After 'Nick' got nicked

Today's Mail on Sunday has a fascinating piece by Alistair Jackson, the BBC man behind that 2015 edition of Panorama which blew the lid on 'Nick' (Carl Beech) and his lurid lies about a VIP paedophile ring.

It paints a particularly damning portrait of the police. 

I'm proud that we backed Panorama over this at the time, strongly agreeing with Stephen Pollard  that it was "surely one of the most important programmes the BBC has ever broadcast":

Wednesday

It's complicated

The odd thing was that Panorama found itself under not-so-friendly fire from its BBC colleagues at Newsnight. 

Looking back, Newsnight surely has some questions to answer about this now. 

Here's part of what I wrote at the time:

I'm groping in the dark a bit with Wednesday's Newsnight. It all seemed a bit odd.
Instead of leading with David Cameron's big speech at the Tory Party conference it led with the previous night's Panorama...
...which might seem somewhat incestuous ("BBC shall speak peace unto BBC"), except that Newsnight's Nick Hopkins's report seemed to be more a case of sibling rivalry than incest (thank goodness!).
Nick Hopkins himself has pursued angles on the self-same story that Panorama was trying hard to discredit, so it's probably not much of a puzzle as to why he would want to cast such a quizzical eye over Panorama's latest edition.
Then came a strange interview with Mark Watts, the head of Exaro News - the media organisation that Panorama aired so many doubts out.
Evan Davis gave him a bit of a grilling but never seemed to go for the jugular. I thought that Mr Watts came rather well out of it.
The one thing I now about Exaro News, however, is that Newsnight has worked with them on several occasions in the past.
Was that why Exaro's chief was given such a prominent platform to defend his organisation at the start of this edition of Newsnight?
If it was, that puts the issue of 'incestuous behaviour' by Newsnight firmly back on the agenda.

 ...and:

...what with Wednesday night's Newsnight (a) sounding a rather dissenting note about the previous night's Panorama (given the Newsnight reporter fronting this piece's own role in reporting much the same kind of thing as Exaro) and (b) giving the Exaro boss a long 'right to reply' against Panorama.

I also heard an interview on Today the day after that Panorama report with the chief constable of Norfolk slamming the BBC for broadcasting that edition of Panorama.

And then came this week's Newswatch (with Samira Ahmed) which reported the complaints of what sounded like quite a lot of BBC viewers (even if 'quite a lot' in these circumstances means a few dozens, or - at best - a few hundreds out of 64 million people). 

All of them savaged the BBC for betraying the victims and prejudicing police investigations. 

And with no one from the BBC being willing to be interviewed about it (including Panorama editor Ceri Thomas), Samira ended up interviewing the chief constable of Norfolk again, who (again) slammed the BBC for broadcasting that edition of Panorama.

So Panorama really was up against it at the time, from the police, viewers and their own BBC colleagues. 

*******

Incidentally, that once-ubiquitous chief constable of Norfolk, Simon Bailey, is still in place. Checking TV Eyes, it looks as if he hasn't been all over the BBC since the conviction of Carl Beech offering up an apology to Panorama for shooting the messenger four years ago. 

*******

By the way, it was actually the BBC that first put 'Nick' on air whilst breaking the news about Operation Midland getting under way. You can see most of that report in a conspiracy theory YouTube video from 2012, and it makes for fascinating viewing.

Listen out in particular for the way BBC reporter, Tom Symonds, gives credence to Carl Beech's claims in his language - some of which I'll quote here:

London in the late 70s and early 80s. a time and place receding into history. But the darkest stories of the past are returning to haunt modern Britain, and this is one of them: an account of boys picked up by chauffeur-driven cars and taken to meet their abusers.  

Nick, not his real name, has overcome decades of fear to give his testimony. 

He remembers the abusers would send their employees to bring him. 

'Nick', of course, 'remembered' no such thing. He was making it up.

Wednesday

I'm groping in the dark a bit with Wednesday's Newsnight. It all seemed a bit odd.

Instead of leading with David Cameron's big speech at the Tory Party conference it led with the previous night's Panorama...

...which might seem somewhat incestuous ("BBC shall speak peace unto BBC"), except that Newsnight's Nick Hopkins's report seemed to be more a case of sibling rivalry than incest (thank goodness!).

Nick Hopkins himself has pursued angles on the self-same story that Panorama was trying hard to discredit, so it's probably not much of a puzzle as to why he would want to cast such a quizzical eye over Panorama's latest edition.

Then came a strange interview with Mark Watts, the head of Exaro News - the media organisation that Panorama aired so many doubts out.

Evan Davis gave him a bit of a grilling but never seemed to go for the jugular. I thought that Mr Watts came rather well out of it.

The one thing I now about Exaro News, however, is that Newsnight has worked with them on several occasions in the past.

Was that why Exaro's chief was given such a prominent platform to defend his organisation at the start of this edition of Newsnight?

If it was, that puts the issue of 'incestuous behaviour' by Newsnight firmly back on the agenda.

And talking of 'incestuous behaviour' by Newsnight, this edition ended with a celebration of another BBC programme, The Great British Bake Off.

And further talking of 'incestuous behaviour' by Newsnight...

The programme's editor Ian Katz is, famously, a former deputy editor of The Guardian. The first report came from former Guardian ace investigative reporter Nick Hopkins. The second report came from former Guardian political correspondent Allegra Stratton. The pundit discussion featured Polly Toynbee of the Guardian (alongside Philip Collins of The Times and Tim Montgomerie). And the closing GBBO discussion had just one interviewee - Yotam Ottolenghi, a long-standing Guardian cookery columnist. Oh my God, the Guard i an!

The report from Allegra on David Cameron's big speech sounded quite enthusiastic. DC had shown that those who featured a lurch to the Right were wrong. DC has lurched to "the centre-left", she said - though he was still "hardline" on some things, like tackling FGM and terrorism. And as for those tax-credit changes, don't even go there sister!

The odd bit here was the pundit panel afterwards. Why were there two pro-Labour panellists (Philip Collins and Polly Toynbee) and only one pro-Conservative panellist (Tim Montgomerie)?

[For fans of Polly, she placed David Cameron close to the far-right of the political spectrum but put Jeremy Corbyn closer to the political centre].

The remaining feature on Newsnight came courtesy of the BBC's everywhere correspondent, the omnipresent Gabriel Gatehouse. I've joked before about how he pops up everywhere, always sounding authoritative, whichever country he's reporting from. Here he was in Saxony in eastern Germany reporting on the "other side" of the German reaction to the arrival of massed numbers of migrants.

Like a number of other such BBC reports, Gabriel was careful to say that not all the anti-migrant/anti-Islamisation protestors protesting there are far-right, but his language was sufficiently clever to ensure that we took away from his report the fact that (a) some of these people are far-right and (b) that those who aren't "primarily" protesting for far-right reasons might be in danger of swelling the far-right.

Thus, Newsnight viewers might have been led to think that those objecting to the mass influx of migrants into Germany are mostly, to varying degrees, linked to the far-right....which is unlikely to be true.

Plus a Saxon security official was encouraged/allowed to say that if countries like the UK took their fair share of these migrants such feelings might not be arising...

...which arose in me the thought that if Germany hadn't invited in hundreds upon hundreds of 'refugees from Syria' en masse in the first place then Germany and the rest of Europe wouldn't be where they/we are today....not that Gabriel put that very obvious point to the official - or his BBC audience - at any stage in his report.

P.S. ...and is this is as good a place to post this as anywhere...

Talking of Philip Collins of The Times, this appealed to my sense of humour, so I thought I'd share:

Look who's started at 'Newsnight'!

Having taken by eye off Newsnight I failed to notice that another new recruit has started there. He's Nick Hopkins and he's now their Investigations Correspondent.

Ian Katz, as a former deputy editor of the Guardian, who took over at Newsnight soon after the Guardian reporter Allegra Stratton was appointed to the post of Newsnight political editor, has made a number of striking appointments - including the TUC's economics advisor Duncan Weldon as economics correspondent and the FT's Chris Cook as policy editor. Others came from within the BBC or from ITV or Channel 4.

Some people detected left-wing bias is the choice of a Guardian deputy editor to head the programme and a Guardian reporter to act as political editor. They then groaned en masse when Duncan Weldon was given Paul Mason's old job.

What then of Nick Hopkins? Where does he come from? Well, according to the Guardian:

BBC2's Newsnight has appointed the Guardian's Nick Hopkins as its investigations correspondent.

Hopkins, the paper's investigations editor and a key member of the team that reported on Edward Snowden's revelations on NSA surveillance, has held roles including national news editor and deputy foreign editor at the Guardian.

So he comes from the Guardian then. Well, fancy that!

So, what sort of things did Nick investigate at the Guardian? Well, take a look for yourselves here.