British Back-scratching Corporation

A columnist in The Scotsman raises a good question that I was unaware of:

FROM a Scottish point of view, the most puzzling aspect of George Galloway’s appearance in Washington this week was Bob Wylie.

We first caught sight of the grinning and gangling BBC Scotland reporter at Galloway’s side in Dulles airport. Then, after the MP’s performance in front of the US Senate’s sub-committee, there was Wylie again, popping up to tell us how, in his considered opinion, he thought it had all gone.

Which was pretty well, actually. Oh, there may be a few people yet to be impressed by Galloway’s bluster, but on the whole, Wylie assured us, Washington was knocked out. The MP for Bethnal Green and Bow had faced down American accusations that he’d profited from Saddam Hussein’s illegal oil deals and, what’s more, he’d denounced the US invasion of Iraq.

Galloway, reported Wylie, was the "Braveheart" on Capitol Hill. Braveheart? Come off it. Even Gorgeous George’s most ardent supporters in Britain would shrink from romanticising him in this way. But not the gushing Wylie.

His presence in Washington begs two questions: why did BBC Scotland feel it needed to send its own man when (a) it is currently implementing drastic cost cuts and (b) the BBC’s Washington correspondent, Clive Myrie, was already there and more than up to the job?

Also, if BBC Scotland really, really had to send, why did it have to be Wylie, whose friendship with Galloway goes back years and who, as the Diary pointed out yesterday, received an acknowledgement in Galloway’s autobiography?

Wylie is not an expert on Iraq or on American politics. And in this case, he was clearly not impartial, and neither was BBC Scotland. Shame on them.

The cost-cutting is not the main issue here. When, some years ago, the BBC had a particularly good Washington correspondent, Gavin Esler, it would still absurdly fly out one of its news anchors (the lightweight Martyn Lewis in this case) when granted an interview with the first President Bush. Profligacy is in its culture.

But its lack of control on a clear conflict of interest in Wylie's 'reporting' of Galloway's trip is shocking. The problem is not that Galloway and Wylie are old friends, but that they are political comrades and professional collaborators. Fourteen years they co-authored a book on the Romanian revolution, presenting a highly tendentious thesis favourable to the government of the thuggish Communist apparatchik Ion Iliescu, who had had the good fortune to fall out of favour with Ceausescu and then to find himself in the right place at the right time. If BBC management could see no problem in Wylie's editorialising about Galloway without once referring to their association, then it is manifestly unfit to run a public-service broadcasting organisation.

As it happens, the BBC has available to it at least one (and probably at most one) journalist who, unlike Wylie, genuinely does know Iraq. He is John Sweeney, a foreign correspondent who three years ago brilliantly exposed the bogus character of Saddam Hussein's propaganda campaign against UN sanctions, and thereby earned himself a sustained campaign of hate-mail from Saddam's propagandists in this country. For his pains, he has also earned high praise from George Galloway:

John Sweeney on the BBC the other week, the cheerleader in chief for imperialist wars everywhere on the globe - can always be dragged out to make up and make a propaganda film.

Coincidentally, Sweeney has also written a book about the fall of the Ceausescus, but unlike Wylie's it's a good one. (Sweeney is a friend of mine. I mention this lest anyone accuse me of adopting a Wylie-esque evasiveness in my commendations.)

Readers in Scotland may wish to ask the BBC why they sent Wylie to report on Galloway's theatricals. In the meantime I shall be lobbying the corporation to appoint Sweeney as their regular Galloway correspondent instead.