13

A meeting with ‘C’

The graveyard slot on Today is the one just before the business news at about 6.10. Each presenter has a couple of minutes to interview someone – almost always a correspondent – about a story that’s considered just about worthy of squeezing into the programme when the audience is at its smallest. Usually it’s something the overnight editor feels obliged to give a couple of minutes to – if only so that he can deny ignoring it altogether. It is seldom memorable. Sometimes it is a taster for a report that a correspondent has spent some time working on and will be broadcast in full at 7.30 or 8.10.

The interview I did at 6.07 on 29 May 2003 was expected to be not much more than that. A taster. Nobody had expected it to create a fuss or indeed make the news. We were wrong. Spectacularly wrong. If news stories can be rated as earthquakes, this would be off the Richter scale altogether. It would lead to the suicide of a decent man, the destruction of what remained of Tony Blair’s reputation after Iraq, the downfall of the two most powerful figures in the BBC, and indeed threaten the very existence of BBC News.

My interviewee was Andrew Gilligan, one of those troublesome journalists who reckon that the job of a reporter is finding out stuff the people in power do not want us to know and pay scant regard to whatever embarrassment they may cause to their employers in the process. The then editor Rod Liddle had ruffled a few feathers in senior management ranks by appointing him as Today’s defence and diplomatic correspondent and he’d been breaking stories and causing trouble ever since. The subject of our very brief chat was a dossier that the government had published back in September 2002, six months before the war.

The purpose of that dossier had been to persuade the British people and MPs that we should join the United States in invading Iraq. As we were to learn much later, Tony Blair had already promised President Bush privately that we would do just that. The nation was deeply hostile to it and so were most MPs. Nobody doubted that the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a psychotic mass murderer and the Middle East would be better off without him. But the overwhelming view – from the lofty heights of the United Nations down to the marchers who came out in vast numbers to protest on the streets – was that regime change was not a legal justification for war. And anyway, this was not our fight. It was not as if we were being threatened by Saddam after all. Or were we?

Blair recalled Parliament early after its summer break determined to quash those misgivings. He presented MPs with the dossier which, in his view, made the case for war unanswerable. In its preface it said: ‘Saddam’s military planning allows for some WMDs to be ready within forty-five minutes of an order to deploy them.’

This, on the face of it, changed everything. Saddam was not only a threat to his own people but to the region as a whole – even, in theory, to Britain’s own forces in Cyprus. And the first his victims would know about these terrible weapons of mass destruction would be when they were en route to their targets. Blair had desperately needed a justification to take Britain to war and fulfil his promise to Bush. This dossier provided it. And we could trust its conclusions because the information came from intelligence sources. If our own spies and arms experts believed that terrifying forty-five-minutes warning, how could we possibly doubt it? Surely it was inconceivable that we were being misled. Gilligan told me that was exactly what was happening.

He’d had a secret meeting at the Charing Cross Hotel in London with a man he described as ‘one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that dossier’. I didn’t ask Gilligan who he was because I knew he wouldn’t tell me. Journalists do not identify their sources for the obvious moral reason that it would be a gross betrayal of the promise of anonymity and for the more practical reason that the journalist would never be trusted again. This is part of what he said he’d been told by his source:

The government probably knew that that forty-five-minute figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in. What this person says is that a week before the publication date of the dossier it was actually rather … erm … a bland production. It didn’t … the draft prepared for Mr Blair by the intelligence agencies … actually didn’t say very much more than was public knowledge already and … erm … Downing Street, our source says, ordered a week before publication … ordered it to be sexed up, to be made more exciting and ordered more facts to be … erm … to be discovered.

We were talking, remember, six weeks after Baghdad had fallen and Saddam had been defeated. So the occupying forces – the Americans and the British – had had over two months to find the ‘weapons of mass destruction’. They did not find them for the very good reason that they did not exist. So the notion that they could be deployed within forty-five minutes was patently nonsense. And now here was a senior official involved in the preparation of the intelligence material apparently telling Gilligan not only that Downing Street knew that, but had sent the dossier back so that it could be made more ‘exciting’ and ordering more ‘facts’ to be discovered. In his memorable phrase so that the dossier could be ‘sexed up’.

That was a sensational allegation to make. But perhaps there was a plausible explanation for it. After all, collecting hugely sensitive information in a hostile country expecting to be invaded by foreign forces is a difficult and dangerous enterprise. Confusion abounds. Maybe the intelligence agencies had simply got it wrong or perhaps they had inadvertently misled Number 10. Mistakes happen. But this, according to Gilligan’s senior official, was not a mistake. Here’s what Gilligan said: ‘What I have been told is that the government knew that claim was questionable even before the war, even before they wrote it in their dossier.’

And later he went on to say something that would ultimately change the whole course of the debate about the rights and wrongs of going to war in Iraq with such devastating consequences. He claimed the official told him: ‘That information was not in the original draft. It was included in the dossier against our wishes, because it wasn’t reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-source, but that was single-source, and we believe that the source was wrong.’

This really was dynamite: an accusation from a ‘senior official’ that someone in government had taken a report that was supposedly based on reliable intelligence sources and ‘made it sexier’. In other words they had deliberately altered it to make it appear that Saddam was a far greater threat than we had believed. So great a threat that it justified sending British men and women to war, knowing that some of them would never return. A war that was to achieve pretty speedily the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – but was to turn Iraq into a hell on earth. The invasion might have gone according to plan – Saddam’s forces were hopelessly mismatched against the might of the United States even without the help of Britain – but the occupation that followed was shamefully mishandled. Saddam’s reign of terror was followed by something even worse: year upon year of murderous anarchy and civil war. Millions lost their homes or fled the country. Nobody can put an accurate estimate on the number who lost their lives but a study three years after the war estimated there had been half a million ‘excess deaths’.

The effect on the wider Middle East was, if possible, infinitely more catastrophic. It was to lead to the destruction of the delicate balance of power between the two mighty branches of Islam – Sunni and Shia – that had prevailed for perhaps a thousand years. The consequences were to prove cataclysmic. It would influence the rise of the barbaric ISIS; the wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen; the prospect of all-out war between Iran and Israel.

It is impossible to put a figure on the numbers who have died as a result but it is safe to say that we have seen some of the greatest humanitarian crises since the world went to war in 1939. And all that without even taking into account the trillions of dollars poured into financing those wars; the vast hordes of penniless refugees who have fled their homelands in search of a new life in Europe; the destruction of ancient towns and cities with all their great treasures that had survived since the days Jesus walked the earth.

All of this for what? For the overthrow of one man to satisfy the vanity of a foolish American president desperate to show his people that the horror of 9/11 would be avenged. Even though the terrorists behind 9/11 had nothing to do with Saddam. Their paymasters were Saudi Arabian extremists. And, yes, one brutal dictator was overthrown. But many more have risen in his place in the chaos and carnage that followed.

It was inevitable that Downing Street would react quickly to Gilligan’s disclosures and they did. When the Today editor Kevin Marsh arrived in the office half an hour later he already had smoke coming out of his ears because of what Gilligan had said. If a correspondent has managed to get hold of a story that’s likely to cause trouble, the editor wants to know about it before it’s broadcast – if only on the basis that forewarned is forearmed – and this one was most definitely going to cause trouble. So Gilligan had already briefed Marsh the day before on what he would say in his quick chat with me at 6.07 and sent him the transcript of his longer report to be broadcast at 7.30. But it’s fair to say that Gilligan was never at his best at the crack of dawn and he had gone more than a little off-script with me. Marsh had a more immediate problem to worry about though.

One of the young assistant editors, Gavin Allen (ultimately to be promoted to be controller of all news output), had the phone clamped to his ear. As Marsh recalls in his book Stumbling Over Truth Allen pointed to the handset and mouthed the words ‘Downing Street’. When he finally hung up after a long and largely one-sided conversation he told Marsh that Downing Street were claiming that Gilligan’s story was one hundred per cent untrue. They demanded that we broadcast a denial in the next news bulletin.

We shall never know for sure what would have happened if Marsh had caved in to that demand, effectively disowned the Gilligan interview with me and decided not to broadcast the report that was scheduled to run in only twenty minutes or so. It would have been the safe thing to do and it is likely that one of the greatest crises ever to face BBC News would have been averted.

Along with every editor in the BBC – and probably every other national news organisation for that matter – Marsh was familiar with the Downing Street bully-boy tactics under the leadership of Alastair Campbell. They were in a different league from their predecessors. Getting complaints from politicians through their spin doctors and often from the politician directly has always been routine for a programme like Today and, inevitably, sometimes they are justified. But usually not. Sometimes it’s pretty half-hearted. Mostly we know when they’re just trying it on and they know we know, so they just register their protest and leave it at that. But not under Campbell. It was seldom just a light skirmish – more like a blitzkrieg.

As Marsh put it, what they were always trying to do was ‘fixing the headlines and punishing those, like me, who refused to take their dictation: flinging handfuls of grit into the machine just like they had in opposition’.

But the consequences of the decision he faced on that May morning were way beyond anything he could have imagined based on what had gone before. There was simply no precedent for it. The message the nation would take from it was, quite simply, that we had been taken into a disastrous war on a lie. A senior minister (who used to work as a BBC reporter) told me on air the following week it was ‘the most serious accusation that I can ever remember being levelled against a government in my lifetime’.

Later Gilligan was to concede that he had gone further in his live two-way than he should have done. He had not scripted it ahead of time, as correspondents often do if they are dealing with a difficult or sensitive subject. He should not have made the suggestion that the government ‘probably knew’ the forty-five-minute figure was wrong. In an earlier, scripted, report for Radio 2 he had not made that point. And having made the allegation at 6.07 the BBC never made it again. At 7.40, Gilligan was stressing that the intelligence services, not the government, thought the claim was wrong. By ten that evening, BBC TV news was simply saying that ‘parts of the report overstated the threat’.

But that fateful morning Number 10 was doing much more than raising a relatively mild objection to a particular aspect of Gilligan’s interview. They were claiming that it was completely untrue. The whole lot. And they wanted us to admit it. Marsh had absolutely no intention of doing so.

As he recalls:

Shortly after seven, Downing Street called again. Allen took the call and soon became exasperated. Again and again he asked: ‘what exactly are you saying is wrong?’ They kept saying ‘Everything!’ In the meantime Humphrys had wandered out of the studio and into the office while the news bulletin was on air. It was one of the few chances I ever got to speak directly to the presenters during the programme and usually we’d talk quickly about the items in the next hour of the programme. This time, though, all we could do was stand by Allen as he explained to Downing Street that we were not going to put on air a ‘denial’ that we knew was untrue and misleading. He kept asking what it was about Gilligan’s story they were saying wasn’t true. Were they saying the document had not been transformed by Number 10 in the week before it was published, for example? They said they would not discuss ‘processology’.

I tried to talk to John through the next few items but his attention was on the Downing Street call. He was amused. He had more of a taste for these early morning scraps than I did but by the time he had to go back into the studio we still hadn’t resolved anything.

And then Downing Street phoned again, this time with a statement that had almost certainly been dictated by Alastair Campbell himself. It was a bizarre piece of writing. It began: ‘These allegations are untrue. Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies.’ An interesting use of the double negative you might think. But it went on to say: ‘The suggestion that any pressure was put on the intelligence services by Number 10 or anyone else to change the document are entirely false.’

This presented Marsh with a real dilemma. Even if he were minded to broadcast a denial (which he wasn’t) he could hardly deny this – for the excellent reason that Gilligan had not said it. Neither had his source. The forty-five-minute claim had been made in the preface of the dossier, which Blair had read out to MPs. Gilligan had not said pressure had been put on the intelligence sources to change the document. But, as Campbell well knew, the BBC had to respond. When Downing Street issues a statement after the BBC has broadcast such a serious allegation we cannot simply ignore it. And the clock was ticking down to the next act in this drama.

I was back in the studio doing interviews about all the other stuff going on in the world and Marsh and Allen were out in the office desperately trying to decide how to react to Number 10. They didn’t have long. Gilligan’s report, which had been the subject of his 6.07 interview with me, was scheduled to go to air within a very few minutes.

They rushed into the control room, still going over the shorthand notes that Allen had made of his Downing Street conversations and Marsh made his decision. The only way we could use the statement, he decided, was for me to read it out but then make it clear immediately that it was denying something no one had said … and then, as he put it, ‘hope that somewhere in the forest of double negatives the audience would find something comprehensible’.

It would have been a tricky enough problem if it were being addressed by a group of BBC senior managers calmly discussing it with all the time in the world in the oak-panelled boardroom over a cup of decent coffee. The control room of a news programme when it is live on air is marginally less conducive to calm, measured reflection. Especially when, as in this case, the editor has literally two or three minutes and can’t even speak to the presenter because the presenter is speaking to the nation.

For the presenter himself it’s even worse.

Obviously I had a rough idea of what was going on, but I’d been live on air when the Downing Street statement arrived and had not seen sight nor sound of it. Nor did I know what Marsh’s thinking was. Were we going to cave in or take it to the wire? Would Marsh risk his career on a judgement taken not just in the heat of battle, but with the shells whistling in over his head from one of the most powerful figures in the land? And if he got it wrong, would he take me with him? As he said, you can’t stop a programme to sort out a problem and there is no golden thread attached to the words uttered on air to pull them back once they’re out there. And when it’s a live programme, not everything that gets out there is exactly what you want. Here’s how he described what happened next:

Allen started to speak to Humphrys through his headphones. I was shouting at the studio producer to get Gilligan’s line up so I could speak to him. (He was at home and not, sadly, in the studio.) Humphrys meanwhile was gesticulating. He couldn’t say anything because the sport report was going out and was in the middle of a live item. He ripped the headphones off and stormed through to the cubicle.

‘I can’t read this rubbish!’ he told me.

‘You have to!’ I told him.

We were now seconds away from hour zero. No time for arguing. Here’s Marsh again:

Humphrys was back in the studio. The green light went on telling him that his mic was live. In a fraction of a second he had to fashion in his head a new introduction to Gilligan from the script he had in front of him, which was now outdated, and from the tortured English of the Downing Street statement. And he had to turn it all into a question to which Gilligan could give the answer: ‘That’s not the allegation.’

I fear I let my editor down. He thought I had ‘overcooked it’ because I described the dossier as ‘cobbled together’ at the last minute with some unconfirmed material that had not been approved by the security services. He had a point and I dare say that if I’d had a few minutes to think about it I would have been more precise. But I didn’t and I suspect the audience got the gist of it. And anyway, I had the chance to make amends half an hour later.

By happy coincidence the 8.10 interview happened to be with a minister who was well placed to deal with the ‘sexed up’ allegations: the defence minister Adam Ingram. He had agreed to come on the programme to deal with some difficult questions raised in a report about the way British forces had used cluster bombs in Iraq close to civilian targets. Obviously all bombs are designed to cause death and destruction, but cluster bombs are particularly hideous because they scatter small ‘bomblets’, many of which do not explode and are abandoned, to be picked up and played with by children weeks or months later. The children are either killed or suffer horrific injuries. Not an easy subject for a minister to address – but Ingram knew that it was not the only thing I would want to talk to him about.

Marsh thought of Ingram as ‘one of those New Labour ministers who enjoyed fighting with Humphrys’ and could slug it out while keeping to his brief. What I had no way of knowing was how closely he had been briefed on the substance of Gilligan’s allegations and what his defence might be.

I began by reminding him of the language Blair had used when he described to MPs the threat from Saddam’s so-called weapons of mass destruction. He had said: ‘It is active, detailed and growing … It is up and running now and it could be activated within forty-five minutes.’ I emphasised the ‘forty-five minutes’ and then I said:

‘It is now forty-five or more days since the war ended. Not one WMD has been found.’

Downing Street would claim later that this had been an ‘ambush’ – a favourite word if an interviewer asks ministers questions they are not expecting. That was ridiculous on so many fronts it’s hard to know where to begin and, in fairness to Ingram, he did not try to duck the question. Indeed, it was obvious that he had been briefed (almost certainly by Campbell) as to how to deal with me. Which made what he said next all the more surprising.

He effectively confirmed one of the most damaging allegations. The official who had spoken to Gilligan had told him the reason why the intelligence agencies were so shocked by his forty-five-minute claim was that it had been made by a single source – a source that, as it was to transpire, was completely untrustworthy. It is a golden rule in the intelligence services that you do not trust information from a single source unless it is someone who has earned that trust over the years. That was not the case here. Yet this is what Ingram told me: ‘Well that was said on the basis of a security source information single source. It was not corroborated.’

I tried not to show it, but I was stunned and I wanted him to repeat what he had said lest there be any doubt.

‘Single-sourced …? So you concede that?’

Ingram must surely have realised the significance of what he had said as soon as the words had left his lips so he tried to downplay it: ‘I think that has already been conceded.’

The giveaway in that escape attempt was the phrase ‘I think’. A minister as clever and well briefed as Ingram would have known that it could not have been ‘conceded’ for one very simple reason. The allegation had not been made until a few hours ago and Downing Street had dismissed everything Gilligan had said. ‘Everything’ they had said, ‘was wrong’. Now here was a minister actually accepting live on air that one of the central allegations was not only true but had been ‘conceded’.

This was vitally important. Not only had a defence minister unwittingly blown a hole through Number 10’s denials, but he had bolstered the credibility of Andrew Gilligan’s source – the mysterious ‘senior official’.

If Number 10 had hoped to kill the story before it took off they were to be sorely disappointed. That 6.07 interview ignited a media firestorm. Blair himself, we know from Campbell’s diary, saw it as an attack on his own integrity. The spin machine went into overdrive and, not for the first time, they were aided by my old nemesis Tom Baldwin of The Times. On 4 June he wrote a bizarre story which claimed that ‘rogue elements with the intelligence services are using the row over weapons of mass destruction to undermine the government’. Senior Cabinet ministers, he wrote, believed the government was the victim of ‘skulduggery’. According to Baldwin they wanted to ‘settle scores’ with Blair and Campbell. My next big interview was with one of those senior Cabinet ministers who had contributed to Baldwin’s story, Dr John Reid.

Reid was a classic example of Old Labour turned New Labour. He had fought his way (sometimes literally) from the back streets of working-class Glasgow to a seat among the most powerful in the land. He was a bruiser and he was not known for taking prisoners. The Guardian told the story of how he once arrived drunk at the House of Commons and, when an attendant tried to stop him getting onto the floor to vote, he threw a punch at him. So I was looking forward to the interview. My editor wasn’t.

He wrote: ‘I never looked forward to Humphrys’ tussles with the New Labour bruisers. They created headlines, maybe the odd mis-speak or gaffe, but rarely any genuine enlightenment. When I was at my grumpiest I saw them as a bout between a couple of ageing, bare-knuckle prize fighters, groggily shuffling around an imaginary ring, jabbing and weaving, looking for the killer punch that both knew would never come.’

I’m not sure I agree with every word of that. Ageing? I was a mere stripling of fifty-nine. Nor was he right that the ‘killer punch’ never comes. It depends, I suppose, on what you mean by a killer punch.

I knew that Reid would pour scorn on Gilligan’s allegation that the government probably knew the forty-five-minute figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in the dossier – and that’s exactly what he did. He described it as Gilligan’s ‘final untruth’. I pointed out that there was not a single shred of evidence to prove that the forty-five-minute claim had been true.

He replied: ‘We were accused of forcing the security services to produce information in a public document in an attempt to dupe the people by putting in false information.’

Yet again a government minister was denying something that nobody had accused them of and I pointed that out. ‘Forced them? Forced the security forces to provide information to dupe the people of this country? I don’t remember me saying that and I don’t remember Andrew Gilligan saying it.’ I also said I had spoken to one or two senior people in the intelligence services who had suggested to me that what the government had indeed done was exaggerate the threat from Saddam. At that point I could have delivered a killer punch. But I didn’t – and to this day I wonder whether it had been a mistake to hold back.

Some weeks earlier I’d had a call in the Today office a few minutes after coming off air from a rather posh-sounding man who said he would like to invite me to lunch with a certain Very Senior Person. There was a condition attached. I was not to reveal anything that was said at the lunch and he would not reveal the name of the VSP if I did not agree to the conditions. I would have to accept that the lunch had never happened. Would I agree? I replied as you would expect: ‘How can I agree to have lunch with someone if I don’t know who he is?’ So he told me. He was Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). (Within the service all heads of MI6 are known as ‘C’, and are the real-life equivalents of Ian Fleming’s character ‘M’, the boss of James Bond.) He was the most powerful spy in the land.

It was not the first time this had happened. I’d had a similar invitation in exactly the same cloak-and-dagger circumstances many years ago so I knew roughly what to expect. One difference was that on that occasion when I’d asked for the address I was told I wouldn’t need it. They would send a car to pick me up. They didn’t want me giving the address to taxi drivers. After all, who knew what they might do with it? It struck me as somewhat paranoid. It seemed unlikely that there were too many taxi drivers in London who did not know the headquarters of MI6 – or, indeed, too many Russian spies for that matter. I accepted and imposed my own condition. I wanted to take my editor with me. He agreed.

It was a tantalising prospect. The last invitation had been soon after the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War had come to an end. It became pretty obvious early on why I had been invited. MI6 were worried that now the old enemy had run up the white flag there would be less demand for their services. So ‘C’ wanted to deliver the message that there were still plenty of enemies out there and it would be madness to cut back on the number of spies and, therefore, his budget.

Interestingly, when I asked him what the nation should fear most now the red terror had been dealt with, he said Middle East terrorism and cyber-attacks. As it turns out he wasn’t far wrong. But what message did Sir Richard Dearlove want to send me away with? I assumed there was only one possible subject. Iraq. I was right.

There were two other top spooks at the lunch – his deputy Nigel Inkster and another senior officer Nigel Backhouse – and there was the usual small talk for a while. I made the obligatory request for an interview with Dearlove and he did what I knew he would do and graciously declined. Then I mentioned that he must have been seeing rather a lot of Blair recently and he said indeed he had. He had been popping into Number 10 most mornings to give him the latest intelligence briefings in the run-up to the war. Now, of course, the war was over and Saddam had fallen and the search for the WMDs had begun.

We recalled Blair’s dark warnings about the threat the WMDs had posed. I thought it was worth asking Dearlove whether Blair had been entirely accurate about that and specifically the forty-five-minute warning but I couched it in slightly more diplomatic language. Where, I wondered, did Dearlove place Iraq in the list of countries posing a danger to our security? His answer was simultaneously Delphic and immensely revealing: ‘On any Cartesian analysis,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure we would regard them as being at the top of our list.’ Indeed, he went further and suggested they were very far from the top and certainly below Syria and Iran. But what about those WMDs, I wondered. Where were they and why hadn’t they been found yet and when were they going to be found? Instead of answering directly, the question was turned on Marsh and me.

What if they were never found, we were asked? What if Saddam had ordered, as the allied troops were closing in on Baghdad and his defeat was inevitable, that the WMDs should be destroyed? How did we think the media would react to such an announcement from the British government?

There was only one answer to that. The first response would be total incredulity and the second would be hilarity. We would reach the obvious conclusion in about ten seconds flat that, in spite of everything we had been told, the fabled WMDs had not been found for the very simple reason that they had never existed. I think it’s fair to say it was the answer our hosts had been expecting.

Now here I was, several weeks after that lunch, facing a senior Cabinet minister live across the Today programme microphones, knowing that if I told him about that conversation it would be impossible for him to deny it – short of calling me a liar who’d made the whole thing up. And he couldn’t do that even if he’d been minded to because I had witnesses. It really would have been a ‘killer punch’. I knew that Tony Blair had exaggerated the threat from WMDs and that they had posed no serious threat to our security because the most senior intelligence figure in the land had told me so. I also knew that I could not say so because I would be breaking a promise, betraying a source to whom I had promised anonymity. So I did my best to convey the information without breaking pretty much the only rule that is respected by all journalists.

‘Well let me tell you,’ I said to Reid, ‘I myself have spoken to one or two senior people in the intelligence services who said things that suggest the government exaggerated the threat from Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction.’ This was not, as he and some of his colleagues had claimed, ‘something that’s been got up by a few disaffected spooks’.

I was not surprised when I came off the air to be told there was a call awaiting me. Even less surprised that it was from MI6. They had listened to the interview with some interest, said my caller, and wondered whether, when I used the phrase ‘senior people’, it had been a coded reference to my lunch with the chief. I had visions of my name being entered in whatever little black book the spooks use to list those who have incurred their displeasure and what punishment they might deem fitting in my case. But I protested my innocence, reminded him that I had named no names and, anyway, pointed out that the chief was not the only senior spook who did a little private briefing when it seemed expedient. I could have been referring to almost anyone, couldn’t I? He seemed happy enough with that, so I tried to get a sense of how MI6 were reacting to the Gilligan disclosures. Did they think there had been a certain amount of cherry-picking with the intelligence in the dossier?

He replied: ‘Inevitably.’

I kept my promise not to reveal any details of the secret lunch but as it turned out I might as well have written an open letter about it to every newspaper in the land. A few weeks after the Reid interview the Observer splashed it all over its front page. They got some details wrong but the important stuff, including the details of my exchange with Dearlove over the threat posed by Saddam, was accurately reported. So someone had leaked it and to this day I don’t know who. All I know is there were five people there and it wasn’t me.

One effect of the leak was that it strengthened the resolve of senior figures at the BBC – above all the director general Greg Dyke – to stand firm behind the Gilligan disclosures. But BBC management did not focus on the gap between what Gilligan had meant to say at 6.07, and what he had actually said. This would come back to haunt us. In that same edition of the Observer there was an interview with Tony Blair in which he said the allegations amounted to ‘about as serious an attack on my integrity as there could possibly be’.

So the stage was set for an almighty battle that would ultimately inflict terrible harm on Blair’s reputation but claim many more victims too – including the men at the very top of the BBC. What we had seen so far were barely the opening skirmishes because something was about to happen that would take it to another dimension altogether. At its heart was another case of a journalist refusing to reveal his sources – but this was to have far greater consequences than my own so-called ‘secret’ lunch with the spooks. The source in this case was the whistle-blower who had given Andrew Gilligan the information that had lit the fuse for this crisis back in May.

He had done so, of course, on condition that his identity would never be revealed. Gilligan had agreed and was true to his promise. But the hunt was on to identify him and it was led by 10 Downing Street. Not just to identify him. For Blair’s reputation to survive, the source’s credibility had to be destroyed.

The first stage of that campaign was farcical and, if the stakes had not been so high, would have provided perfect material for a BBC2 late-night satire. It involved not just Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell but also the defence secretary Geoff Hoon, BBC bosses, assorted spooks, their respective teams and a seemingly endless and increasingly frenetic stream of emails, letters and phone calls with everybody blaming everybody else and most of them either denying that they knew or making it clear that actually they did know perfectly well who it was but were damned if they were going to say so in case they got the blame. It proved relatively simple to identify him – there were, after all, very few senior officials who had been UN weapons inspectors with personal knowledge of Saddam’s Iraq – but from Campbell’s perspective it was important not to be seen as the man behind the leak. To this day he has denied being implicated. So perhaps it was just a coincidence that the newspaper that eventually named the whistle-blower on 10 July 2003 was The Times and the name attached to the story none other than Tom Baldwin, Campbell’s old friend. For most of the characters in this dark drama what had been at stake so far was their reputation. The consequences of this latest revelation were to prove tragic.

The name of the ‘senior official’ who had sat with Andrew Gilligan in the Charing Cross Hotel on 22 May and told him – on a strictly unattributable basis – why the nation should not believe Tony Blair’s interpretation of the notorious dossier was Dr David Kelly. He was a mild-mannered, highly respected scientist. He was an expert in biological warfare employed by the Ministry of Defence and he had been a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. If anyone could claim to know from first-hand experience over many years the state of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons it was David Kelly.

A few weeks after his identity was unveiled, on 15 July 2003 Dr Kelly was summoned to appear before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons to be questioned about what he had told Gilligan. He appeared to be under severe stress and spoke so softly his answers were almost inaudible. The air conditioners had to be turned off even though it was one of the hottest days of the year.

Two days later he was at his home in Oxfordshire. In the afternoon he was called by his superior officer at the Ministry of Defence, Wing Commander Clark, and they spoke for six or seven minutes. When Clark phoned back some twenty minutes later Dr Kelly’s wife told him he had gone for his usual afternoon walk in the nearby woods. He did not return. Early the following morning he was found dead. There were knife wounds to his left wrist and nearby a bottle of painkiller tablets. He had swallowed as many as twenty-nine of them.

As I write these words we still cannot say with absolute certainty how Dr Kelly met his end. The official verdict was, unsurprisingly given the circumstances, suicide. But that verdict was delivered not by a coroner’s court as a victim’s family are entitled to expect under English law, but by a judge conducting an inquiry at the request of a politician. An inquest had indeed been opened four days after his body was discovered but three weeks later the then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, who happened to be an old flatmate of Tony Blair, ordered it to be adjourned indefinitely. It was revealed later that on the morning Kelly’s body was discovered Falconer had two telephone conversations with Blair, who was on an aeroplane from Washington to Tokyo. That same morning it was announced that he had asked Lord Hutton to chair an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Kelly’s death. The questions to be answered were whether the government bore any responsibility and the part played in it by the BBC.

Our coverage of the ‘sexed up’ dossier and our treatment of Kelly’s whistle-blowing were of critical importance. It was, perhaps, the biggest challenge to the BBC’s integrity and professionalism we had ever faced. Every one of the BBC’s 7,000 journalists knew that the findings of the Hutton Inquiry would influence, if not determine, the future of BBC News. If the Hutton Inquiry were to report that the BBC’s journalism had been flawed in some details but essentially sound we would be able to hold our heads up high. If it were to condemn us, a reputation built up over the past eighty years as the world’s most respected news organisation might be destroyed. It was as serious as that.

The BBC was not optimistic. There were grave misgivings about the suitability of Hutton for the job. That was partly because he did not have the skills and experience of a practised coroner. He did not even call as a witness the police officer heading the investigation into Dr Kelly’s death, Chief Inspector Alan Young. But also because he was seen by many as a ‘tame judge’ – far too friendly to the political establishment. Those misgivings were to be borne out by the events that followed.

The inquiry opened in August 2003 and its findings were delivered nearly six months later.

When a big story is breaking, a newsroom is an exciting place to be. Breaking news is what we are about. It’s in the DNA of every journalist who operates to a daily news deadline. We want to be there when it happens – which is why I broke the habit of a lifetime and went back into the newsroom on that January afternoon even though I had presented the programme in the morning. Hutton had reached his verdict and would be delivering it any minute now. But there was no excitement, no anticipatory thrill. I have never known the atmosphere in that place to be so resigned, so depressed.

Perhaps it was because we knew what to expect. There had been so many leaks from the Hutton team and the conduct of the inquiry had struck us as so weighted against the BBC that we feared the worst. Some of us might even have felt we deserved it. We had been pummelled for so long by the government and its spin doctors and supporters I suspect many of us were beginning to doubt our own professionalism and even our integrity. Our big bosses seemed to have lost confidence in their own ability to control the organisation and some of them were coming under attack from their own senior colleagues – prepared to wound but afraid to strike.

It was true that we had made mistakes. Gilligan had publicly admitted he’d got some things wrong and done things he should not have done and his judgement had been found wanting. So had the judgement of some of the most senior figures in the BBC. But surely, after six months of investigations, Hutton would see the wider picture. Gilligan had broken a story that had to be told. Blair had – for whatever reason – misled the nation and we had gone to war on a false prospectus. And a decent man had died because he felt the nation should know.

One of the oldest jokes in the BBC is that whenever you ask a member of staff about morale they will shake their head ruefully and mutter: ‘Bad … never been as low as this.’ This time it was not a joke. We were, I suspect, resigned to our fate as we sat slumped in the newsroom or leaned against our desks in small groups waiting for Hutton to appear in front of the cameras.

He did not disappoint those of us who feared the worst. His report might as well have been written by Alastair Campbell himself. He exonerated the government of pretty much every charge levelled against it. Nobody, he said, could have anticipated that Dr Kelly would take his life. There was no ‘underhand government strategy’ to name him as the source of the BBC’s accusations. Gilligan’s accusations were unfounded and the BBC’s editorial and management processes were ‘defective’. Oh … and the dossier had not been ‘sexed up’. In short, the claims made by Gilligan had been false. The BBC’s chain of management should not have defended his story and the governors should have recognised that the allegations against the government’s integrity were unfounded.

Within minutes of Hutton leaving the stage Tony Blair made his appearance in the House of Commons. Blair has almost always been a consummate judge of the public mood with an instinct for the right tone to adopt. There must have been a temptation to exult, to crow over the corpse of the BBC’s lost journalistic integrity. He did neither. His words were measured and delivered in sorrow more than anger. His tone was almost regretful. But he left his audience in no doubt that he and the words he had spoken from that very same spot before he took the nation to war had been vindicated.

When Alastair Campbell appeared in front of the cameras soon afterwards his approach could not have been in greater contrast. He was no longer a public figure – he had left Number 10 after having resigned the previous August during the Hutton Inquiry – but the setting he chose would have done credit to a South American dictator intent on demonstrating his dignity and gravity to his adoring people. He appeared to the waiting cameras at the foot of what must surely be one of the grandest stairways in one of the grandest houses with one of the grandest addresses in London: Carlton House Terrace. The house, now home to the Foreign Press Association, had once been the residence of William Gladstone. All that was missing was the presence of a corps of trumpeters sounding a ceremonial salute as Campbell descended the carpeted stairs, his left hand resting lightly on the sword with which he was about to smite his enemies. He was angry and, unlike his former master, he wanted the world to know it.

The BBC, he declaimed, had waged a vicious campaign to paint him and Tony Blair as liars. He went on: ‘The prime minister told the truth, the government told the truth, I told the truth. The BBC, from the chairman on down, did not.’ Apart from the chairman, Gavyn Davies, the other liars he listed were the director general Greg Dyke, the director of News Richard Sambrook, Andrew Gilligan, and my own editor Kevin Marsh.

Whether Campbell believed that rubbish I have no way of knowing, but I suspect he did. I got to know him reasonably well when he was a journalist before his Downing Street days and both liked and respected him. He was a decent man and loyal to a fault. His weakness was that he demanded the same unquestioning belief in his leader – whether it was Neil Kinnock or Tony Blair – from everyone. Even from journalists who, as he well knew, had an absolute duty to report dispassionately. As I’ve mentioned earlier, for Campbell it was simple: you were either for Blair or you were against him. And if he had you marked down as a threat, however limited, he would do his damndest to destroy you. And on that bleak day in January 2004 it seemed that he had succeeded. The next day the chairman resigned. He was followed by the director general and then by Andrew Gilligan. The BBC had been decapitated. It seemed in those dark days it would never again occupy the same journalistic high ground.

But that was not the end of the story. Another chapter would be written. The final chapter. Another inquiry – infinitely more detailed, thorough and impartial – would be conducted. But it would not even be set up until long after Tony Blair had left Number 10 and Gordon Brown had moved in, and it would take more than seven years to complete. It was called the Chilcot Inquiry.

Lord Hutton had barely ended his press conference before the criticism of his inquiry began: both the way he had handled it and its conclusions. The following morning the front page of the Independent newspaper had but one word splashed across it: ‘WHITEWASH?’ That pretty much summed up the opinion of a large section of the public and the political world – large and growing larger almost by the day as Iraq and the Middle East descended ever deeper into violence. A powerful committee of privy councillors had been pressing for a proper inquiry into Britain’s involvement in Iraq, the run-up to the invasion, the conduct of the war and the horrendous aftermath. The Blair government blocked it at every turn, but in 2009 Gordon Brown announced that it would happen. It proved to be everything that the Hutton Inquiry had failed to be.

Its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, was no ‘tame judge’: he was a highly respected career diplomat. And he did not sit alone. Alongside him were four other equally respected figures, each expert in their own fields. They were not merely thorough. They were relentless: forensic and detailed to the point of mind-numbing boredom for all those of us who just wanted them to get on with it. But the conclusions, when they came after a seemingly endless seven years, were more than worth the effort. The final report ran to a daunting million words.

(Martin Rowson)

In spare and precise language it blew apart the conclusions of the Hutton Report and the claims made by Tony Blair in that sexed-up dossier thirteen years earlier. Saddam Hussein did not pose an ‘urgent threat’ to British interests. The intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction had indeed, as Dr Kelly told Andrew Gilligan, been presented with ‘unwarranted certainty’. The peaceful alternatives to war had not been exhausted. The United Kingdom and the United States had undermined the authority of the United Nations Security Council. The process of identifying the legal basis for war was ‘far from satisfactory’.

I have often tried to imagine how Tony Blair must have felt when he first had sight of that report. There has never been a prime minister who has not feared the verdict of history. When the door of Number 10 closes behind them for the last time the ambition that has driven them for so much of their lives closes with it. The past matters more than the future. And surely Blair must have known that Chilcot had destroyed what remained of his dream to be the prime minister who had led the nation to victory in a just war. The morning after the report was published Blair came into the studio and gave me his first interview. It was different from any I had ever done with him. Not because he made any great admission of guilt or grievous error – he did not and never has – but his tone and his manner were different. He seemed more subdued, less defiant. But I suspect what many listeners wanted was at least an acknowledgement that the invasion of Iraq had stoked a series of blazes that were to consume great swathes of the Middle East. They wanted a touch of repentance. They were disappointed.

I have known Blair since he was a young, eager backbench MP who wanted to achieve great things – as indeed he did. In electoral terms he was the most successful leader the Labour Party has ever had. ‘Blairism’ became the creed of ‘New’ Labour and Blair was seen as the party’s saviour. By the turn of the century he seemed all set to enter the history books as one of the great post-war prime ministers. But after Iraq he became one of the most reviled.

I have interviewed him many times since the war and tried to wring from him at least a recognition that its awful consequences must have given him some second thoughts. But he has never, for a moment, strayed from his mantra that the world is a better place without Saddam. That was the purpose of the war and it was achieved. But though his words tell one story I have often sensed his eyes telling another: the eyes of a deeply conflicted man. But perhaps I see only what I am looking for.

I remember one interview with particular clarity for one specific phrase. It was the longest interview I had ever conducted on Today. Blair resigned as prime minister on 27 June 2007 – almost exactly ten years since he had entered Number 10 – and, of course, every news programme wanted his final interview. It was assumed that, showman as he was, he would choose television over radio but he didn’t. He gave me not one but two live interviews. It was agreed that one would cover domestic matters and the other foreign affairs. I took that to mean Iraq.

Rather than come into our studio Blair chose to do the interview in Number 10. It was a rather intimidating set-up: a large reception room with Blair and me plonked in the middle facing each other and his most senior aides sitting in a row behind me. It meant I could not see them but he could and his gaze would often switch from me to them – as though he were seeking approval for what he was saying.

Normally even the most important 8.10 interview must give way to sport. Today has its structure and listeners tend to get cross when we override it, which means we seldom exceed eighteen minutes. This interview lasted for a record-breaking twenty-seven minutes. By far the most revealing exchange was when I pressed him on his reason for going to war in Iraq and made what I thought was the obvious point. His justification was the threat posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction but those weapons did not exist and he must have known it. It was a long and heated exchange and he ended it with a phrase that I remember vividly to this day: ‘I only know what I believe.’

That struck me as the most extraordinary thing to say. I tried pointing out that surely it was a prime minister’s duty faced with such an awesome decision to act only on what he knew, not what he ‘believed’. And the only way to ‘know’ was to interrogate the intelligence reports relentlessly. If they supported his case, well and good. If they did not, the fighter jets would have to stay in their hangars and the troops in their barracks. But Blair had promised Bush we would go to war alongside him and that is what happened. Because Blair believed it was the right thing to do.