ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Burned. Sam McBride
Читать онлайн.
Pressed by Nolan on why he, as the minister in Stormont’s Department for Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI), did not close RHI at the first opportunity, Bell replied: ‘Other DUP spads involved themselves in the process … I was then informed by my special adviser in the department that other DUP spads were not allowing this scheme to be closed.’
The word spad, an abbreviation for ministerial special adviser, would have meant little to most viewers. But to anyone familiar with Stormont it was instantly clear what Bell was doing: he was accusing some of the DUP’s most powerful figures of deliberately wasting vast sums of taxpayers’ money. Within the DUP’s ultra-centralised structure, spads were people of immense power.
Bell went on to name the two spads as Timothy Johnston, the DUP’s most senior backroom figure, and Andrew Crawford, the long-standing adviser to Arlene Foster. Foster had been Bell’s predecessor as DETI minister and had set up the scheme. By now she was both DUP leader and First Minister.
It was a clever move by Bell to seize the initiative. He was putting himself up against one of the most aggressive interviewers in Northern Ireland. However, as much of the information was new, Nolan did not yet have the full picture as to what had gone on. Bell’s story was particularly compelling because he was committing to full publication of every document and demanding a judge-led public inquiry – the most rigourous investigation possible under British law. Why would he be doing that if he had any doubts as to the accuracy of what he was saying?
The constant references to God gave Bell’s interview a confessional quality, which attempted to elevate it above the dirty world of politics. By underpinning the drama with theology, Bell was making it harder for the DUP to make him the scapegoat for what had happened. Some people – even some Christians – viewed the prayer scene at the start of the broadcast as a gimmick that undermined Bell. Standing in the studio, Bell had asked Nolan if he could pray before they began and the broadcaster agreed. It is unclear whether Bell knew at that point the cameras were rolling; he soon did because producers were concerned that a decision to air that scene could appear to be intrusive. At the conclusion of the interview Bell was asked if he wanted that segment to be broadcast. The politician gave his consent and that was the first image a quarter of a million viewers saw the following evening.
The interview was littered with the insistence that he was telling the truth; the late Ian Paisley had exhorted him to tell the truth, his wife that morning had told him to tell the truth, even God had told him to tell the truth.
The broadcast contained a slew of remarkable allegations, including the claim that the second-most senior civil servant in his department had come to him to whistleblow about Bell’s spad. According to Bell, the civil servant had been asked ‘behind my back’ to ‘cleanse the [departmental] record’ by removing Foster’s name and a reference to the Department of Finance from a departmental submission about RHI.
He then spoke of the period just after cost controls were introduced, where Stormont received confirmation from the Treasury that it would have to bear the full bill for the overspend – a colossal sum for a devolved administration. At that point, in January 2016, Bell said that he had been advised by the civil service to shut RHI immediately, which he wanted to do, but he was ‘ordered’ by a ‘highly agitated and angry’ Foster to keep the scheme open. He said: ‘She walked in and shouted at me that I would keep this scheme open. She shouted so much that then Timothy Johnston came into the room.’ Breaking down, he said he had tears in his eyes because ‘children are dying’ as a result of the NHS losing money: ‘The regret that I ultimately have now, when we’re seeing terminally ill children being sent home from hospital, is that I didn’t resign … I think we all should hang our heads in shame for what has occurred.’
It was an explosive, gripping performance. But although some of what Bell was revealing was accurate, sceptical viewers might have wondered why he had not thought to tell the public about this for almost a year – until the point where he thought he was going to be blamed. Nolan asked the 46-year-old politician: ‘Are you involved in a coup to take Arlene Foster down?’ Bell replied: ‘Nothing, as God is my judge, could be further from the truth.’
But all was not quite as it seemed. What Bell presented as a straightforward case of political corruption was more complicated. The public inquiry Bell demanded would ultimately dissect his ministerial career and expose an unflattering portrait of a minister who took limited interest in the work of his department, while acting in ways which did not sit easily with the devoutly religious image he had cultivated.
***********
Almost a year later, at the opening of the public inquiry into the cash for ash scandal, a section of the Bell interview was played on video screens in Stormont’s old Senate Chamber – where for 111 days witnesses would give evidence about the scandal. Counsel for the inquiry David Scoffield QC described it as ‘gripping television’ that had an ‘explosive’ impact. The lawyer said: ‘It’s probably unprecedented in contemporary Northern Ireland politics as an example of a former minister turning on senior party colleagues, including his party leader, the then First Minister.’ But until now the story behind that theatrical – and bitter – split with his party has never been told.
It began a full week before he recorded the interview. Bell rang Nolan, who on his morning radio show had picked up on the scandal after the broadcast of an exposé by colleagues in BBC NI’s Spotlight team the previous night. Nolan had a sharp eye for spotting the significance of a story but his instinct was reinforced by quantitative evidence. Whereas a good Nolan show would involve about 150 calls from the public, in the days after Spotlight, the programme was getting upwards of 300 calls a day, with most of the callers – unionist and nationalist alike – expressing fury. Responding to the sense of anger and interest in the story, the programme would break multiple revelations about the scandal for weeks.
Bell was eager to talk, and he had gone to the man who could deliver his words to a bigger audience than anyone else in Northern Ireland. Nolan invited Bell to his salubrious home on the shores of Strangford Lough that day. That in itself was indicative of the story’s significance because Nolan valued his privacy. Although an ebullient media personality, only one politician – Martin McGuinness – had ever been to his rural home.
Bell did not hold back. What he had would blow the government wide open, he claimed, and the former minister spoke candidly about what he knew. What Nolan did not know was that the man in front of him was secretly recording him, something he would admit to several days later.
The following night, Bell returned to Nolan’s home. This time the broadcaster was joined by his senior backroom team, composed of his editor, David O’Dornan; producer, David Thompson; and BBC’s Ireland correspondent, Chris Buckler, an old friend of Nolan’s from their days at the Belfast’s Citybeat radio station.
Bell, who agreed for the meeting to be recorded so that the journalists could fact-check his claims, positioned himself at the end of the dining room table. With a tape recorder in front of him, the MLA opened up. At points, he would veer off to relate tales that were irrelevant to RHI but revealed the level of distrust that now existed between himself and DUP colleagues. He had brought tape recordings and bulky paper files from his old department to back up his riveting tale. Some of what he said has never been broadcast for legal reasons and because it is not clear whether it is accurate. He referred to allegations that one senior DUP politician had been having an affair with another politician and that another senior DUP member had taken drugs. Seamlessly, he would shift from those lurid tales of alleged iniquity to impressing upon his listeners the fervency of his faith. Over coming days, Bell would repeatedly tell Nolan that God had told him to come to him with the story.
Demonstrating the vanity which had not endeared Bell to many of his party colleagues, he spoke about himself in the third person, with the journalists attempting to steer him back to the topic in hand.