Campbell’s accusations caught the BBC unawares. As Campbell was testifying, the broadcaster’s leadership team was on retreat in Surrey. “I... watched Campbell, and I could see we were in trouble,” recalls Radio News Chief Mitchell, who remained in London. He called Sambrook to brief him. The BBC immediately put out a statement , which read: “We do not feel the BBC has anything to apologize for. We regret that Alastair Campbell has chosen to accuse Andrew Gilligan and the BBC of lying. We have always been clear in our reporting.”

But that was only a first salvo in what they felt had to be a more robust response. The BBC leadership’s initial reaction was that Campbell was trying to divert public attention from his own slip-up with the “dodgy” dossier. “Internally, part of our thought process was ‘hang on, is he just trying to divert the fire here?’ It was a very strong, vitriolic attack on the whole of the BBC, not just this particular story,” says Sambrook.

At that point, I felt he was redefining what our story was. Which was a very classic Alastair tactic. He kept defining it as, you have accused the prime minister of lying. Well, we hadn’t... [We said] that someone in government probably knew the intelligence was wrong.

The leadership team discussed Wednesday evening how the BBC might respond. Sambrook asked Dyke: “Do we want to build bridges?” But Dyke wanted to play hardball. Sambrook remembers that Dyke responded: “I want to jab both fingers in their eyes.” Sambrook rushed up to London in order to appear on the Today program the next day, Thursday, at 8 a.m.

Today played excerpts from Campbell’s testimony, and Sambrook tried to answer the charges one by one. Saying that Campbell had “seriously misrepresented the BBC’s journalism,” he denied that the BBC had pursued an anti-war agenda, or that it had accused the prime minister either of lying or misleading the House of Commons, or of leading the country to war on a false basis. He agreed that the BBC should be held to the highest journalistic standards. Sambrook reiterated that “I’m entirely satisfied that [Gilligan’s source] is a senior, credible, and reliable source.” As to an apology, he observed that “we’re not going to apologize for something we haven’t said, it’s as simple as that... This isn’t the BBC’s own allegation, we’re reporting what a senior intelligence source has told us.” In closing, he summarized the stand-off:

Alastair Campbell’s job is to try to put the government’s case in the best light, and that’s absolutely legitimate, that’s what he’s paid to do and he does it extremely well. The BBC’s job is to raise issues of public interest and discuss them, and that’s what we’ve done and we’ll continue to do it.

“This was a huge escalation,” notes Sambrook. “From the moment that Alastair went public at the Foreign Affairs Committee, we saw this as an attack on the independence of the BBC... Alastair was trying to bully us into bending to a political narrative, which we had got very strong grounds to think was at least flawed, if not wrong.”

Not unanimous. Not everyone at the BBC agreed with Sambrook and the leadership team. Radio 4 Controller Boaden and another colleague had listened to the 6:07 two-way and reached a different conclusion. “If you say someone did something bad, probably knowing it was wrong, you have to be inside someone’s head,” observes Boaden. “The 6:07 was basically saying the prime minister was a liar. Yet we didn’t have the evidence, really, to demonstrate he knew it was wrong... We had to make sure that what we were defending we actually thought was right.” As one BBC newsroom source told the Guardian : “Everyone just hopes [Gilligan]’s sure of his grounds because it’ll reflect so badly on all of us if he isn’t.” ^[43]

Others tried to tell Dyke that the BBC might have a problem, but their arguments went unheeded. Byford, then-head of international news, says that “once it was a matter of major controversy with Campbell and the government, we should have definitely been saying, ‘what did Gilligan’s notes say, and can you show me that that’s right?’” ^[44] Adds Boaden:

What you wanted someone to do is go and listen to the tapes, and then talk to Andrew Gilligan at length [and say] ‘Let’s look in detail at what happened, who knew what, what was going on around it, why did we do what we did?

But Dyke, Sambrook and their team considered that this had already been done, first by Controller Whittle and subsequently over the many conversations Sambrook, Deputy News Director Damazer, and Radio News chief Mitchell had all had with Gilligan about the grounds and strength of the story.