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. Showing remarkable trust in the journalists, at Bell’s own suggestion he handed over the password for his personal email account, which he had used for government business, and gave them permission to search through it for any relevant material.
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
