The Media Column: 'The BBC's extraordinary plans to hide the Hutton report from its reporters'

The BBC is not in the mood today for scoops, leaks or insider gossip. If you are reading this and you have been given advance sight of Lord Hutton's report, please do not be tempted to pick up the phone and call your favourite BBC reporter.

For any reporter presenting a story about an exclusive Hutton revelation to his or her news editor is likely to be greeted with the unfriendliest of responses. That is not because the corporation has lost its nerve - though you might understand why the Today programme is devoting so much time at the moment to asking us to count the blue tits in our back gardens - but because any early news of Lord Hutton's findings that makes its way on to an unauthorised BBC notepad or Palm Pilot is likely to set off a witch-hunt for the source.

The BBC, having been the inadvertent initiator of the witch-hunt that ended in the death of David Kelly, does not need another one - and certainly not one directly linked to the Kelly affair.

Yet while the journalist footsoldiers are, in effect, barred from digging around for an early sniff of tomorrow's report, several of their bosses will be working their way through it today, with the express permission of Lord Hutton. At lunchtime today, his staff will deliver copies of the report to all BBC staff who were parties to the inquiry - the chairman, Gavyn Davies; the director general, Greg Dyke; Richard Sambrook, the director of news; Mark Damazer, the deputy director of news; and the Today reporter Andrew Gilligan.

In exchange for seeing the report before publication, each of them has had to sign a confidentiality agreement. In theory, at least, they could be sued if they do not keep the details to themselves.

The BBC has gone to extraordinary lengths to try to cordon off those in the know from those who might be eager to know.

Copies of the report will be kept in a locked safe when not being used. Those who have access to it will not be able to take notes on the main BBC computer network; instead, they will use laptops and notepads, which must be surrendered after use and will also be kept in the safe. The safe, whose location is being kept secret, will be guarded round the clock.

Anyone reading the report will have to do so in the presence of a BBC lawyer in one of a number of designated rooms. A few days ago, the door-locks of those rooms were changed: the only key-holders are the BBC's head of security and the BBC legal department.

When night falls, they will not go home but to a hotel room, from where they will be barred from talking about the report to colleagues. The key-holders will dine away from the public and only in the company of others who have seen Hutton's findings.

This is pretty extraordinary stuff. It has been put in place not because the five men are not honourable but because the outside world must be presented with solid evidence of the divorce of BBC management from its journalism.

Sambrook, as head of news, finds himself in the most peculiar position of all: he will be cocooned in Broadcasting House hoping his own staff a few miles away in TV Centre do not do what comes naturally to them (and what he encourages them to do the rest of the time): namely ferreting out the news.

But what happens when another news organisation, most likely a newspaper, gets its hands on the report's findings? At the time of writing, no one has managed to "reveal" anything more than a few generalities about Hutton's findings, which appear to be to be based on not much more than informed guesswork. The BBC has rightly not followed them up. But if a revelation too good to ignore emerges?

What if a BBC reporter obtains information not from the newspapers or one of his bosses but from an outside source - a politician or a civil servant? Would he or she be allowed to broadcast it?

The BBC says yes. Dyke, Sambrook et al will play no part in story selection. Instead, the buck will stop for the next 24 hours with Mark Byford, the deputy director general, and Roger Mosey who is head of TV news - neither of whom have been tarnished by the Andrew Gilligan affair.

Would they be brave enough to put such a claim to air? You can be sure that if the sources appear strong enough, Sky News and ITN will not be sheepish in doing so.

Wise voices at the BBC - which has been almost shockingly fair in its reporting of the David Kelly affair - reckon that, yes, its bulletins will not turn away from reporting everything that matters about the Hutton story. And that includes details of what is in the report before Hutton is officially ready to tell the world.

But they'd far rather it never came to that. So if you know more than the rest of us, they'd rather you kept it to yourself.

v.graff@independent.co.uk