The Sunday Times has published extracts from the letter it received from Mark Thompson’s lawyers in September which confirm what I have reported on this blog  this past week.

The story by Miles Goslett is behind a pay wall.It says that Thompson has told the Pollard inquiry that he was not emailed a copy of the letter and does not recall being shown it.

It also says the BBC Trust has made a formal request to the BBC Executive Board for the letter to be passed to the Pollard review.

Among other coverage this weekend, New York Magazine has a story headlined Mark Thompson had no idea what was in that letter from Mark Thompson

The American journalism website poynter.org has a copy of Mark Thompson’s email to New York Times colleagues at the end of his first week which makes no mention of the controversy but does announce three ‘Town Hall’ meetings in New York in December at which,presumably, NYT journalists will have the opportunity to ask him questions about his role in the Savile saga.

1. The story by Miles Goslett first appears in the Sunday Times.

2. No mainstream media publishes a follow-up on  the story which is behind a pay wall (significant?) I follow it up and write a new version here on profpurvis.com .Michael Crick is the first to retweet the link.

3.A friend,Simon Albury, sends it to a reporter on the New York Times (actually two different friends send it to two different reporters on the New York Times but only one does anything about it).This leads to..

4.The New York Times syndicates it which leads to articles around the world like this in the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.

5.At the same time America’s largest news agency the Associated Press sees the blog, calls me and includes it as the second half of a BBC story.

6.This leads to it appearing in American regionals such as the Washington Times and Philly.com.

7.This morning (Saturday) the story is in the NYT’s big rival Wall Street Journal.

8.It is also in the New Yorker (probably the best piece so far)

9.And for the first time it appears anywhere in a UK publication since the Sunday Times last week.Quite rightly-and why does no other paper think this is  a story (especially the Guardian’s specialist media website) –The Times (behind a paywall) goes on the angle that the New York Times is running this story about its own CEO on its front page.

Some of the coverage  mentions  this blog,some doesn’t. More importantly sadly there’s little if any  mention  of Miles Goslett who,I believe,will eventually emerge as one of the journalistic heroes of this saga.

Lets see if there’s anything new in the Sunday Times tomorrow.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/world/europe/letter-raises-questions-about-when-bbc-ex-chief-learned-of-abuse-cases.html?hp

You just might have read this story somewhere else earlier this week.

A spokeman for Mark Thompson has now told me:

‘Mark will not be making any statement on this issue other than to reinforce what was said to the Sunday Times, namely that he verbally agreed to the tactic of sending a legal letter to the paper, but was not involved in its drafting, nor was he aware of the detail beyond the central and false allegation put to the BBC that he had influenced the decision to abandon Newsnight’s investigation into Jimmy Savile. Such legal letters are a common occurrence at the BBC and Mark would invariably follow the advice of the legal and press teams. As Mark has repeatedly made clear, he was not aware of the allegations against Jimmy Savile until the pre-publicity ahead of the ITV documentary’.

I’m grateful that Mark has responded. I note that his spokesman:

1. Does not dispute that a letter from a solicitor representing him was sent to the Sunday Times threatening legal action if they published.

2.Does not dispute that the email from the Sunday Times referred to assaults on BBC premises.

3.Does not dispute that the reply from the solicitors representing him referred to BBC premises.

Readers will draw their own conclusion from the revelation that a  letter threatening personal,not corporate,legal action on behalf of the the Director-General of the BBC would  be sent to one of the UK’s leading newspapers as a ‘tactic’ without the DG being aware of the full detail.

Should there be any doubt about whether Mark Thompson was still  DG when the Mills and Reeve letter was sent on September 6th,the letter specifically refers to him as DG and  when, ten days later, Mark Thompson appeared on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 on 16th September  that day,the 16th, was described in the programme-and in the report on the BBC website- as ‘ his last day as director general of the BBC’. Source:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19615708

The reply also raises the question of who was paying Mills and Reeve to act for Thompson and Boaden. The spokesman says ‘such legal letters are a common occurrence at the BBC and Mark would invariably follow the advice of the legal and press teams’. But the Mills and Reeve letter ( see the extract in last week’s Sunday Times) says ‘Dear Sirs,BBC Newsnight.We act for Helen Boaden,Director of BBC News Group and Mark Thompson,Director-General of the BBC’. The letter doesnt say Mills and Reeve act for the BBC itself.

. Helen Boaden has not yet taken up my invitation to respond to the blog.

If you’ve read my first blog on a Savile timeline you may remember that I first got the idea after noticing one interesting fact in the Sunday Times a few weeks back and looking further into it.

Well I’ve done the same thing after reading a story which appeared in the Sunday Times last weekend but surprisingly doesn’t seem to have been followed up anywhere. This despite the fact that it appears to raise important issues. The story was headlined ‘Lawyer’s letter puts dent in Thompson’s Savile denial’. The Thompson in question is Mark Thompson, former Director-General of the BBC and now Chief Executive of the New York Times. Perhaps readers thought it was the latest battle in the long running saga between the Murdochs and News Corp on the one hand and Thompson and the BBC on the other. As I am not affiliated with either side I tried to look at the merits of the article by freelance reporter Miles Goslett who has been working on the Savile story for nearly a year. His contacts with the BBC Press Office on the Savile story go back to December of last year when among other allegations he put to them a claim that Savile abused minors on BBC premises in the 1970s.

Here’s my new take on The Sunday Times story on Thompson in one paragraph:

Mark Thompson, who has denied ever knowing while he was DG of any allegation of Savile abusing women on BBC premises, authorised solicitors to threaten legal action after receiving an email from the Sunday Times making that specific allegation. And all this happened while he was still DG.

Now the detail:

Mark Thompson wrote to Rob Wilson MP on 23rd October this year (after he had left the BBC) and his letter included this paragraph:

 Given the many hundreds of investigations the BBC does every year, the personal involvement of the DG in a given investigation would inevitably be unusual and noteworthy and could therefore have a distorting or chilling effect on the journalism involved. Particular care not to directly involve the DG is taken when investigations may involve the BBC itself, to avoid the risk of a conflict of interest or the perception of one. It is worth noting, however, that I did not know at the time or for the remainder of my period in office whether the Newsnight Savile investigation included allegations related to the BBC and whether it therefore fell into this category, or not.

That final sentence is the crucial one.

Going back to the time when Mark Thompson was still DG, at the end of August the Sunday Times emailed the BBC press team inviting replies to a number of allegations about Savile and the BBC. One allegation specifically mentioned alleged assaults  on BBC premises. There were also questions about the role, if any, of Helen Boaden and Mark Thompson in the decision to drop the Newsnight investigation

The BBC press team responded by strenuously denying any allegations against Thompson and Boaden.

On 6th September, again while Thompson was still DG, a firm of solicitors called Mills and Reeve sent the Sunday Times a formal letter saying they were acting for Thompson and Boaden .The solicitors denied all the allegations about the handling of the Newsnight item and threatened legal action if they were printed. They did not refer to the allegation about alleged assaults by Savile on BBC premises.

The Sunday Times did not run the story in any form.

So what are the implications of this correspondence?

For Mark Thompson’s later statement to Rob Wilson MP to be true – that at no time as DG did he know of any allegation of Savile ‘related to the BBC’ – he must not have understood  the email from the Sunday Times before authorising solicitors to threaten to sue them if they published.

In the Sunday Times article this past weekend, Miles Goslett quoted a source close to Thompson as saying he was on holiday in America when the Sunday Times submitted their questions and that on his return to Britain he gave verbal approval for the letter to be sent.

Goslett said the source told the Sunday Times that Thompson was only made aware by the BBC of the sections of the letter that related to Newsnight and not to those relating to sexual abuse by Savile.

But I am as certain as I can be that Mills and Reeve specifically refer to ‘BBC premises’ in their letter on behalf of Thompson and Boaden.

How could the solicitors have denied the allegations about events on BBC premises on behalf of Thompson if he had not understood them?

The bottom line would appear to be that the man who now runs one of the world’s great newspapers did , earlier this year in his BBC role, put his name to a threat of legal action against one of the world’s other great newspapers after they put to him an allegation about Savile’s behaviour at the BBC that now seems to be accepted as fact.

I emailed a draft of this blogpost to Mark Thompson at the New York Times, to Helen Boaden and the BBC Press Office and to Mills and Reeve.

Mark Thompson e-mailed back that he was at full stretch on Day Three of his new job so would I speak to an executive at the London office of an international public relations company , because ‘he can brief you on my perspective on this bit of the saga’. I was then emailed by that executive. Knowing that a ‘source close to Mark Thompson’  had already spoken to the Sunday Times and that I had quoted that source in this blog, I emailed back that I did not need a briefing, I needed a statement from Mark.He then emailed that the Sunday Times had only used some of what he had said to them  and that I would therefore only have a partial view based on one press article. I invited him to solve that problem by providing me with a statement

UPDATE; Later that evening he gave me this statement:

‘Mark will not be making any statement on this issue other than to reinforce what was said to the Sunday Times, namely that he verbally agreed to the tactic of sending a legal letter to the paper, but was not involved in its drafting, nor was he aware of the detail beyond the central and false allegation put to the BBC that he had influenced the decision to abandon Newsnight’s investigation into Jimmy Savile. Such legal letters are a common occurrence at the BBC and Mark would invariably follow the advice of the legal and press teams. As Mark has repeatedly made clear, he was not aware of the allegations against Jimmy Savile until the pre-publicity ahead of the ITV documentary’.

A BBC spokesman said:'”It would be inappropriate to comment on matters that relate to legal advice.”

Helen Boaden has not responded to my emails to her inviting her to respond with a statement.

Mills and Reeve told me:'”We are unable to comment on any matters relating to legal advice we have provided.”

I have spoken to Rob Wilson, the M.P to whom Thompson sent the letter with the ‘I did not know’ line. He told me:”Not for the first time since the Savile scandal broke, aspects of Mark Thompson’s management of the BBC look rather strange. Despite writing a lengthy letter to me and making various public statements, he hasn’t yet given a definitive account of his knowledge of the Savile allegations during his time at the BBC’.

“Now it appears legal threats were issued using his name against a newspaper over claims that he hadn’t bothered to read, let alone investigate, but which turned out to be true.”