BBC accuses Blair's office of intimidation

6.00pm - BY ANDREW GRICE

LONDON - The BBC has accused Downing Street of "intimidation" and has rejected Tony Blair's director of communications Alastair Campbell's demand for an apology over claims that the Government "sexed up" a dossier on Iraqi weapons.

The war of words between Number 10 and the BBC intensified when the corporation sent a strongly worded, nine-page letter to Mr Campbell, accusing him of mounting a "personal vendetta" against the BBC journalist who made the claim.

Richard Sambrook, the BBC's director of news, dismissed criticism by Campbell, that the corporation pursued an anti-war agenda over Iraq. He said: "It is our firm view that No 10 tried to intimidate the BBC in its reporting of events leading up to the war and during the course of the war itself."

He told Campbell bluntly: "Our responsibility was to present an impartial picture and you were not best placed to judge what was impartial. This was particularly the case given the widescale opposition to the war in the UK at that time, including significant opposition inside the Parliamentary Labour Party. For example, you will remember when the key division on the war took place in the House of Commons in March you wrote to me to suggest that we had given too much prominence to the vote which recorded the largest backbench parliamentary revolt in modern history."

Sambrook said the BBC's board of governors had expressed their complete satisfaction with the impartiality of the BBC's coverage. He told Campbell: "It seems you have missed the many reports we have filed from Iraq about mass graves, torture and political repression - evidence which has been used to justify the war."

He defended the actions of Andrew Gilligan, the BBC defence correspondent, who said Number 10 had inserted into the dossier at a late stage a claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in 45 minutes - against the wishes of the intelligence services. Sambrook told Campbell: "We have to believe that you are conducting a personal vendetta against a particular journalist whose reports on a number of occasions have caused you discomfort."

He stood by what he called "a perfectly fair and proper journalistic process". But he made two minor concessions to Campbell, which are bound to be seized upon by Downing Street.

He admitted that it would have been better to have had more than a single source for the claim about the dossier reported by Gilligan, but insisted that his unnamed source was "a senior official involved in the compilation of the dossier" who had proved reliable in the past.

Sambrook also said it would have been better if Gilligan had attributed the claim that the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, had "bureaucratically signed off" the dossier to his anonymous source.

The BBC letter quoted other journalists who had reported concerns in the security services about the way intelligence was used in the run-up to war, including Raymond Whittaker in The Independent on Sunday.

Earlier Blair's official spokesman renewed the demand for the BBC to apologise for a story which he said was "100 per cent wrong".

He added: "We will keep raising these issues. In the end, people will have to reach a judgement as to whether the BBC are answering questions which are entirely legitimate questions. What people are talking about is the BBC being big enough to admit that it has made a mistake."

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Herald Feature: Iraq