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Burned. Sam McBride
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Over the coming days, the small team moved into the office of a BBC executive who was on holiday and began going through Bell’s paperwork and recordings. Nolan, who flew to Manchester every weekend to present phone-ins on BBC Radio 5 Live, withdrew from those programmes and worked round the clock to get the story on air.
But the MLA still had not committed to going in front of a camera. He wanted the BBC to do the story – but he did not necessarily want to be seen to be their source. Bell told them that if they did the story he would then come out after it to confirm that what had been said was accurate. Several days into the contact with Bell, he arranged for Nolan to meet him in an isolated spot near his County Down home. Nolan parked beside Bell’s car and the MLA got into the passenger seat. After a brief conversation, he handed over another audio recorder containing a secret recording of a senior civil servant.
As Nolan drove back to Belfast he listened to what he had been given. Whether deliberately or inadvertently, the recording finished and another conversation played. This time it was a conversation between Bell and former First Minister Peter Robinson. They were discussing what Bell was doing and whether he should go to The Times or to Nolan with his story. Robinson sounded cautious in what he said, with Bell driving the conversation. Nevertheless, the involvement of Robinson – just a year after he had stepped down as DUP leader – added a new layer of intrigue to what was unfolding.
By Monday evening, it seemed that Bell would not do an interview, though he had given enough material for a one-off TV programme. Nolan and Buckler went to meet Peter Johnston, BBC NI’s controller, to make their case for bringing the story to air. Now less than a fortnight to Christmas, Johnston asked: ‘Can this hold until after Christmas?’ Convinced by the journalists’ arguments for urgency, Johnston gave them the green light. He now sent for Carragher. As the most senior editor in the BBC’s Belfast newsroom, Carragher had frequently clashed with Nolan – who operated within a silo and was as fiercely competitive with BBC colleagues as he was with rival organisations. One senior BBC source said that there were ‘massive tensions’ between them but they quickly agreed to work together professionally and agreed that they could press ahead without Bell speaking on the record.
The following night there would be a furtive meeting between the journalists and Bell, which would be decisive. The BBC had booked a room in the Holiday Inn, a mid-market hotel across the road from Broadcasting House. Arriving separately, the politician, Cleland and the BBC men – Nolan, Buckler and Thompson – gradually entered the bedroom. Cleland, an adviser and religious companion, was a figure whose role has not been fully understood and who would crop up again in the story. It was clear to the journalists that Cleland was very influential in Bell’s decisions. One BBC source described him as ‘the strategist’ who referred throughout to himself and Bell as ‘we’, and it appeared to the journalists that Cleland was the key figure who had to be convinced if Bell was to talk.
During the half-hour meeting, a deal was struck, with Bell giving his word that if The Nolan Show revealed parts of the story the following morning, then he would do a TV interview. The next morning The Nolan Show made a series of revelations based on Bell’s conversation, his secret recordings and the paperwork he had turned over to the BBC. The story threw the Executive into a tailspin. Stormont Castle released a statement to the programme, which said that no one from the DUP or the Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister had sought to delay closure of the scheme. But within an hour, Stormont Castle had contacted The Nolan Show to retract its own statement, which then only came from the DUP – not the joint office shared with Sinn Féin. Cleland was delighted with the coverage and Bell agreed to now come and be interviewed.
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On the night the Bell interview was broadcast, what viewers did not know was that his allegations were heavily reliant on a secret recording of one of Stormont’s most senior civil servants just two days earlier.
Four days before the interview was broadcast, Andrew McCormick, the permanent secretary of Bell’s old department, was at home on a Sunday afternoon when he received a phone call from his former minister. Now five days after the Spotlight programme and amid a fevered political atmosphere, Bell wanted to exercise his right to view ministerial papers about the scheme, which had come to him as minister. Unknown to McCormick, Bell was taping the exchange.
In a lengthy conversation, the politician said that the attempts to rein in RHI when it had been out of control the previous year had been delayed by Johnston, the DUP’s most powerful backroom figure. When Bell asked if there was documentation that would show that, McCormick said it was unlikely because ‘people know when to use emails and when not to’, and went on to admit that ‘the actual to-and-fro of what’s really going on very rarely goes down on paper, you know’.
During the conversation, McCormick inadvertently – perhaps out of nothing more than politely attempting to hurry the conversation along – agreed to Bell’s suggestion that delays were the responsibility of the First Minister’s spads. That bolstered Bell’s belief that there had been a hidden hand interfering in his department – and he was now potentially going to be thrown to the wolves to protect that unseen individual or individuals. In fact, McCormick had at that point no evidence that the First Minister’s advisers were involved and instead believed the delays to have been primarily the work of Foster’s spad, Andrew Crawford.
Parts of the conversation revealed Bell to be hopelessly confused about the key timeline of the delays. At one point he suggested that the spike in applications – where claimants piled in before cost controls – had come after cost controls. McCormick agreed to meet him the following day and Bell said he would bring ‘one of my researchers’ with him.
By this stage, the DUP was suspicious of what Bell might do. Prior to McCormick allowing Bell to view documentation in his office, the mandarin spent more than an hour with Timothy Johnston and Richard Bullick, the First Minister’s two key lieutenants, who had asked to go through the material with him in advance.
In that meeting, McCormick told Foster’s closest advisers that he had understood that Crawford had worked in the background to delay cost controls. The civil servant felt exasperation at what seemed to be a reluctance by the DUP spads to accept the evidence of delay from someone in their party. By the time McCormick left that meeting and travelled a mile across the Stormont Estate to his department’s Netherleigh House headquarters, Bell was already waiting to see him.
But alongside the former minister that evening, Bell was accompanied by someone familiar to McCormick – Ken Cleland. Cleland was a somewhat mysterious figure, known to many at Stormont and an associate of some senior DUP figures. He and his wife had been extremely close to Peter Robinson, the former First Minister, and his wife Iris. After the revelation of her affair with a young man and subsequent financial transactions with property developers, Mrs Cleland stood by her friend, taking her shopping and looking after her at a point when some of the former DUP MP’s erstwhile friends forsook her.
Peter Robinson had trusted Cleland with a sensitive Stormont appointment, putting him on the board of the Maze Long Kesh Development Corporation, a body with responsibility for developing the economically significant and potentially lucrative site of the former Maze Prison, but whose work was riven with political arguments. In that role, Cleland had travelled with the then DUP Health Minister Edwin Poots and McCormick, Poots’s then permanent secretary, to Germany three years earlier for a study trip. The three men had discussed their shared Christian faith, meaning that when Cleland arrived with Bell he was a figure known to the civil servant.
On entering Room Two in Netherleigh House with Bell, Cleland said to McCormick that he was probably wondering what had brought them together. Answering his own question, Cleland told him that they had become close companions in Christian fellowship. McCormick recollected that they presented themselves as ‘seekers after truth, indeed potentially as “agents of righteousness”’. Cleland proceeded to inform the mandarin that he had arrived bearing a prophecy about Bell. The self-proclaimed prophet went on to predict that Bell would be vindicated over RHI. The agent of righteousness then admonished the civil servant: ‘We’ve