A despicable and cowardly diversion

There was a strange sort of hiatus between Andrew Gilligan’s report on the Today programme that Alastair Campbell had ‘sexed up’ some of the evidence about Iraq’s threat to the West, and Mr Campbell’s rage at being so accused.

It lasted for nearly four weeks. Immediately after Gilligan made his report, there was a brief letter of complaint from Campbell – not an unusual eventuality – but nothing more; just this rageless lacuna.

In the middle of the interval, Mr Campbell and the Prime Minister met BBC executives and the editors of the Radio Four news programmes, including Today, to discuss various stuff: the euro, foundation hospitals, the battle against crime, and so on.

This meeting took place on the day that Tony Blair announced his embarrassing and botched Cabinet reshuffle, the one where people suddenly found out that they were simultaneously Secretary of State for Transport and Scotland. So the journalists and corporate monkeys from the BBC remember the date well, because the media was encamped outside No. 10.

‘As we walked in, the reporters asked us if we were pleased with our new jobs,’ one Corporation attendee told me.

So, anyway, they sat down and had their briefing with Campbell and Blair. And here’s the thing. The name of Andrew Gilligan was not mentioned. The famous Today report was not mentioned. Weapons of mass destruction were not mentioned. Nobody said a thing about this appalling, destructive calumny broadcast by Mr Gilligan, the one which, peculiarly, a week or so later, drove Campbell and Blair and most of the Cabinet into paroxysms of confected outrage. There they were, the Prime Minister and his chief of communications, faced with the perpetrators – and they said not a word. On the BBC’s side, nobody was much surprised by this, because there had been little complaint from Downing Street in the press, either.