My Greatest Mistake: Gavin Esler, presenter for BBC News 24

'You tend to trust a 16-year-old girl who breaks down under oath'

"I was the chief North America correspondent of the BBC in Washington in November 1990. I had been up a mountain in Colorado with Margaret Thatcher in August, 1990, when she was meeting George Bush and Kuwait was invaded by Iraq. It was increasingly likely that we were going to war. As part of the political preparations for going to war, there were a series of congressional hearings held in Washington about Iraqi atrocities. At one hearing, a young girl, about 16, appeared and testified in the most incredibly moving fashion about scenes that she had witnessed in a hospital in Kuwait. She was a Kuwaiti and had seen some of the terrible things that Iraqi soldiers had done. She said that they had taken babies out of incubators and shipped the incubators back to Baghdad, leaving the Kuwaiti babies in great distress. It was bloodcurdling stuff, and very emotional. I filed a piece for the BBC's Nine O'Clock News that night.

Everybody wrote stories – The Washington Post and The New York Times – about these brutal Iraqis. How could they do this to babies? Congress then moved to vote for the war, and war started in January 1991. Sometime in the late spring of 1991, when the war was over, we all discovered that this Kuwaiti girl was actually the daughter of the Ambassador of Kuwait. She had been in Washington at the time, had witnessed none of this, and the story had been made up through a public relations agency. There is an old American saying that Bill Clinton used to quote: 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.' As journalists we are sceptical by nature, but there are some things you take on trust. When you see a 16-year-old girl breaking down in tears about babies under oath, you tend to believe it – but not again.

Right at the start of News 24, in about 1988, we had huge difficulties with three state-of-the-art computer systems that put the network on air. Trying to get them to work together was almost impossible. Sometimes the words that I had written and the pictures which appeared did not co-ordinate. One night, I was reading the opening headlines for the main news. I said, 'Boris Yeltsin, gravely ill, is taken to hospital' – but what you saw were pictures from the BSE crisis of a butcher chopping up a cow.

About 10 years ago, I was presenting part of the European elections for Newsnight, from Rome. Imagine an Italian TV studio run by the equivalent of Manuel the waiter from Fawlty Towers. Everything went wrong – including the fact that I couldn't hear anything from London. In order to cue me, somebody on a telephone in London had to shout to a producer in the gallery in Rome who had to tell a translator who told a director who told a floor manager. This took about 15 seconds, while I just sat there blank. It got worse. As the results got later, I noticed the floor manager giving drinks to the audience. I thought it was water, but it was grappa. All you saw was me looking vacant, and a studio audience plastered on raw brandy and falling about laughing. I looked at the tape when I got home and it was the most awful television I have ever been involved in."