BBC's Gilligan mea culpa; admits to 'slip of the tongue'

Gilligan admits to 'slip of the tongue'
Jason Deans
Wednesday September 17, 2003

Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter who sparked the cataclysmic row between the government and the corporation, today insisted the broad thrust of his story was true but admitted to a series of mistakes that threaten to undermine the corporation's case.

He said he did not mean to accuse the government of inserting the 45-minute WMD claim into last September's Iraq dossier "knowing it was wrong", describing the phrase as "slip of the tongue".

And he confessed for the first time that his first report on the Today programme had not been as accurate as it should have been.

"I regret that on this occasion, I did not report carefully and accurately what he [David Kelly] said."

Gilligan's admission today combined with an earlier apology to this morning's Hutton inquiry about an email he sent to an MP on a select committee effectively "outing" Dr Kelly as the source of another journalist's story came amid two and a half hours of heavy questioning from a series of barristers.

Although he was composed and mildly spoken throughout, the BBC reporter admitted having made a series of mistakes and errors but insisted the broad thrust of his Today programme report was correct, because of subsequent evidence put before the inquiry proving that Dr Kelly and colleagues in the intelligence services were concerned that the Iraq intelligence dossier was being drafted and redrafted for political objectives.

The counsel for the Hutton inquiry, James Dingemans QC, said that Gilligan had accused the government of a "conscious wrongdoing" when he reported in his 6.07am broadcast on May 29 that it had deliberately tried to mislead the country by saying it had inserted the 45-minute claim even though it knew it was wrong.

"My feeling on this was that it was an allegation less serious than that. That it was part of a political debate," Gilligan replied.

He explained that several newspapers that morning, including the Guardian, the Independent and the Mirror, had carried stories about concerns that there had been no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq so many weeks after the war and he felt that his story was a contribution to that ongoing debate.

"So you thought you would join in with that morning's headlines?" Mr Dingemans asked.

"No, that was not the intention. The intention was to report on what Dr Kelly told me. I regret that on these two occasions [the 6.07am and 7.32am Today broadcasts] I did not report entirely carefully and accurately what he had said," Gilligan responded

"It wasn't intended as the definitive view of the dossier, it was intended as the opinion of one source," he added.

On his initial 6.07am report that the government inserted the 45-minute claim "probably knowing it was wrong", Gilligan said: "I accept that wasn't the right form of words to use because it gave listeners the impression that he [Dr Kelly] had said it in those terms and he hadn't said it in those terms.

"My error was in ascribing [that claim directly to Dr Kelly]. He had said things that led me to conclude it, but he did not suggest it directly, no."

In later reports on May 29 Gilligan said the government had inserted the 45-minute claim knowing that it was "questionable", rather than "wrong" and he today defended this phrase at the Hutton inquiry.

Gilligan told the inquiry it had since emerged that some members of the intelligence services had expressed reservations about the 45-minute claim, so it was fair to conclude that the government would have known the claim was questionable.

But Mr Dingemans pressed Gilligan about whether changing the word "wrong" to "questionable" really amounted to much of a change in his story.

"It's not much of a retraction is it, Mr Gilligan?" he said.

"Well, knowing that a claim is questionable is not the same as knowing it is wrong and for that reason I was happier with questionable. It was a reasonable construction," Gilligan replied.

"I repeatedly corrected any impression we may have given that the government may have lied or, that it had fabricated anything or that the 45-minute claim was not real intelligence," he added.