Thank you all for the help and support you’ve given me. This might sound schmaltzy but I really will miss you all.
Greg
As soon as the e-mail had gone I went downstairs to the entrance of Broadcasting House in Langham Place, where there was a massive, totally disorganized media scrum right on the BBC’s own doorstep. I walked out through the revolving door, realized I was in danger of being crushed, stepped back into the drum, and revolved back into the building. After a couple of minutes there was enough room for me to move outside and, live on BBC News 24, Sky News, and the ITV News Channel, I announced I was leaving. The irony was that BBC News 24 almost missed the whole event because their crew was stuck at the back of the scrum and couldn’t get a decent shot of me making the statement.
Then it was back upstairs and lots of drink and food with friends and colleagues. By then all thoughts of Atkins and abstinence had totally disappeared. Mark Damazer, whom I first worked with at TV-am twenty years earlier, made a short but funny speech talking about my strengths and weaknesses. I replied by telling everyone that this was not a day for bandstanding. I was going and they should protect their careers. I also told them to support Mark Byford, who was to be acting Director-General; he was a good bloke and had played no part in my demise.
Oddly, it was about that time that Mark was making a terrible mistake. He had agreed to stand with Lord Ryder while the acting Chairman recorded a statement. When asked to do this, Mark should have declined. Instead, he stood by while Ryder made the most grovelling of apologies in which he said sorry for any mistake the BBC might have made, without actually defining what the mistakes were. He apologized ‘unreservedly’. It was as if he had apologized for anything anyone in Government could accuse the BBC of. It was the style of delivery that made the apology seem so grovelling. The two of them looked like the leaders of an old Eastern European government: grey, boring, and frightened.
The statement was on the news bulletins all day and was seen throughout the world. Without realizing it, Lord Ryder had done enormous damage to the reputation of the BBC, and to himself.
When, that afternoon, Lord Ryder was asked at a special meeting of the BBC’s executive committee whether his statement would be enough to satisfy the Government, he replied that he had been assured it would, leaving a number of members of the committee with the clear impression that he had discussed and cleared the statement with Downing Street before delivering it.
I have since had it confirmed by the BBC that, before he made his statement, Lord Ryder had been in contact with Number Ten telling them both of the content of the statement he planned to make and that I was going. The BBC now say this was only a matter of ‘courtesy’, but it has serious implications. The whole independence of the BBC is based on its separation from Government, and yet here was its acting Chairman effectively clearing a statement before he made it. We don’t know if they asked for changes. What would he have done if they had?
It also brings into question whether or not Downing Street wanted my head. Gavyn had reached an agreement with Blair, in one of the many phone calls they had between June and December, that no matter what Hutton said the Government would not call for either of us to go. When he watched Blair in the House of Commons immediately after Hutton’s press conference Gavyn realized the Prime Minister had gone back on his word. He told me: ‘Blair skilfully piled the pressure on, and did nothing to discharge his promise that there should be no resignations at the BBC. I assumed he had reneged. Then I saw Campbell calling us liars, and demanding that heads should roll. I assumed that Blair had deliberately unleashed the dogs against us, and that there would be no peace with the Government until we either resigned or apologized.’
I, too, had been assured in advance, in discussions between myself and Campbell’s successor, Dave Hill – a more rational and reasonable man than Campbell – that when the Hutton report was published Number Ten would not criticize the BBC if we agreed not to criticize them. Hill had also assured me that they would be able to control Campbell, that he would be back inside Number Ten for the publication of the Hutton Report and would take orders. So on that Wednesday Blair could have stopped Campbell from calling for heads. He chose not to. And on the Thursday morning Downing Street was told what was happening at the BBC but Blair did nothing to prevent my ‘resignation’. Since then, he has let it be known through friends that he didn’t want either Gavyn or me to go and has even invited me to meet with him informally. I refused. I no longer regard Tony Blair as someone to be trusted.
Ryder’s ‘unreserved’ apology had other repercussions. From that moment onwards the BBC stopped publicly arguing the case it had argued throughout the Hutton inquiry: that while it had made some mistakes, it had been right to broadcast Dr Kelly’s claims that Downing Street had ‘sexed up’ the dossier to make a more convincing case for war. From that moment onwards no one from within the BBC was allowed to make that argument, and yet it is what I still believe happened and I will argue the case passionately in this book.
The real irony came several weeks later when The Guardian ran a story that said that Lord Hutton was ‘shocked’ by the reaction to his report and hadn’t expected any heads to roll at the BBC. If this is true, he is a remarkably naive man.
My day and my time at the BBC were rapidly coming to an end. I was preparing to leave my office for the last time when I got a phone call from Peter Salmon at Television Centre. He told me that there were remarkable scenes happening and that I ought to come over. He said that hundreds of members of staff had taken to the streets with ‘Bring Back Greg’ posters and that the demonstration was getting bigger by the minute. I turned to Magnus and Emma and said we ought to go. Andrew Harvey, a friend and talented journalist whom I had brought in to edit Ariel, the BBC’s in-house magazine, was with me at the time, so he came along too.
In all there were five of us in the car. It was a fifteen-minute drive and no one said anything. When we got to White City and drove down towards Television Centre we found the roads outside the BBC buildings thronged with chanting staff holding up placards. The scenes were amazing. As I got out of the car people were applauding and trying to shake my hand. There were news crews everywhere trying to interview me. For a brief period of my life I suddenly found out what it was like to be an American presidential candidate or Madonna. It was frightening.
Someone thrust a megaphone into my hand and I made an impromptu speech. We were all a bit scared for our safety and Magnus and Emma tried to guide me through the crowd. We lost Andrew Harvey somewhere and didn’t see him again that day. At one stage Emma even thumped a news cameraman who was getting a bit rough; but, inch by inch, we gradually moved towards the entrance to Stage Six, the home of BBC News.
Inside the building there were people everywhere shouting and applauding. I stopped for a quick but hassled interview with Kirsty Wark, the Newsnight presenter, whom I admired a lot. I then decided to go up to the BBC News room. As I walked in people started applauding and eventually I climbed onto a desk and spoke to them all. I told them that our journalism had to be fair but not to lose their nerve, unaware that it was being broadcast live to the nation on BBC News 24. I told the staff in the newsroom, and the rest of the world live on television, that all we had been trying to do was to defend the ‘integrity and independence of the BBC’. I later discovered that this really upset Downing Street, but in truth it was exactly what the whole thing had been about. We were defending the BBC from a wholesale attack on its journalism by Alastair Campbell, a man whom some in the Labour Government are only now beginning to understand was a complete maverick and who had been given unprecedented power by Tony Blair.
I also went to visit the staff of the Today programme, on which Andrew Gilligan had worked. There was a more sombre mood amongst the Today staff.
We went quickly to others parts of the building and the response was overwhelming. I then decided it was time to go. We went outside and were surrounded yet again. Someone had written ‘We love you Greg’ on my car windscreen in lipstick, and if my driver Bill and a policeman hadn’t stopped them they would have written all over the car. We drove out with hundreds of people