BBC ex-DG: British Govt ‘tried to kill’ Gilligan

Greg Dyke, former director general of the BBC has claimed that the British government ‘‘tried to kill’’ Andrew Gilligan,...

Greg Dyke, former director general of the BBC has claimed that the British government ‘‘tried to kill’’ Andrew Gilligan, the reporter who broke the story that British intelligence had ‘‘sexed up’’ a dossier on Iraq that sought to justify Britain’s support for US-led invasion of the country.

‘‘The government tried to kill him,’’ claimed Dyke about Gilligan, who was forced out of his job at the BBC in January, in the wake of the Hutton report that inquired into the death of scientist David Kelly, who was the main source for the British national broadcaster. ‘‘Andrew Gilligan was a guy of 32; like all those press guys… They’re all a bit odd. It’s the nature of the world they work in. He lives on his own and he’s not the most popular man in the world,’’ Dyke said at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature in Gloucestershire last night.

‘‘Campbell (Alastair Campbell), the then chief of communications at 10, Downing Street) hated him. They tried to get him. When he wouldn’t do the deed (a reference to Gilligan apologising), they basically said to us: ‘Right, we are going to throw the whole PR operation of the government against you’. These are not nice people.

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‘‘The reason Kelly’s name came into the public agenda—it was put there at the suggestion of Campbell, by people from the press office in the Ministry of Defence,’’ he alleged. According to The Independent on Sunday, Dyke also told the audience that he was twice offered a deal by the government.

‘‘They said—first through Peter Mandelson, former minister and close friend of Prime Minister Tony Blair, and then through Blair—‘The deal is this. You’ve got to say the story is wrong and we’ll say you were entitled to broadcast it’’’, he claimed.

‘‘Well, we didn’t know it was wrong. If you do that analysis now, Gilligan’s story was right. The BBC board will have to stand up for what it believes in.’’ Dyke said Gilligan made ‘‘one key mistake’’ when he said the government ‘‘ordered’’ more information to be put in the dossier. He asked: ‘‘How could we have ensured everything was correct?

‘‘They (the government) have not even begun to apologise for what they should be apologising for. Some people in Downing Street knew, there’s no doubt about it.”

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