I said a while back that I thought we’d had all the revelations we were going to get about the Gilligan affair and that the judicial inquiry would slowly chew the matter to death. But there were some surprising revelations in Dyke’s testimony and, at times, the BBC’s director general said things that Lord Hutton clearly found hard to swallow.
For example, Dyke revealed that, several weeks after the BBC broadcast in which Gilligan had made the allegations against the government, he was still not aware that the BBC reporter had said that the government probably knew the 45 minute figure in the dossier was wrong. However, in his defence, Dyke said he had received assurances from Stephen Whittle, head of the BBC’s editorial policy unit, that Gilligan’s story was “strong and well sourced”. As we now know, and many of us suspected at the time, it wasn’t.
Dyke’s was not a confident performance and he seemed at times reluctant to give a straight answer to questions from James Dingemans, the counsel to the inquiry. On several occasions, Lord Hutton was forced to intervene to press Dyke to clarify his answers.
The following exchange is illustrative:
LORD HUTTON: Had you, by this stage, [the investigation of the matter by the foreign affairs committee] read the details of Mr Gilligan's broadcast report on 29th May, Mr Dyke?Perhaps the most damning thing for the BBC hierarchy was the revelation that, at the meeting of the BBC’s governors in July, Dyke had argued that it would have been preferable “if we had put this [Gilligan’s story] to Downing Street as well as to the Ministry of Defence”. The board chose to ignore Dyke's contribution and, immediately following the meeting, the governors, to my astonishment, came out in full support of Gilligan and his story.
DYKE: (Pause). I do not remember.
LORD HUTTON: Yes.
DYKE: I think probably not.
LORD HUTTON: Yes.
DYKE: Probably not.
But the BBC does seem ready to learn some lessons from the affair, as Dyke himself conceded:
In hindsight we would have – we might have behaved differently. We might have done things differently. Obviously we should learn from that. Naturally we will not prejudge the findings of the Inquiry before settling on any changes but I have asked our General Counsel Nicholas Eldred to begin to look at some of the lessons which we might learn from this. For instance, I have asked him with assistance from senior editorial figures in the BBC to look at aspects of the producer guidelines, particularly concerning anonymous sources and the description of them.The lesson the BBC should draw from this is, as I have said many times before, less hubris and more journalism. My present concern is that, given his performance over the Gilligan affair, this is not something that Greg Dyke is capable of delivering.
