Andrew Gilligan is out. And he’s whining furiously about the Hutton report:

He said: “If Lord Hutton had fairly considered the evidence he heard, he would have concluded that most of my story was right.”

He said the BBC’s punishment was “far out of proportion to its or my mistakes, which were honest ones”.

Mr Gilligan said: “This report casts a chill over all journalism, not just the BBC’s.

”It seeks to hold reporters, with all the difficulties they face, to a standard that it does not appear to demand of, for instance, government dossiers.”