in the evening the Governors did agree to see the BBC’s Director of Policy, Caroline Thomson, so she could give them a briefing: she had spent all evening gathering intelligence at Westminster. The BBC’s Director of Human Resources, Stephen Dando, demanded to be seen and was allowed in. He told the Governors that getting rid of me would be a terrible blow to the staff and the BBC. But by then it was too late. The Governors had already made up their minds before speaking to either of them. They did what people under pressure often do: they turned inwards, talked to each other, and panicked.
I was there for the first forty minutes of the meeting. When they arrived, the Governors knew that Gavyn was going and some turned up with the view that they too should resign. In retrospect I should have let them. Instead I argued what I believed to be right: that the BBC couldn’t be left without a Chairman and Governors because, in those circumstances, it would have no effective constitution. They agreed to stay.
When it came to discussing what should happen to members of the management team who had been criticized I offered to leave the meeting. I leant across to Simon Milner, who was sitting next to me, and reminded him what Gavyn and I had told him of our conversation the night before. It was his job to tell the Governors that if I was to continue I needed them to support me publicly. Gavyn and I then left the meeting for what I expected to be a half-hour discussion. As it turned out, I never went back that evening, and I will never have to go to another meeting of the BBC Governors again. There are some upsides in the whole affair.
As I walked down