Well, waddya know. The BBC internal inquiry into what went wrong over Andrew Gilligan's infamous Today broadcast which led to the David Kelly affair and the Hutton inqury and provoked the biggest crisis in the Beeb's history, has found that virtually nothing went wrong apart from Andrew Gilligan and no-one was to blame for anything important apart from Andrew Gilligan.

So not one of the myriad BBC editors and senior management -- who not only put a report on the air which falsely accused the government of riding roughshod over the intelligence service as well as promulgating information ministers knew to be false and taking the country to war on a lie, and who then continued to whip up a furore on the substance of this false claim for days afterwards, refused to acknowledge its error at any stage, failed adequately to investigate the veracity or reliability of the report, falsely (if unwittingly) inflated for public consumption the authority of Gilligan's source, and dug in their heels in defence of the indefensible -- did anything seriously wrong at all! On the contrary: apart from some minor criticisms, they all behaved perfectly properly and professionally and competently; and instead it is Lord Hutton who should be in the dock!

Because as all right-thinking people know, the Gilligan report, although wrong in virtually every particular, was actually right in virtually every particular. And that is because everyone knows for a certainty, don't they, that simply everything that Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon and John Scarlett ever said which had any bearing on the war on Iraq was a lie -- even though the evidence to Hutton (as opposed to the reporting of the evidence to Hutton, which was a bent cherry-pickers' paradise) clearly demolished every aspect of the case made against them -- because the war on Iraq was wrong, and so everyone who opposed the war is honest and truthful and brave and everyone who supported the war is a dishonest, dangerous, insane neo-con lickspittle.

So are the BBC staff pleased at having been so widely exonerated ? Au contraire. They are behaving as if they have been subjected to hooding, white noise and sleep deprivation:

'Mr Ayre said he had been told one BBC news executive caught up in the inquiry felt "destroyed", while another felt he had never been so badly treated in a 30-year career. The investigation has also been described as the BBC's "Guantanamo Bay" and a "kangaroo court".'

Of course -- because the BBC must never, ever be criticised or held to account, since everyone knows it embodies moral perfection. Clearly, the nation owes it a grovelling apology for even presuming to question it. Call for a human rights lawyer, immediately! Anyone who now dares to suggest that the BBC wouldn't recognise journalistic objectivity if Lord Reith himself descended from the celestial heights and gave them the template in words of one syllable should obviously be put in the stocks, along with Lord Hutton, and pelted with digital recordings of the rotten Today programme.

*This is an updated version of my original post.