Press Office

Aired: Sunday, 26 September, 2004 10:00
Sky News' Sunday with Adam Boulton

ADAM BOULTON:  The verdict on Tony Blair by Greg Dyke, the former Director General of the BBC and former New Labour donor, is that the Prime Minister is either a knave or a fool.  Greg Dyke was sacked in January after the Hutton Report was critical of the BBC for broadcasting allegations that the government sexed up its dossier on Iraqi weapons.  In a documentary broadcast last week and in his memoirs, ‘The Inside Story’, Greg Dyke remains unrepentant.  Lord Hutton was a joke, he says, and everyone in Britain was duped by Downing Street into going to war against Saddam Hussein.  Greg Dyke joins me now and I should say he is a former boss of mine and I am one of those people who stood up for his probity when he was trying to become Director General.  Greg Dyke, before we get on to the wrongs of the government, what are the mistakes that you made in this sorry affair, because you clearly paid a price?

GREG DYKE;           Oh, the biggest mistake I made was when Alastair Campbell went ballistic at the Foreign Affairs committee and demanded that, he said there’s a letter and I demand this and I demand this and I demand this and I want to know all this by this afternoon.  I should have said I’m sorry, we’re not going to do that, we’ll set up our own internal investigation and we’ll come back to you when that’s complete.

ADAM BOULTON:  Don’t you think that perhaps the mistake was that when Andrew Gilligan made his serious allegation that the government had knowingly inserted something they knew to be false in the dossier, that you and the BBC management didn’t really take any notice.

GREG DYKE;           Well it wasn’t … I don’t think it was quite like that! I don’t think we …

ADAM BOULTON:  Well how long after did you actually check the transcript?

GREG DYKE;           Oh well, what I did, I was on holiday at the time as … I was on holiday when everything was a crisis at the BBC, it just happened that way, but I got back on the Monday and on about the Tuesday there was some noise about the story, it wasn’t a lot but there was some noise about the story.  I asked the Head of Internal Policy to take a look at it for me and he came back and said it’s a sound story, well sourced.  So actually I was fairly happy with that.  We then got Alastair Campbell’s two letters, I saw both of them but they were written to, they weren’t written to me, they were written to the Head of News, Richard Sambrook, so he therefore replied and in the second reply all I said to, all I suggested, the only change I made, I said why don’t you put in offering him the chance to go through a formal complaints process?  We have a formal complaints process.  Two weeks, nothing happened.

ADAM BOULTON:  But you see even to this day, you can’t say, can you, that the government inserted something that they probably knew to be false into the document can you?

GREG DYKE;           You can’t say they demanded and inserted.  What you can say is that there were things in that dossier that people in Downing Street, not the Prime Minister necessarily, but some people in Downing Street knew were false.

ADAM BOULTON:  But on that specific point, you still can’t say that bit of the story was right and therefore …

GREG DYKE;           Oh I think you can.

ADAM BOULTON:  What, that they knowingly inserted something they probably knew were false?

GREG DYKE;           There were things in that dossier that certain people in Downing Street knew were false, yes.

ADAM BOULTON:  Such as?

GREG DYKE;           Well, the 45 minute claim.

ADAM BOULTON:  Well they didn’t give the full context of that …

GREG DYKE;           It’s the same thing.

ADAM BOULTON:  It’s not.

GREG DYKE;           Come on.  The caveats that were not included in the 45 minute claim made the 45 minute claim meaningless.   If you read Butler’s account of the 45 minute claim, he sees it as a joke.

ADAM BOULTON:  You see I put it to you that if you’d been doing your job at ITV or indeed Sky, if you’d have been running Sky, you’d have looked at the story within 24 hours because it would have been a sensible market issue and you would have clarified the story and it would have all gone away.

GREG DYKE;           No, I don't think that was the case.  First of all the BBC is much, much bigger.

ADAM BOULTON:  But you saw it as a sort of clash of institutions, that's the point, understandably because you were getting all these letters from Alastair Campbell.

GREG DYKE;           I don't think we saw that there was going to be a significant bust up for at least a couple of weeks.  Until Alastair Campbell went to the Foreign Affairs Committee this was just a story that was going to go away like all bust ups go away and actually it was only when Alastair Campbell went, Alastair Campbell went to the Foreign Affairs Committee and decided to attack the BBC for reasons that, as I try to explain in the book, were pretty clear.  He thought he was in trouble.  He did what PR people have always done when they think they’re in trouble on one story, he created another.  So he attacked the BBC.

ADAM BOULTON:  But within his terms he won though didn’t he?

GREG DYKE;           Well he hasn’t got a job, neither have I.  I don’t think that means he won. 

ADAM BOULTON:  Well he resigned and he was exonerated.

GREG DYKE;           Well, a) he didn’t resign, he was pushed out, we know he was pushed out.  He was going to go at some stage anyway but it certainly didn’t got, it wasn’t of his timing to go then.  Secondly he was exonerated by Hutton but Hutton is now regarded as a bit of a joke. 

ADAM BOULTON:  Now you were a very active Labour supporter, you have some money to Tony Blair, you gave some money to Labour, who do you vote for now?

GREG DYKE;           Who I voted for last time was up to me, I’m not sure I’m going to tell you.  I was, looking forward I think I’d have great difficulty saying I’d vote for New Labour while Tony Blair is the Prime Minister.

ADAM BOULTON:  So will you vote?

GREG DYKE;           I’d vote, yes.

ADAM BOULTON:  What, LibDem?

GREG DYKE;           Well I live in a LibDem constituency anyway, so tactical voting would make you vote LibDem anyway, if that's what you wanted, if you’re left of centre which I probably am but I would not vote for, I don't think I could bring myself to vote for New Labour while Tony is still the leader, even though I am intrinsically a  New Labour supporter.

ADAM BOULTON:  And why is that, what’s wrong with Tony Blair in your view?

GREG DYKE;           Well I think he took a decision on Iraq and went to war on a false premise.  I don't think … his decision to go to war was perfectly fair and perfectly rational but it was not based upon the threat of weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein to British interests, it was based upon something that goes right back to 1956 and Suez, about wanting to support American foreign policy.  It was a perfectly rational position to take but it was not the one he told us he was taking. 

ADAM BOULTON:  And you had not seen in your encounters with him that he was a politician that couldn’t be trusted?

GREG DYKE;           I don’t think …  I think if you .. I’ll give you an analogy from the corporate world.  If was the chief executive of a company, I went to my board and I said I want to acquire this company and this is the rationale for it and it later turned out that the thing didn’t work – which Iraq clearly  hasn’t worked – and the whole rationale was bullshit, I’m not sure I’d still be the chief executive.  It didn’t matter if I knew it was bullshit or not, I would not be the chief executive.

ADAM BOULTON:  But doesn’t it in the end come down to success?  If you go on a venture and it succeeds then everyone forgets the precise arguments, on the other hand if it runs into problems then people tend to look for excuses or things to blame.

GREG DYKE;           Well I got involved in a particular issue so obviously I’m interested in that particular issue, I mean there is a danger of becoming obsessional about the issue which I hope I can now move on and do something else with my life, but Tony Blair told Britain we were going, in that dossier, that we were going to war because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  They didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the evidence on which that claim was made was incredibly flimsy and as the Prime Minister he should have questioned that evidence and he didn’t. 

ADAM BOULTON:  You talked about wanting to get on with something else, is that running ITV?  Is that a job you’d like?

GREG DYKE;           I don't know what job I’m going to do, if I do another job really.  I mean …

ADAM BOULTON:  You don’t need to. 

GREG DYKE;           I don’t need to, which makes, which makes it harder because if you've got to pay the mortgage you go get another job don’t you?  If you haven’t got to pay the mortgage you make up your mind whether you find it interesting.  When I left the BBC, when I took the decision to write the book of couse I didn’t fully understand how it would still leave me six months later in that issue, you know, I’m not that sort of person, I don’t carry those sort of grudges, I just like to do it and move on.  I’ve done many jobs in my life, I’ve enjoyed most of them and I’d quite like to do another one but only if I find it exciting and challenging.

ADAM BOULTON:  Would you think, having been Director General of the BBC it would be appropriate for you, for example if they offered you the Head of ITV, to take that?

GREG DYKE;           Well there’s somebody in that job so they’re not likely to offer it.

ADAM BOULTON:  I think that's a bit disingenuous.

GREG DYKE;           By who, you or me?

ADAM BOULTON:  By you. 

GREG DYKE;           No, no,  I'm saying ….

ADAM BOULTON:  Well it’s being widely speculated that …

GREG DYKE;           It’s being widely speculated by people like you.  All I am saying is that there is somebody in that job.  The board of ITV support him …

ADAM BOULTON:  But the principle of it is if it became vacant … 

GREG DYKE;           If it became vacant …

ADAM BOULTON:  … you wouldn’t think you’d be ruled out by having worked for the BBC?

GREG DYKE;           Oh working for the BBC wouldn’t rule me out.  All sorts of people have told me that by writing this book I’ve ensured that I’ll never work again but it seems to me that it’s a pretty strange view of a society that if you criticise the Prime Minister you are not going to be given another job.

ADAM BOULTON:  Do you think there’s any truth in it?

GREG DYKE;           Well … Listen, it doesn’t matter does it?  It was more important to put what … I mean the book was, I started writing about Hutton as soon as I left and I was so angry about it I thought I can’t do this now and I pushed it to one side, did the rest and came back to Hutton.  By that time we’d had Butler, we’d had all sorts of other stories and they’d actually changed the story.  The original story was that these are claims being made by a whistle blower who was one of the people who put together the dossier.  By the time I wrote it Butler had come out and actually what it showed was actually that the dossier was nonsense.

ADAM BOULTON:  Before you go, I want you to give your third McTaggart lecture in about thirty seconds.  The future of television in this country, what’s going to happen?

GREG DYKE;           I think the BBC is in quite a strong position now.  I think oddly it came out stronger out of all this.  What the politicians saw was that if you take on the BBC in a big bust up, the public tends to support the BBC, so the future of the BBC is pretty strong.  It’ll have to have some changes but it’ll be pretty strong.  I think Sky will continue to be very successful and throw off an awful lot of cash and the question for Sky is what do you do with the cash?  Freeview has been a big success so we will as a society go digital, everyone will go to digital television, half of whom I suspect will be on Freeview and the other half will be on Sky and cable.  The question that comes out is, will the commercial sector, the traditional commercial sector, ITV and Channel 4, will they have enough money to make the sort of programming that they have historically made?  I think the answer is Channel 4 probably  yes, ITV probably  no.

ADAM BOULTON:  Greg Dyke, thank you very much indeed.