Andrew Gilligan

London, Jan. 31 (Reuters): When Britain’s staid public broadcaster hired Andrew Gilligan to spice up its breakfast show with scoops, BBC bosses knew they were taking on a pugnacious newspaperman who loves a fight with the powers that be.

But no one was prepared for the feud the reporter sparked last June with a story on the government’s handling of intelligence about Iraq — the fallout from which drove his source, government scientist David Kelly, to suicide.

In the scandal that followed, Gilligan was forced to admit to much that would embarrass any journalist — that some of the wording in his unscripted reports was plain wrong, and some represented his interpretation rather than Kelly’s words.

He also apologised for sending an e-mail to parliamentarians grilling Kelly that identified the scientist as the confidential source of a colleague’s report — even while defending his right to keep his own source a secret.

Damned in a report released this week by judge Lord Hutton into Kelly’s death, Gilligan, as expected, resigned yesterday from the BBC. But, characteristically, he went out fighting.

“If Lord Hutton had fairly considered the evidence he heard, he would have concluded that most of my story was right,” he said in a statement. “The government did sex up the dossier.”

He admitted to mistakes —“We deserved criticism.... Some of my story was wrong” — but insisted his errors were minor compared to the greater public good he served by revealing that top experts had misgivings about the way the government presented intelligence to justify war. “Thanks to what David Kelly told me and other BBC journalists, in very similar terms, we know now what we did not know before,” he said.

Described by colleagues as a newsroom loner with an aloof air, Gilligan, 34, had nonetheless racked up an impressive record of scoops by the time the BBC sent him to Baghdad as one of its team reporting last year's war in Iraq. But he also had a knack for infuriating the authorities.

During the war, the government was angry at what it saw as hostile coverage from the BBC —particularly Gilligan’s reports from Baghdad for the breakfast radio show Today, which often started the day with a confrontational news agenda.