The BBC got the dossier wrong, so here comes WMD: The Truth

The BBC mindset, post Hutton report, was best summed up by Greg Dyke's petulant remark. Stepping into a media scrum after the board of governors' apology to the Government, he told the cameras: "I don't really know what we're apologising for." A primer for the unrepentant Dyke would go like this. Let's pretend that Andrew Gilligan had been the Beeb's financial correspondent researching American interest rates. On the basis of his research, he decides that Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, is going to raise rates. Gilligan goes on radio and into print to say that "all indications are that US interest rates will rise next quarter". Fine. But what if he says, with exactly the same research, that "Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan told me yesterday that he will raise US interest rates next month"? Such a lie is more or less the economic equivalent of the political untruth Gilligan did in fact tell. Mistruths like this have enormous consequences.

Given Gilligan's research, he could legitimately have made biting criticisms about the Government's intelligence dossier. Instead, he attributed his own conclusions to the Prime Minister and Alastair Campbell, backing them up with a source who never said what Gilligan claimed he did. Greg Dyke and the BBC governors affirmed their deep and abiding faith in him, without the bother of any investigation. That deserves an apology. If Mr Dyke can't see it, I'm stymied as to what ethical guidance anyone can give him.

The aftermath of the Hutton report was about as credible as a Hollywood B-movie script. By the end of the week, Gilligan was a shoo-in for a TV and Newspaper Award for his courageous misreporting. "Journalism," wrote Max Hastings in the Daily Mail, "is a messy, erratic, undisciplined craft which seeks to find bits of truth amid a morass of official obfuscation and deceit... the choice is seldom between truth and falsehood, but between... offering nuggets of reality snatched from beneath the jaws of Campbells baying in their shadowy caverns, whose business it is to guard them from the daylight." Such a marvellously poetic and lyrical defence of a tendentious inaccuracy. Beverly Hills beckons.

The BBC managed sackcloth and ashes for about two hours before it segued smoothly into defiance. "Can the Government be trusted to appoint the next director-general?" demanded an aggressive BBC News. Translation: BBC spin on what Hutton labelled "defective" journalism should be that the report jeopardises the Beeb's independence. On cue, groaning hordes of important people rushed to cite how much the British people trust the BBC, sprinkling the gold dust of childhood memories on the corporation. One felt they had all huddled around wirelesses, mesmerised, listening to the pa-pa-pa pom of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony that began the BBC's foreign broadcasts during the Second World War. That magnificent tradition hovers like a benevolent ghost over today's BBC, sheltering the very people who are overturning the objectivity for which it stood.

Hutton recommended that reporters and editors do their jobs better. Not a threat to the BBC's independence, you'd think. But the reason for everyone's worry is that we all have a pretty good idea of what being "better" at their job means for the BBC. Essentially, it means abandoning their political world-view. Had Gilligan been a Right-wing reporter, who slipped through the BBC's invisible screen designed to keep such non-U people out, his errors would not have got on the airwaves. It's a guess, but, speaking from some experience, anyone attempting to broadcast a Right-wing conclusion unsupported by impeccable research would find the editorial competence of the BBC exhibiting itself in full flower. The falsification would be magnificently (and correctly) stopped dead in its tracks. And they'd be sacked. BBC news, current affairs and documentaries are to the Left of both Labour and Conservative governments – which is why the BBC can, hand on heart, claim both governments dislike it. This is proof not of impartiality but of bias. The Beeb is consistently anti-American, anti-war, anti-Israel, anti-Western values, anti-free enterprise, anti-globalism, anti-fees-for-anything, pro-third world, pro-statism, pro-UN – you name it.

Suggest that there may be positive aspects to George W Bush or two sides to issues such as global warming, pay equity and the minimum wage and you might as well speak in tongues. There are individual thinkers on air – Andrew Neil and Tom Mangold come to mind – but the pattern is unequivocal. According to the Guardian, the BBC's current notion of fairness is to ring up Tariq Ali citing the Hutton report and a "need for a more balanced panel" in order to cancel what must be his 1,537th BBC appearance. Or to put a neo-conservative on America On Trial. BBC producers wouldn't grasp that the very concept of such a programme is tendentious.

I don't see how to reform the BBC. Regulators, thought police, quotas of right-thinking people are all nonsense. And as one contemplates the wasteland of radio and television outside the BBC, the temptation is very strong to say that since we all know where the BBC is coming from, we might as well take its good with the bad. The Beeb is currently gearing up for act two of its anti-war stance. The first act failed but now we go to "Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Truth", which, post hoc, can make the war a bad thing. Before the inevitable debates with Tariq Ali, George Soros and General Wesley Clark, let me, as a post scriptum, put down a couple of markers on the issue. Was the intelligence on WMD wrong? Don't know. One can't be sure that stockpiles were not removed from Iraq. This, after all, was a regime that just before the first Gulf war sent its entire air force for safe-keeping in Iran. If the intelligence services were wrong, every Western service and regime, from France to America, from Clinton to Chirac, failed. It is conceivable that Saddam Hussein found it important to pretend that he had nuclear weapons. He might have been like any moronic hooligan or bank robber who, faced with the police, pretends they have a weapon and often die as they reach for their toy pistol - or sunglasses.

Iraq was a regime that had a nuclear reactor (before Israel bombed it), attempted to acquire technological information abroad, refused to follow 16 UN resolutions and periodically kicked out UN inspectors. If its WMD programme was only disinformation, it was believed because Iraq did its level best to make it credible.

President Bush's policy was that his was a pre-emptive doctrine. His action was based on the notion that once you find WMD it's too late. If deployment is to be the proof of their existence, the price tag becomes too high.

Perhaps Saddam himself was fooled into believing he had WMDs by his own scientists, who were pocketing the money marked for weapons. More confirmation that no terror is great enough to eliminate human corruption or greed. The BBC should like that one.