|
|
|||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
News Search
|
|
20-8-2003 Scotsman The Hutton Inquiry: Gilligan tried to put questions in mouth of Commons committee By Gethin Chamberlain THE BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan attempted to influence a parliamentary committee's questioning of the government weapons expert Dr David Kelly, an e-mail released to the Hutton Inquiry revealed yesterday. Mr Gilligan e-mailed a number of questions to a Liberal Democrat press officer to be passed on to David Chidgey, the party's representative on the foreign affairs committee. When Dr Kelly appeared before the select committee, Mr Chidgey obliged Mr Gilligan by putting at least one of his questions to the weapons expert. The inquiry was told that an e-mail sent by Mr Gilligan to Greg Simpson, a press officer in the Liberal Democrats' office in London, referred to Dr Kelly as an "extremely interesting witness" and appeared to suggest questions for him. One from the e-mail said: "He should be asked what kind of threat Iraq was in September 2002, and if he was able to answer frankly, it should be devastating." Mr James Dingemans QC, the counsel to the inquiry, suggested Mr Gilligan was using the committee as a chance to get at the government. Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's director of communications and strategy, said he did not agree that the e-mail showed that - as another press officer had said - the government was involved in a game of "chicken" with the BBC. He added: "I do not accept that. I find that quite an extraordinary e-mail." Yesterday, a spokesman for the Liberal Democrats said that Mr Chidgey, the Liberal Democrat MP for Eastleigh and the party's former spokesman on industry and transport, had received a number of questions from Mr Gilligan. He said Mr Chidgey had asked Dr Kelly to elaborate on a meeting with Susan Watts, another BBC reporter, and he confirmed that Mr Chidgey had followed Mr Gilligan's advice and asked about the immediate threat posed by Iraq. The spokesman accepted that Mr Gilligan may have been attempting to use the party's member on the committee to enhance his case against the government, but he said that the questions were valid. "He (Mr Chidgey) may well be feeling a tad used, but in terms of the questions put to Dr Kelly, it was a valid question," said the spokesman. When Mr Gilligan appeared before the committee for a second time, to answer questions in private in an atmosphere he described as "hostile", Mr Chidgey left before it ended. During hours of questioning before the Hutton Inquiry last week, Mr Gilligan admitted that his first broadcast of the story that No 10 had "sexed up" the September Iraq weapons dossier, most notably by inserting the claim that Saddam's forces could use such weapons within 45 minutes, was "not perfect": just after 6am on 29 May he used words that implied Downing Street knew the allegation was wrong. He had not repeated the error in subsequent reports. He also admitted that he had lost his diary, as well as the transcript he had made the day after his meeting with Dr Kelly at the Charing Cross Hotel. All he had to rely on were his notes, typed into an electronic personal organiser. Kevin Marsh, Mr Gilligan's boss at Today, had criticised the report in an e-mail. Its "good investigative journalism" had been "marred by flawed reporting" and careless use of language, he said. However, Mr Gilligan stuck to the essence of his original story - that it was Dr Kelly who had first mentioned the 45-minutes claim and had first named Mr Campbell. A tape of a meeting between Dr Kelly and Ms Watts, the science editor of Newsnight, failed to corroborate some of Mr Gilligan's most contentious claims, but did support the general thrust of his report: that Dr Kelly felt the government had been desperate to bolster its case against Iraq, and had seized upon the 45-minute claim as a useful addition to the dossier.
|
|
||||
|
................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
|||||||
