Greg Dyke, the former BBC director general ousted over the broadcaster's coverage of the Iraq conflict, yesterday unleashed a scorching attack on British Prime Minister Tony Blair, blaming him for trying to bully the BBC into submission.
Dyke, in excerpts of his upcoming book Inside Story published in the Observer and the Mail, also scalded the BBC governing board for pandering to Blair's office by pushing him out.
"We were all duped," he said of the argument Blair made to drum up support for the Iraq war. "History will not be on Blair's side, it will show that the whole saga is a great political scandal."
Blair was "either incompetent and took Britain to war on a misunderstanding, or he lied when he told the House of Commons that he didn't know what the 45-minute claim meant."
Dyke referred to a claim made, then retracted, by Blair's office in arguing for Saddam Hussein's overthrow, that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in just 45 minutes.
A BBC reporter accused the government of "sexing up" its dossier with the false claim, thereby triggering a scandal that pitted the BBC against the government in an open conflict.
Blair's former media advisor Alastair Campbell, too, was a "deranged, vindictive bastard" who vilified the BBC for its refusal to bow to Downing Street over the war, Dyke said.
He also reveals that when the BBC did finally apologize after Dyke had quit, they first checked the statement with Number 10.
"I had no idea I would be fired by a board of governors behaving like frightened rabbits caught in car headlights," Dyke says.
Dyke also revealed that Blair sent a letter to Dyke and the BBC chairman a week before the war in Iraq started.
"It seems to me there has been a real breakdown of the separation of news and comment," Blair wrote.
"I believe, and I am not alone in believing, that you have not got the balance right between support and dissent; between news and comment; between the voices of the Iraqi regime and the voices of Iraqi dissidents; or between the diplomatic support we have, and diplomatic opposition," he wrote.
The book also claims that Blair broke a promise to the BBC chairman that he would not demand the resignations of either himself or Dyke following publication of the Hutton Report.
The Hutton inquiry was set up after the death of David Kelly, the government scientist linked to claims on the BBC radio Today program that Downing Street had manipulated its intelligence data to make a stronger case for war.
Both Davies and Dyke left the BBC within 36 hours of the report's appearance, after Campbell accused the corporation of lying in an officially sanctioned statement.
After Kelly's death, the government further tried to turn the screw, with one Cabinet minister briefing journalists that "the problem with the BBC was ... too much money and Greg Dyke." The minister also spoke of "revenge."
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