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Cost the BBC £1 million How the BBC Paid out £1,000,000 in Libel Damages after Running one of Gable’s lies
Despite this ruse being an obvious Communist attempt to divert attention away from the very real extremist leftist “Militant Tendency” which was then still tenaciously involved in a power struggle within the Labour Party, the BBC accepted Gable’s “research” without question and based an entire episode on it. Gable
was in fact, quick to boast of how the programme "drew heavily upon According to Labour MP Mr Robin Corbett, Gable "was the man mainly responsible for the programme" (Daily Telegraph, 13 March 1985). Of course, it was yet another Gable fantasy, and the two Tory MPs named as “secret Nazis,” Neil Hamilton and Gerald Howarth, quickly issued a libel action against the BBC. Faced with the overwhelming evidence that Gable had simply manufactured the “evidence” and had given the BBC the biggest load of cock-and-bull ever seen since the ‘Column 88’ hogwash, the BBC’s legal department surrendered, and in 1986 the BBC offered an out-of-court settlement, which was accepted, and the damages amounted to £1 million in cash. Despite this money actually coming from the taxpayer and TV licence payers directly, and therefore actually being public money, the BBC and other media forms still rely on Gable’s fantasies for their stories… something which will, without question, cost them dearly in the future again. It is little wonder that an article in The Observer said Gable is "a conspiracy theorist who could spot Nazi architecture in a kindergarten sandpit". |
In
1984, Gerry Gable and Searchlight provided “research” back-up to the BBC
Panorama programme on "Maggie's Militant Tendency" -- supposedly about
“extreme right wingers” within the Tory Party.
Searchlight's own revelations", (Searchlight No 130 April
1986, p2).