She said, "I hear you're thinking of resigning. I order you not to."
I said, "Prime Minister. To me, it is a matter of honour."
ALL: Bring back Greg! Bring back Greg!
I didn't sleep much and I suppose I decided then that I would go.
If you have lost the support of the board, you can't really stay.
If I had resigned, it would have been a cowardly resignation,
because I'd done nothing wrong.
Home Secretary, are you going to resign?
I stepped out of the car
and I think the only thing I said to him was,
"I'm going to have to resign."
Bastard!
You murderer!
You see a pile of dead children's bodies in your mind
because these people wouldn't stop operating on them,
One of us had to resign and they weren't going to.
Resigning is about honour and dishonour.
Matters of principle and taste and decency.
Being caught out and taking responsibility.
But are there universal truths about resigning?
Can the experience of those who have taken that giant step and resigned
teach us some important lessons?
The catalyst that turns thought about resigning into action
is usually a crisis.
Major Norman and his section where out-numbered ten to one.
They were ten yards away from us within about ten minutes.
We all came to terms very quickly with the fact that we were
probably going to die in the next half an hour.
In 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands.
Foreign Office Minister Richard Luce was facing HIS crisis.
Things deteriorated very, very fast indeed.
At that point, I made sure that
I was equipped with my stick.
I always like a stick when there's a crisis.
So I was walking around with a stick and everyone said,
"There must be some problem."
In Port Stanley, the Governor was surrounded by Argentine soldiers.
Will you talk to them, sir?
I'll talk to them but I'm not walking out.
I'm not surrendering to the bloody Argies, Patrick. Certainly not.
Richard Luce was already considering resigning.
The invasion took place on that Friday morning
and my first instinct was to say,
"Well, I'm the minister of state with day-to-day responsibility.
"I should go."
But not everyone would think the crisis merits resignation.
Another crisis. another matter of life and death.
Bristol Royal Infirmary in the 1990s.
Too many children were dying after heart operations.
The mortician pointed to a series of small bodies on slabs
in the mortuary and said, "When is somebody going to do something about
"these children dying after cardiac surgery?"
On his own initiative, Consultant Anaesthetist Dr Stephen Bolsin
collected evidence pointing to problems
with the competence of two surgeons.
The problem was dreadful.
We discovered, at the end of Mr Dhasmana's series of operations,
that 9 out of 13 tiny babies had died.
The acceptable mortality was way under 10%
and the mortality in Bristol was way over 60%.
My feeling was that was because people were too arrogant to
actually stop doing the operations and that the institution was
completely indifferent to the outcomes.
Bolsin would go on to take action.
'It was this doctor's decision to blow the whistle, which turned
'the public spotlight on Bristol. '
But first, he had to resign.
In the year 2000, Richard Desmond took over Express Newspapers.
My politics? Well, I suppose I'm a socialist really.
But in the years that followed, it was concern about the politics
of his papers that led to a crisis for one of his journalists.
You may have read some of my other earth-shattering exclusives.
"Michael Jackson To Attend Jade Goody's Funeral."
He didn't.
"Robbie Williams Pops Pill At Heroes Concert."
He didn't either.
Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt
says he was sick of making up stories.
This is his resignation letter.
"Matt Lucas On Suicide Watch." He wasn't.
"Jordan Turns To Buddha."
She might have, but I doubt it.
ALL: E-D-L!
But Peppiatt's final straw was his concern over the paper's reporting
of the English Defence League.
People of Britain, to come and fight for your country!
The Daily Star seemed to be openly courting the English Defence League.
They were writing quite positive articles about them.
All the sort of terminology that had always existed around them.
Right-wing thugs, extremists,
was directly told to be removed.
We were just to refer to them as the EDL,
as if you were talking about the Lib Dems or the Tories.
And to me, that was a real wake-up call.
Richard Peppiatt's was a personal crisis.
But in 2004, the BBC was plunged into a corporate crisis
over its journalism.
Until the BBC acknowledge that is a lie I will keep banging on
and they better issue an apology pretty quick.
It was condemned by the Hutton report into the death
of Dr David Kelly.
On the eve of a crucial governors' meeting,
its Director General, Greg Dyke, believed he'd survive the furore.
I never had any intention of resigning.
I didn't think it would be necessary.
There was a deal done the night before
and Gavin Davis, the Chairman, said he was going to go.
I talked to Pauline Neville-Jones,
who's one of the other governors, and said,
"Well, does it help if I offer to resign?" And she said, "Yeah.
We couldn't let both of you go."
"Gavin's going to go anyway.
"Why don't you offer to resign and we'll keep you?"
The governors denied there was any deal with Dyke.
Director General was a job he never expected to get in the first place.
I'm not sure the BBC and I are made for each other, really.
You know, there's one or two interesting jobs at the BBC,
but I'm not sure they'd offer them to me.
Like DG?
Well, I think Saddam Hussein has more chance of being offered
it than I have, really.
Dyke would have to decide whether to fight for his dream job.
Today, British gays and lesbians who choose to serve in the ranks are
constantly defending a second front - to keep their sexuality secret.
I was forced to lie, to myself and to other people, on a daily basis.
The crisis for military policewoman Caroline Meagher was intensely private.
In the 1980s, she had to investigate gay and lesbian soldiers,
who were banned from serving in the armed forces.
She was told to be suspicious of sporty women with short hair,
and men who walked funny and spent too long in front of the mirror.
I could see, sometimes,
the women looking at me with a question in their eyes
and I would see that question and feel ashamed.
Ashamed, I have to say.
It's because Caroline is a lesbian herself.
I just felt such a raging
and overwhelming sense of helplessness, impotence, rage at
the unfairness of it, the injustice, rage at being involved myself.
Having to be a hypocrite. It just felt monumental.
I just think it's ridiculous, what they're claiming for.
It just seems a very unfair way of spending taxpayers' money, really.
In 2009, Parliament was engulfed in a scandal over MPs' expenses.
It seems to be just taking the mick, really.
One incident was about to bring Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's
crisis to a head.
My advisor rang me up and said there's going to be a story in
the Sunday Express about you having claimed porn films on your expenses.
Smith was on her way to a constituency meeting.
She asked her husband, Richard, if he knew what had happened.
We worked out that a receipt for broadband had included on it
Pay Per View films.
And two of them had been porn films.
Richard accepted they were ones he'd watched when I hadn't been there.
I stepped out of the car and said to him, "I'm going to have to resign."
I'm really sorry for any embarrassment I have caused Jacqui.
Quite obviously,
a claim should never have been made for these films.
An apology won't be enough.
When I saw it, I was appalled.
I was really shocked at what we were being asked to do.
Early 2003 at GCHQ, the Government communications headquarters.
Katharine Gun had a crisis of conscience.
She'd received an e-mail from the US government asking staff
to bug UN Security Council delegates.
It was to gather information, which they could use to persuade
them or blackmail them or bribe them into voting for a resolution
that would authorise an invasion of Iraq.
I felt that e-mail required action.
So the crisis can take many forms,
but it always points towards making that decision.
Mr Heath's future. Should he go?
The decision to resign is usually made in the worst of circumstances.
When pressure is at its most intense.
He's hopeless. He ain't with the times.
He's pompous - I know best, leave everything to me.
Prime Minister Ted Heath was under huge pressure
after fighting an inconclusive election in February 1974.
We only see politicians on the goggle box. He hasn't got the flair.
Ted Heath resigned within days.
Jacqui Smith was under pressure after the expenses revelations.
The Home Secretary is to face a parliamentary investigation...
Jacqui Smith returning to the shared London house...
I'd wake up after only a few hours and just fret about everything.
What I was doing to everybody else,
and what it meant to my family and those that cared about me
and how I'd get on and if I could do it at all.
All of those things swilling around in your mind.
You feel such stress and I'm not an easily-stressed person,
I'm not an easily depressed person but it begins
to wear you down when you have to be forever putting a brave face on it.
The pressure helped make up Jacqui Smith's mind.
I said to the governors, who also discussed
whether they should go, I do need your confidence.
An hour or so later I discovered they'd decided to suggest I leave.
Greg Dyke's gamble backfired.
The BBC's Governors accepted his offer of resignation.
I got home on my own. I didn't get in until two o'clock in the morning.
Now he had to decide whether to stand by the offer to resign
he never wanted to be taken seriously in the first place.
I remember I didn't sleep much. And I suppose I decided then I'd go.
That if you've lost the support of the board, you can't really stay.
It's not worth it, too much aggro.
At six o'clock, now it's the BBC's Director-General who goes.
Greg Dyke resigns after the Hutton Report,
he wants the BBC's future protected.
With the departure of Gavin and myself
and the apology I issued on behalf of the BBC yesterday,
I hope a line can now be drawn under this whole episode.
I was sacked by a bunch of gutless governors.
I think they lost their nerve.
I couldn't quite work out what they'd apologised for.
They believed, because of my relationship with the Government,
that if I stayed on as Director-General, I wouldn't
be able to negotiate a decent Charter renewal.
My argument to that is that wasn't their job that day.
Their job was to defend the journalistic integrity of the BBC.
Be fair, but don't let anyone pressurise you.
What do we want? Return the Dyke! When do we want it? Now!
Greg Dyke's own staff tried to get his decision reversed.
I don't want to go but if you screw up, you have to go.
Dyke would go on to regret his decision.
At Bristol Royal Infirmary, the pressure on Stephen Bolsin
was mounting.
He was given a warning by the hospital.
If I continued to raise concerns then my career in Bristol
would be threatened.
And that was a very serious threat.
The stress lead me to become depressed in my job because I
couldn't impact the continuing and incessant deaths of these children.
I think it lead to tensions between Maggie, my wife and myself because
she was saying you've grown into someone who isn't the man I married.
Have you declared war on the BBC? Go away!
Despite being cleared by the Hutton Inquiry, Alastair Campbell was
also feeling the pressure to resign, but closer to home.
I was doing a job that Fiona, my partner, had not wanted me to do
in the first place, doing it in a situation where
the major issue was Iraq and the policy that she totally opposed.
You spend all day defending the policy.
You go home and you thought,
"Oh, God, I've got to have the bloody argument again!"
Campbell wanted to resign, but Tony Blair asked him to stay on.
The pressure began to build. Towards the end it, got very, very difficult.
You know, but I was definitely reaching a point where I thought,
"If I'm not careful, I push this too far,
"push it much further, you know, I end up without a family."
The only time I nearly lost it was when we had demonstrations
outside the house and I remember once my daughter, who was about nine,
coming back from school with friends and people giving her
pictures of kids who had been gassed by Saddam at Halabja and saying,
"Can you ask your dad why he is doing this?"
Now, that was the only time when I sort of thought I might just go out and lamp somebody, but I didn't.
That would have been a resignation issue?
It might have been, it might not have been. John Prescott got away with it!
HE LAUGHS
At GCHQ, Katharine Gun agonised over the secret e-mail
and eventually passed it to a journalist.
On a visit to her newsagent's, she was shocked.
There it was, splashed across the front pages, "Dirty tricks."
Well, I was just trembling as soon as I picked it up, I was trembling.
It was only as an investigation was launched that Katharine realised she couldn't stay in her job.
By the Wednesday, I just couldn't keep it in any longer and I felt
I couldn't lead a duplicitous existence and I told my line manager.
I was very innocent, I suppose, perhaps I should have made it
a really loud, personal, in-your-face kind of announcement.
I don't know. I really don't.
Would it have been that expensive in hardware and money to have
sent a couple of frigates and a submarine?
Well, you don't really want to take that action
unless you feel that it is a real possibility that something serious will happen.
Now, as it turned out, we were wrong in that sense. It did happen.
Richard Luce was under fire from all sides.
But on the day the Argentines invaded, his mother rang with a brilliant solution.
She called about ten times, so I took the call and she said,
"Darling, I have got the answer for you."
I said, "Well, what's that?"
She said, "Arrange a football match between Argentina
"and Britain and that will end the war."
"It's a bit late, there's been an invasion!"
Voters can exert their own pressure on politicians who they want to go.
Health Minister Edwina Currie was forced to resign in 1988,
over the salmonella in eggs crisis. Some of her constituents were her greatest critics.
I think she's done the right thing. By resigning? Yes.
Great. Why? Why? Because we don't like her round here.
She just opens her mouth too much, doesn't she?
Sometimes the pressure to go can come from an outsider, with an axe to grind.
Jeffrey Archer was forced to resign as Mayor of London candidate
by a man who didn't want Archer in a position of power.
How much are you earning? Never mind. That's my business.
That's your business. The publicist, Max Clifford.
He made sure a client's revelations about Archer committing perjury
in a libel trial forced Archer's resignation.
The main concern I had was you don't want Jeffrey Archer in a position of power.
Today, in the centre of the media circus,
the man who lied for Lord Archer.
Clifford took to the airwaves with his client, Ted Francis, to get the desired result.
I disapproved of the idea of Jeffrey Archer becoming Mayor of London. I'm sure you feel the same.
Ted Francis was a guy that gave Jeffrey Archer his alibi.
So he came to me and the rest was history,
but I got the result I wanted inasmuch as Jeffrey Archer
wasn't going to be Mayor of London because of the scandal.
So pressure can come from many directions and it is difficult to resist.
Any minister must have the full confidence of his colleagues.
I therefore asked to see the Prime Minister to tender my resignation.
Honourable resignations are sometimes seen as an old-fashioned way of carrying the can.
Leon Brittan is believed to have resigned as Trade and Industry Secretary
to save Mrs Thatcher's skin over the leaking of a letter.
I suppose he has to resign, but one can't help wondering
if he isn't the scapegoat of the Prime Minister?
Mrs Thatcher served for another four years.
Few honourable resignations are as simple as they seem on the surface.
To the South Atlantic.
Quick... march!
One of the most celebrated was over the Falklands crisis in 1982.
Immediately after the Argentine invasion,
Richard Luce sought out his boss, Lord Carrington.
Before I spoke, he saw my face and said, "You're not going to resign."
So I told him the reasons and he said, "No, now hang on.
"I'm the Foreign Secretary, I carry the can.
"You're my Minister of State. It is our duty to stay at our post."
It took a pounding from Parliament and, perhaps crucially, the Press
to finally make up Carrington's mind.
I think time led him to pause and reflect and he had been told
there would be a very nasty editorial in The Times on Monday,
not that an editorial of a newspaper should dictate what we do.
It did on the Monday morning talk about ministers of the Foreign Office
being traitors, virtually being traitors to their country.
I think that, apart from being deeply wounding, was something of a catalyst
for him to say, "Well perhaps the Prime Minister needs a new Foreign Minister."
But Margaret Thatcher intervened.
She said, "I hear you're thinking of resigning, I order you not to."
And I said to her, "Prime Minister, to me it is a matter of honour."
And there was a surprising silence coming from Lady Thatcher
and she said, "I can't quarrel with honour."
It was a blow, but in a way, it's never a blow for politics
if you have someone doing what he deems to be the honourable thing.
We have seen a very great national humiliation.
I felt myself, like Lord Carrington, that it would be right
for the Prime Minister to have the chance to have new ministers at her disposal.
So the Press and Parliament and a Prime Minister's belief
in honour helped an honourable resignation get back on track.
But doing the honourable thing isn't always so easy.
The MPs' rule book is quite clear -
your main home is where you spend more nights than any other.
Jacqui Smith insists she spends most of her time
at this southeast London house behind me, belonging to her sister.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was pilloried for clinging to office after the expenses revelations.
In fact, she wanted to go, but the decision wasn't hers alone.
It was the Friday before the G20 and my adviser said to me,
I think he's right, "The last thing the Prime Minister wants
"to happen this weekend is for the Home Secretary to resign."
Smith waited a few days and met the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
He said to me, "If you resign about this, you know, you'll always
"be remembered as resigning because of expenses."
And I said, "Well, I know that to a certain extent,
"but I can't do the job that you asked me to do."
Eventually, he realised that I had made up my mind
and I was going to go
and then he persuaded me not to go until the reshuffle.
I didn't feel like crying. I felt a big relief.
I felt a big weight lifted from me.
The interests of a Prime Minister derailed an honourable resignation, not a desperation to stay on.
Honour and political interest are often uneasy bedfellows.
Resignations are a product of their times.
The issue, the crisis, can be seen as a barometer
of what society deems to be acceptable behaviour.
Marriage prospects are good. The proportion would be much higher
except for the regulation requiring all pregnant service women to resign.
It was only in the last decade of the 20th century that the MoD
stopped discriminating against women.
But homosexuality, that was another matter.
I think most red-blooded males, and I count myself among them,
are repelled by the physical genital activities of these people.
Faced with a new posting to Northern Ireland,
and the task of carrying out more investigations of gays in the Army,
Caroline Meagher handed in her resignation.
I felt a relief, I suppose it had been at the back of my mind for ages
and I actually felt quite liberated. I felt very hopeful.
But before she could work out her notice,
the Military Police arrived to investigate her own private life.
They were very sarcastic and delighted in saying, "It's you that we've come for."
And they went more or less straightaway to a photo
and removing the back of the photo, removed letters.
There was a stuffed toy there and they unzipped the toy
and reached in, and lo and behold, there was another cache of letters appeared and I knew then,
just my heart fell and I thought they have certainly planted evidence here.
Some of the letters I had not received.
So they had been intercepted.
It is just not in the military where gays and lesbians felt hounded.
A 37-year-old computer programmer died after collapsing on the floor
of a gay disco called Heaven. He contracted AIDS.
The AIDS virus provoked widespread fear.
Merely to be gay can cost your job.
Even a bishop said he found it difficult to shake hands with an AIDS sufferer.
I think three parts of them want burning and I do mean that. They want burning.
Like thousands of others, Jonathan Grimshaw knew there was little effective treatment,
a terrible prognosis, and a lot of prejudice.
It's a terrifying prospect. If I was to be living at home,
I know that my flatmate could not cope.
I'm not sure that services
would be available from the local authority to look after me.
So, I mean, I don't know what's going to happen.
To be told something like that is just utterly devastating,
because it meant that it was a death sentence, really.
Friends of mine were being hounded out of their jobs.
Beset on all sides by this moral panic and believing he had little time left,
Jonathan decided to resign from his job in TV.
If you're told that you have a terminal illness,
you find that people have a sort of surge of energy and they think,
"I don't want to kind of die insignificantly".
But I was so angry,
and so fired up,
and so determined to achieve
everything I wanted to achieve in, I don't know how many years I had,
two years, three years, four years, that I absolutely threw myself into,
you know, really sort of committed campaigning work.
Resignation led Jonathan to co-found Body Positive - a support group for HIV sufferers.
Sex has been at the heart of many political resignations.
War Secretary Jack Profumo's resignation in 1963,
followed his dalliance with a call girl who also slept with a Soviet naval attache.
Ten years later, Defence Minister Lord Lambton was also caught with a prostitute.
Why should a man of your social position and charm and personality have to go to whores for sex?
I think that people sometimes like variety.
I think it's as simple as that and I think this impulse is probably understood by almost everybody.
Don't you?
I think a great many people may understand it, Lord Lambton, I think that is so.
If the call girl had said to me,
"Please, suddenly, darling, tell me about the laser ray,"
or something or, "What do you think of the new Rolls-Royce engine for the MRCA?"
I would have known that something was up.
Despite his protestations, Lambton resigned.
Mr Parkinson left his London home this morning, firmly declining to add to his statement.
I will not, at any stage, say any more.
Misdemeanours didn't have to involve paying for sex to provoke the end of ministerial life.
Affairs could be fatal too.
Will it affect your political future?
I have no further comment. I have no idea.
Cecil Parkinson resigned as Trade and Industry Secretary
in 1983 after revelations about an affair and a pregnancy.
A decade later, affairs and perhaps more crucially,
the hypocrisy they uncovered, was still an issue.
The only thing I want to say is how grateful I am for the support
and encouragement and how sad I am to leave the Government today.
Environment Minister, Tim Yeo, fell foul of the Tories' Back to Basics policy.
His extra-martial affair and resulting child led once again to resignation.
But by 1997, things were changing.
I can confirm that I'm leaving my wife. I want to make it clear
that the responsibility for this is entirely mine.
A newspaper discovered that Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook,
was having an affair with a member of his staff.
This idea that I phoned him up and said you know,
"Wife or mistress, you decide." It wasn't like that at all.
I had almost this coded conversation where I was able to be clear to Robin,
but he was not being terribly clear back.
That's because Cook's wife, Margaret, was within earshot.
We got cut off.
He then obviously explained to Margaret what was going on
and when he phoned back I remember him saying,
"Look, you know, we're swimming in a sea of some emotional turbulence here."
And I then said, "Look, I've talked to Tony,
"and he does not see this as a resigning issue per se,
"but, you know, you do need some sort of sense of clarity about this."
And it was he who came back in the morning and said he'd decided to end his marriage.
Clarity meant Cook's marriage, not his career, was over.
Politicians, it seems, have learned to avoid the trap of preaching about family values.
And by the time we reach 21st century Britain,
married men can pay for sex and hang on to their jobs.
Max Mosley led the FIA, the governing body for world motor sport, for 16 years.
A newspaper sting revealed he'd been having sadomasochistic sex with prostitutes.
There were the usual calls for resignation.
You represent over 50 million members. Correct.
You would consider pulling all those out of the FA because of Mr Mosley's actions?
I haven't thought about that for ages.
Yeah, he was in tears.
And he, you know, said...
.. I don't suppose he ever expected to see me on that side of the partition.
Erm... In a way, you know, it is in the situation
when someone else is crying, you end up being the strong one,
so I was not crying and I was saying, "It's going to be all right.
"Everything's going to be all right."
The princess has made the battle against AIDS
and the provision of help for those already suffering, one of her most dedicated causes.
Developments in medication meant an HIV diagnosis was no longer a death sentence.
Jonathan Grimshaw, who resigned expecting he had very few years
left to live, discovered a whole new future.
But like many who abandon good careers, he paid a price.
Most of us at that time were pretty young.
We hadn't had time in our jobs to build up a big pension pot
and when I look at my peers, people the same age,
the same sort of education as I had,
and a lot of them are doing great.
Very good salaries and...
You know, I do feel... I do feel sort of cheated out of a life
because of HIV, but you know,
I mean strictly speaking, you know, I shouldn't be here.
The cost of not being able to resign on her own terms was serious for Caroline Meagher.
Instead of accepting my resignation,
I was subjected to humiliating interviews
where I was followed to the bathroom and watched
whilst I went to the toilet, invasive bullying questions.
I lost all of my so-called friends.
In the last five years, 260 homosexual men and women have been discharged.
Caroline was herself discharged from the Army for unnatural conduct,
contrary to military discipline.
She was convicted of fraud for claiming travel expenses to visit her girlfriend.
I felt cheated out of my resignation that I wasn't being allowed to
just mark time quietly and leave with some shred of dignity
and some pride in my career.
Had I resigned I would have, in all probability, joined the police.
I would probably have two big fat pensions
and probably a very different standard of living.
I was left with virtually nothing. I was unemployed for a long while.
I was struggling on every level
and I feel, in a way, that that taught me an awful lot about myself.
In 2000, the ban on homosexuals in the military was finally lifted.
It came a decade too late for Caroline.
Not everyone paid a financial price.
Greg Dyke's private wealth probably made it easier for him to go.
One of the issues, I made money. It's interesting,
the only two people who left the BBC at that time,
given the numbers that had been involved in Hutton, were myself
and Gavin Davies, who were the only two who didn't have a mortgage.
But whether it is financial or emotional,
resignation always racks up a cost.
I intend to join those tomorrow night who vote against military action.
It is a truism to say all resignations have consequences.
The point is, nobody knows what the consequences will be.
It is for that reason, and that reason alone,
and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the Government.
Hear, hear!
For Robin Cook, it was the surprise of the first standing ovation in the history of the Commons.
For Richard Luce, reaction to his resignation demonstrated a strength of democracy.
I went in rather nervously to Parliament, having resigned,
and wondering what people were feeling,
but members of Parliament from all parties came up privately and said,
"Thank you for doing that and there, but for the grace of God, go I."
I thought that was gratifying and it made me feel
that principled resignation as a matter of honour
is a good thing for our democratic system.
You murdering bastard!
Stephen Bolsin's revelations, backed by his resignation, helped change the Health Service.
Bastard!
You murderer!
Surgeon, James Wisheart, and hospital Chief Executive, John Roylance, were struck off.
Surgeon, Janardan Dhasmana, was found guilty of serious professional
misconduct and not allowed to operate on children for three years.
We are victims of a gross injustice.
The injustice that our children were taken from us.
It sparked the biggest ever public inquiry into the workings
of the Health Service and overhauled monitoring of hospital deaths.
I've got no doubt that clinical governance
has changed the Health Service and made it much, much safer.
I suspect that the events in Bristol and my resignation
and publicising of them has saved thousands of lives,
if not tens of thousands of lives, in a relatively short period of time.
I'm obviously delighted and just gobsmacked.
I'm speechless, quite frankly. Would you do it again?
I have no regrets, I would do it, again, yes.
A year after her arrest at GCHQ, the Government dropped all charges
against Katharine Gun and proved to Katharine that she was right.
It was fantastic. I was at Liberty at the time,
I was in London. We got the news,
and we were just jumping around hugging each other.
There was a sort of 24-hour media circus,
at Liberty headquarters. I was talking to Jeremy Paxman.
It was all really surreal, looking back on it now.
Who are you to make a judgement on whether it is legal or illegal,
moral or immoral?
My conscience compelled me to reveal it to the public
and I think the reaction that I've seen and also the fact
that they've dropped the charges
is pretty much vindicating what I did.
Jacqui Smith eventually lost her seat,
but her marriage was strengthened.
Some people say, "Why forgive your husband and not make him sleep on the sofa?"
If he watches porn films, we can argue about that,
but if he makes a silly mistake on a claim form and I'm silly enough
to sign it, that shouldn't undermine everything that he has contributed
to my career and everything that we've got together as a relationship.
Richard Peppiatt's letter was finally published
in The Guardian and struck a blow for journalistic ethics.
I went from having about ten followers on Twitter,
because I had just joined it, to 2,000 in about six hours.
And people e-mailing me from, you know, all over the world,
sort of saying, "Bloody hell, well done, you know.
"You've done a really good thing here."
A lot of journalists I knew and journalists I didn't know
on Fleet Street who got in touch to say, "Congratulations, you have
"been very brave to do that. Thank God someone's finally speaking out."
The Daily Star says it has never endorsed the EDL.
Peppiatt couldn't resign, he'd only been a casual reporter for two years.
He was unhappy at not getting a staff post.
And he had been warned about offering to make up quotes.
There are still nurses within the Health Service who,
as it were, disapprove of people with AIDS.
Jonathan Grimshaw found fulfilment
and a commitment to helping others with HIV.
Ten years after my diagnosis,
I achieved everything I wanted to achieve.
HIV gave me the reason to do something which I thought was important with my life.
For me, spending the time well, meant, I suppose, doing something
to help people who are going through
this awful trauma and social rejection
and not being cared for when they had this terrible disease.
Even when it takes place in the worst of circumstances,
a resignation can still be an uplifting experience.
Once the resignation has passed, there is time to pause for reflection.
I really hope that Greg will be able to move on from this,
and that's important, not just for him,
but it's important also for the BBC.
About 18 months, two years later,
it was still sort of dominating my life, really.
This was a traumatic event.
So for two years, I looked around what else I should do with my life.
But if you've just had that sort of bust-up with the Government,
you don't get offered a lot of work...
.. because Blair was still the Prime Minister.
And one day my daughter, who was about 20 at the time,
just looked at me and said, "Look, just get over it."
And I thought, "She's right. You just have to get over it."
My son, one Sunday afternoon, looked up at me as we were playing
with a tennis ball in the sun and he said to me very innocently,
"Daddy, why do you smile so much more in Australia?"
It was really a very moving moment for me, that I realised that
the kids had noticed, but they just hadn't commented on it.
The depressing thing for me probably is that I will be remembered
for being put in a position where I had to resign because of the expenses scandal.
I'm sad about that, but one of the things I have certainly learnt
over the last two years is, you know who you are,
regardless of what other people say about you.
I knew that in resigning as I did,
it wouldn't just be The Daily Star I'd never work at,
it would be any tabloid, they'd all turn their backs on me.
You have broken the code of omerta.
But I can get up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror
and smile and know that that day I can go about my business
in a manner that I don't feel is detracting from the world.
I'm trying to put something into it.
I didn't have a bloody clue what I was going to do.
I had a very bad bout of depression, which I think was literally a depression.
It was depressurising and because of the way my mind works,
that sometimes does take me into a pretty dark place.
I had a very bad bout of depression, but I got over that.
I then started to do different things
and definitely ended up in a better place.
If there are things out there that really should come out,
hey, why not?
'I am able to talk about it without developing the shakes
'and the trembles, so I have moved on from it.
'My life has changed dramatically since then. '
I don't have a secure job. I don't have a secure income.
But there have been other remarkable opportunities and experiences
that I've had that I wouldn't have had if I had stayed there.
I remember thinking, "Oh my goodness, I'm no longer a minister.
"I haven't got an official car."
I said to my wife, "How am I going to get to Parliament? What am I going to do?"
She said, "There's something called the Tube, try that!"
I hadn't realised that there were new doors
which didn't open automatically, you had to press a button.
And the doors didn't open,
and I started to get very angry, "What a disgraceful Tube this is."
And a man behind me said, "All you do is press that button," and the door opened.
And it just shows, the world changes and you can be quite cushioned.
And there are still some sweet moments to savour
when those who have overseen your downfall face the axe themselves.
I always remember Jack Charlton saying he had a little black book
and he had a few names in there.
Everybody, I think, has got a few names in a little black book.
Amongst the names in my little black book would be Blair,
it would be Campbell, the Cabinet Ministers around them.
There were a couple of people on the board who I made it very clear at the time that I didn't like.
Baroness Hogg, and she happened to be married to the guy who got done
for claiming cleaning the moat on his expenses.
And I looked up that day and thought, "There is a God after all."
In the last 50 years, much has changed.
Society is more tolerant, but quicker to call for heads to roll.
The honourable resignation may be less common in politics,
but it's still to be found.
In other walks of life, it has flourished.
And perhaps there are some universal truths
which have remained unchanged.
Resigning is personal. It is painful and it is important.
You have got loss of lives, always in the back of your mind.
Lord Franks' committee said the Government could not have done anything to stop that invasion,
but it is nevertheless very painful to think what it led to.
I don't think I would do anything differently,
but I think that if I knew then
what I know now,
I wouldn't have applied for the job in Bristol.
When I tell people I was sacked from the Army for being gay,
they laugh and go, "No, really? Really? Did that happen?"
Never, since the moment I hit that button,
have I doubted that what I did was the right thing.
My advice to anybody who is facing resignation is, don't resign, wait,
because it looks different in the morning.