BBC had doubts over report

Doubts that BBC management had about their own reporter Andrew Gilligan and his "flawed reporting" dramatically surfaced at the inquiry into the death of weapons expert David Kelly today.

Four weeks after the BBC's sensational story that the Government's dossier on Iraqi weapons had been sexed up, and after Dr Kelly's suicide, the editor of the Today programme, Kevin Marsh, sent an email to the head of Radio News, Stephen Mitchell.

With Gilligan's performance under intense scrutiny and his reporting being attacked by the Government, the email on 27 June read: "This story was a good piece of investigative journalism marred by flawed reporting. Our biggest millstone has been his loose use of language and lack of judgment in some of his phraseology."

The email goes on to question the amount of reporting Gilligan was carrying out for other BBC outlets and continues: "This is a result of the loose and sometimes distant relationship he has been allowed to have with Today."

For Gilligan, already subjected to close questioning at Lord Hutton's inquiry, the revelation of the email was an added strain. He admitted that he had never seen it before.

However, the inquiry was then given an insight into the world of BBC politics when an earlier email, this time from Marsh to Gilligan, on 30 May, was read out.

In it Mr Marsh took a quite different view of the Today reporter. He wrote: "Welcome back. Good work, good story, well-handled and wellthought out."

In a reference to the unsocial hours worked by Gilligan he says: "Since you are an entirely nocturnal person and I am a normal
human being, maybe you could crack the coffin lid open during next week during daylight so we could have a meeting."

Although the BBC has steadfastly defended its story, the inquiry today heard extracts from minutes of a BBC governors' meeting on 6 July which stated baldly: "Careful language had not been applied by Andrew Gilligan throughout."

Gilligan himself admitted to the inquiry today that his reporting "wasn't perfect" - in particular an unscripted interview down a telephone line from his home. "With the benefit of hindsight-and going through it with a fine toothcomb, it wasn't wrong what I said, but it wasn't perfect either," he told the inquiry.

"It should have been scripted. But it was the product of a live broadcast."

He said that, in the interview, he'd drawn a fair conclusion from what he had earlier been told by Dr Kelly: "But, on reflection, I didn't use exactly the right language. It wasn't wrong, but it wasn't exactly right either. I was reporting what I believed Dr Kelly was saying."

In the broadcast, the Government was accused of acting in bad faith and deliberately lying by using material they knew was not true.

Gilligan's claim, firmly denied by Dr Kelly to MoD officials before his suicide, was that the weapons expert had told him the report had been "sexed up".

Dr Kelly was also reported as saying that undue weight had been given to the 45-minute readiness of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction when that information had come from only one source.

Counsel to the inquiry, James Dingemans, told Gilligan that part of the reason for the debate over the Kelly affair becoming so heated was the perception that there had been deliberate wrongdoing by the Government.

Gilligan replied: "The Government have used a technique where they quote selectively from the weakest detail of the report and use it to discredit the whole report. The Government wants to put the most extreme interpretation on it.

"It was never my intention to say intelligence had been fabricated. It wasn't my intention to say the Government had lied or made up intelligence. It seemed people did get that impression."