Beeb and Bernie - Part II

I'm afraid there is no trophy. Sorry.

You may well be away that the BBC has found itself at the centre of a sexism row involving its nominations for Sports Personality of the Year.

All the ten candidates are men and it has been disclosed that for some obscure reason people from “respectable” pornography magazines just as Nuts and Zoo were tasked with picking the nominees.

The BBC has said it will look again at how the process should be managed, but isn’t going to change anything for this year.

So, with that in mind I have decided to right a wrong. I will now announce to a fanfare of applause the FoI News Freedom of Information Officer of the Year Award 2011, otherwise known as the “Poison Chalice” award.

The award, which consists of no cash and no actual prize (so don’t bother to see if it is declared on any gift register) goes to Rachael Ward of the BBC.

“Why her?” I hear you cry. I’m sure she probably will not thank me for this, but it is awarded for displaying courage under fire from superiors. I’ll try to explain more fully.

After a considerable wrangle I eventually wrote a story based upon the fact that the BBC gave a set of Wimbledon men’s final tickets to multi-millionaire Bernie Ecclestone.

Having taken some time to extract this from the Beeb I suspected something might be amiss and sent off the dreaded “meta-request” – a request about a request – or the request of last resort.

When the response came back not only did it give a full account of how the details of Bernie’s tickets were released but also how FoI officer Ward stood firm in front of pressure from her superiors.

Her boss Dominic Coles e-mailed her saying: “Rather than naming Bernie Ecclestone specifically, can we not say two tickets were offered for use by Formula One Management?”  

She could have crumbled under the pressure of the six-figure pay packet, but she didn’t. She held on to the principles of FoI, buttressed by the law itself and sent me out Bernie’s name – much to Bernie’s initial annoyance.

The “cover-up that wasn’t” story appeared in the Mail on Sunday. For those of you interested the full BBC disclosure can be seen here. [RFI20111231 ].

My love-match with “Mr E”

Is that Matthew Davis on the line?

Every year I send an FoI request to the BBC to see how many free tickets the Corporation gets for Wimbledon.

Over the years the request has been modified to discriminate between tickets for No.1 and Centre Court and most recently who had received the tickets.

This year after a little bit of misunderstanding with the lovely people in the BBC’s FoI office I was eventually handed the names of the people who got the prize tickets, those for the men’s final on centre court.

Imagine my surprise when I see on the letter that one pair went to F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone. I knew I had a story and as you can see below it made a nice show in the Sun.

But then things took a turn for the worse when my phone rang on the morning the story was published. The conversation went a bit like this.

Caller: Is that Matthew Davis?

Me: Yes.

Caller: Mr Ecclestone here.

Me (in high voice): What Mr Bernie Ecclestone?

Caller: Yes, that’s me. Listen, I don’t like people who write lies about me. I didn’t get any freebie tickets for Wimbledon. Why would I have to accept freebies?

As you can imagine at this point I was getting a little concerned. Images of my bankruptcy, being forced to live in the street with my children foraging in dustbins flashed before my eyes.

I told him that I hadn’t made it up but had been provided with the information by the BBC, and seeing as it was a FoI response I was happy to forward it on to him. You can see a copy here Beeb’s FoI reply.

Later that day I got another personal call from Mr Ecclesstone, where he admitted being reminded by one of his staff that he did accept a pair of tickets from the BBC, but handed them on to the President of Valencia.

It all ended quite amicably and I had quite a nice chat with ‘Mr E’.

As a part-time media law lecturer one of the things that has always appealed to me about FoI is how the answer should always act as a justification against any potential legal problems, as long as your interpretation of it is correct. Hence the need to make your question as crystal clear as possible.