BBC admits Kelly 'mistake'

The statement was made after a meeting of the BBC governors

A description of Dr David Kelly as a "senior intelligence source" was inserted by mistake into a BBC statement, the corporation has admitted.

The BBC said the description had been included in a statement "at the last minute".

The statement was issued at the height of the row between the government and the BBC over correspondent Andrew Gilligan's report quoting a source as saying the Iraq weapons dossier had been "sexed up" on the orders of Downing Street.

The question as to whether the BBC over-played Dr Kelly's status is one of the issues being considered in the Hutton inquiry.

The statement was issued after a meeting of the BBC governors on 6 July.

It backed BBC managers, saying it was justifiable to broadcast stories such as Mr Gilligan's based on single sources in exceptional circumstances.

"Stories based on senior intelligence sources are a case in point," it went on.

The BBC governors did not know Dr Kelly's identity at that point.

BBC director of communications Sally Osman said on Tuesday that the description of Dr Kelly as a senior intelligence source was "an assumption too far".

Gossip

Ms Osman said "quite a few people" had been working on the statement and the reference "was one of those things that got inserted by mistake".

It has emerged that BBC governor Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, a former chairman of the joint intelligence committee, told BBC chairman Gavyn Davies after Dr Kelly had been named that he could not be called a senior intelligence source.

In an e-mail released to the Hutton inquiry, she said Dr Kelly could not be described as "an intelligence source of any level of seniority".

She said Dr Kelly could only have heard gossip about the claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to do so.

"He would have been inside the scuttlebutt ring and therefore on receipt of hearsay," she said.

Mr Davies replied by saying he agreed about the "haste" with which the governors' statement had been made and said that with hindsight, the governors should have met earlier on 6 July.