Secretary’s office at the BBC complained all the time that he didn’t work hard enough to be the Deputy Chairman.
When we met up with Gavyn, Pauline, and Richard they, too, seemed shocked. Pauline said she was horrified by the report; Richard said very little. Gavyn told us that he had been told by a close friend that we had made a mistake co-operating with Hutton in the first place and that from the moment this particular judge had been appointed the result was a foregone conclusion. Our only hope, according to Gavyn’s friend, had been to attack the way Hutton ran the whole inquiry at every available opportunity: that way we would have been able to demonstrate that he had been appointed by the Government to deliver a verdict that would favour them. It was an interesting perspective but hardly relevant to the position we were now in. In the middle of this discussion Tara Conlan, a journalist on the Daily Mail, rang Gavyn on his mobile phone and asked him openly what was in the report. We all laughed as he gave her a very polite brush-off.
By late afternoon we moved to a bigger room, where we were joined by our legal and press teams. Our QC, Andrew Caldecott, turned up with a comprehensive argument detailing how Hutton had completely misunderstood the law on ‘qualified privilege’, which covered the rights journalistic organizations now possessed. In the end we split into two groups, one to plan strategy and the other practicalities.
I worked on a comparatively aggressive statement, which we would put out the following day and which we’d all agreed Gavyn was to deliver. Together we watched the result of the parliamentary vote on tuition fees, which took place around 7.00 p.m. We got even more depressed when the Government narrowly won, thanks to Gordon Brown delivering his supporters at the last minute. Our reaction was nothing to do with the pros and cons of the issue; we simply thought we’d get an easier time the following day if the Government had another crisis on its hands.
The whole team then had dinner together. I remember being pleased that someone had ordered something other than sandwiches. At the time I was on the Atkins diet, and January is also one of the two months in the year when I don’t drink alcohol, so as I munched through two or three pieces of chicken, and drank my bottled water, I was feeling very virtuous.
By now Gavyn had begun to talk privately about resigning. I was strongly against it, but I thought it had to be his decision. As the hours went by he became more and more convinced it was the right and honourable thing for him to do. I certainly had no intention of resigning. We discussed the position briefly with Richard Ryder before he disappeared for the evening and we talked over the whole strategy with Pauline Neville-Jones later in the evening after she had returned from a drinks party.
The three of us – Gavyn, Pauline, and I – sat privately in a room together and weighed up the options, a conversation that was to take on greater importance later given what happened the following day. Gavyn said he believed it was right for him to resign because the Governors had been criticized for the actions they had taken. I disagreed and said that if someone had to go, then we should discuss whether it should be him or me, given that Lord Hutton had also criticized the management. I didn’t believe it was necessary for either of us to go. I didn’t believe then, and still don’t believe today, that the BBC had done enough wrong to merit such a drastic response.
My view was that if Lord Hutton’s criticisms required resignations, then the Chairman, all the Governors, the Director-General, and several senior people in BBC News should all go at once. Since I also knew that Tony Blair had told Gavyn in a private telephone conversation that, whatever happened, Number Ten would not be calling on either Gavyn or me to go, I was of the view we should all sit out the coming storm.
While Gavyn hadn’t finally made up his mind he was of the view that at least one resignation was essential. As he says now: ‘I was willing to resign in preference to apologizing for doing nothing wrong, indeed for telling the British people the truth about the September dossier. I was never going to grovel but I am not sure that a strategy of “no apology and no resignation” was ever viable after Hutton.’
Once Pauline realized that Gavyn was likely to go she turned to me and said it would be impossible for both of us to go at the same time. I agreed. Given what she did the following day, this was an interesting position, one that both Gavyn and I clearly remember her taking. I said that, in those circumstances, I would need the Governors to make it clear they supported me, and she agreed with that.
During the evening, Richard Sambrook took a call from the BBC’s political editor, Andy Marr, who told us that The Sun had got a comprehensive leak of the report that made it very clear that Downing Street had been cleared and that the BBC had got the blame. It was a good scoop and the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News reported the story in full. Tuition fees were now yesterday’s news and, a day earlier than expected, Hutton was now the big story.
But where had the leak come from? I and a million others immediately assumed it was Alastair Campbell, that it was payback time for The Sun in recognition of the support they had given Tony Blair and the Government during the Iraq war. During his time in Downing Street Campbell had regularly given exclusives to The Sun, sometimes when they were other people’s stories. As Alastair was no longer on the staff at Number Ten, my view at the time was that he had little to lose by leaking the document even if he was caught, and there wasn’t much chance of that. Despite having spun his exit brilliantly we knew that Campbell had been pushed out. I had absolutely no evidence to support the view that Campbell leaked the story, and I now believe my immediate response was wrong. What I do know is that Downing Street was very scared that it would be blamed for the leak and that evening demanded that Rebekah Wade, The Sun’s editor, put out a statement making it clear that it wasn’t Downing Street or Campbell who had leaked it.
Since then, it has been suggested to me that the leak might have come from someone on our side who was playing a very Machiavellian game to make it look like it originated with Campbell. I don’t buy that because it would have taken such a peculiar sort of mind to think that way, and what would have been the point? Another theory is that The Sun got the report from the printers. Lord Hutton set up an inquiry to try to discover who leaked his report, but I suspect we’ll never know who actually did it.
At around 11 p.m. we all decided it was time to pack up and go home. I took the back way out of Broadcasting House to avoid any journalists but I did notice that Tara Conlan was still in reception. She rang me in the car about twenty minutes later, still digging.
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Tara, the Daily Mail’s TV editor. She was my bête noire when the Daily Mail was attacking me and the BBC virtually every day. She used to ask ridiculous questions at press conferences. I once replied to her by saying that her paper had already run the story in question on at least three separate occasions and yet she was now asking about it for the fourth time. Her answer was wonderful. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, ‘but my editor likes the story.’ Later, when our relationship with the Mail improved, I grew to respect her. She worked incredibly hard, and when other journalists gave up she was always there.
On that Tuesday night I told her very politely that I was still bound by the confidentiality agreement we’d all signed and that I wouldn’t break it (even though by then someone had broken it quite spectacularly). The only unauthorized person I had told about the contents of the report was Sue when I rang her in Suffolk. She asked what it was like. I answered in one word, ‘Grim’, and that was all I told her.
The next morning saw the same pattern as the day before. I left home early, escaping from my house via the back door and walking down to 10a, where Bill picked me up. There were even more journalists and crews outside my house than the previous day. I was glad that Sue was away and that I’d arranged for Joe to stay with a friend. Why should they have to put up with all this hassle simply because I was a public figure? I’d chosen that life, they hadn’t.
It was an odd morning in the office. My PA for the past sixteen years, Fiona Hillary, arrived back from a holiday in Cuba not knowing that both our days at the BBC were numbered. By that evening she was in tears – not something I’ve seen from Fiona during the years we’ve worked together. She was also in a particularly difficult position: she is a close friend of Tony and Cherie Blair (her husband, Barry Cox, the Deputy Chairman