Andrew Gilligan - Career in Journalism

Career in Journalism

In 1994, after a summer placement on The Independent, he joined the Cambridge Evening News and later moved to the Sunday Telegraph where he became a specialist reporter on defence. In 1999 he was recruited by BBC Radio 4 Today programme editor Rod Liddle as Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent. In May 2003, Gilligan made a broadcast in which he claimed that the British Government had "sexed up" a report in order to exaggerate the WMD capabilities of Saddam Hussein. Gilligan resigned from the BBC in 2004, in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry, after Lord Hutton questioned the reliability of Gilligan's evidence. In a statement, he admitted making mistakes and also stated, "The government did sex up the dossier, transforming possibilities and probabilities into certainties, removing vital caveats".

Gilligan joined the London Evening Standard, where he was a critic of former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone. In April 2008, Gilligan was named Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards for his work on the Mayoralty. In autumn 2009, he joined the Daily and Sunday Telegraph.

Gilligan is also a reporter for Channel 4's investigative programme Dispatches, covering a number of issues, including a fundamentalist Islamic group in Britain.

Gilligan presented a fortnightly programme for Press TV, the Iranian government's English-language TV channel. Rod Liddle challenged Gilligan in July 2009 about working for an "international propaganda channel run by the Iranian government". Gilligan stopped his regular show in December 2009, though he appeared twice more on the network just before the UK's May 2010 general election. Gilligan attributed his decision to leave to the "Iranian shilling that was inconsistent with my opposition to Islamism. I have not worked for Press TV since." Gilligan also stated that his work for Press TV consisted of a "regular discussion show on the station, in which Islamism, and the policies of the Iranian government, were often debated and challenged."

In October 2008, it was reported that Andrew Gilligan had engaged in sockpuppeting. Guardian journalist Dave Hill wrote about the allegations. Gilligan stated that one of the alleged sockpuppets was his "partner".

On 22 November 2011 Andrew Gilligan appeared before the Leveson enquiry. When asked about the main threats to investigative journalism in the foreseeable future, he argued "The most important threat is official restraint, by which I mean libel and privacy law, state surveillance, and the potential threat posed by the Leveson inquiry." He wrote that the public still trusted the press, and in the wake of the BBC's false linking of child abuse to Lord McAlpine he suggested Lord Leveson should take note. However, Andrew Gilligan himself was cited in a submission to the Leveson enquiry, also in a case of child abuse which he had wrongly linked to a mosque. The Telegraph deleted Andrew Gilligan's article and issued a correction, though he later denied any story he had written had been corrected.