Journalists will be the next target of public anger, and rightly so

There is a danger in writing columns that you destroy everything. You begin by gleefully attacking your enemies, then you begin to attack your friends. You end up attacking yourself, like one of those nematode worms which, in a witless sexual frenzy, stabs itself to death with its own penis. This is the fate that awaits all of us scribblers — and fair enough, I suppose. So this week, then, halfway there: friends.

In fairness, Andrew Gilligan was never a very close friend of mine — we didn’t, you know, hang out. But I employed him as a reporter at the BBC Today programme and admired him as, I think, the finest investigative journalist I’ve come across. You may remember him from that ticklish little contretemps with the government back in 2003, when he suggested that Blair and Campbell had knowingly exaggerated the military threat posed by Saddam Hussein and had misrepresented the intelligence from the security services. That was the gist of the David Kelly affair and I wonder if there is anyone in Britain today, except Lord Hutton, who does not believe that Gilligan was right. He was also the first journalist to uncover the plans for a European Union constitution, for which story he was personally vilified in the lobby by the Downing Street spin machine. Since leaving Today he has rightly won numerous awards, not least for a relentless and painstaking exposure of Ken Livingstone’s numerous client groups and the money they received from the Mayor’s office. What I really liked about Gilligan, though, was his morality; his quaint conviction that journalism should be about exposing wrong-doing, no matter how much trouble it caused for himself. So different to the majority of other young journos I interviewed back then, at the BBC — the people who, when asked why they wanted to be a journalist replied, with an air of mystification, that they wanted ‘a job in the media’.