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CHAPTER 1

ON HIS KNEES

Deep in the belly of Broadcasting House, Jonathan Bell’s silver-white head was bowed in prayer. On his knees, the man, who just seven months earlier had been part of the DUP’s powerful team of Stormont ministers, was being prayed for by two elderly associates who laid their hands on the politician’s shoulders as the television cameras rolled.

BBC staff looked on bemused as one of the men – who despite being under hot studio lights was still wearing an overcoat necessary on a cold Belfast night – prayed: ‘We ask for the power of thy Holy Spirit to come upon Jonathan and those who interview him, that you will direct them in all that they think and say, that at the end of the day we all will have been done [sic] for the glory of Christ. Father, hear our prayer, for Christ’s sake. Amen.’

As Bell rose, the two allies who had joined him – the politician’s father, Pastor Fergus Bell, and an intriguing business character called Ken Cleland – slapped him on the back. But while the scene added a layer of spiritual intrigue, which even for Northern Ireland’s religiously infused political landscape was rare, the two protagonists in the studio knew that a brutal political defenestration was about to begin. Bell, a self-confident character who had always been disliked by many of his colleagues, had been around politics for long enough to understand that his words would critically destabilise his party leader, already embroiled in a financial scandal that had been leading news bulletins for more than a week.

Seated opposite the Strangford MLA was a big beast of broadcasting: Stephen Nolan, BBC Northern Ireland’s aggressive and populist presenter, whose daily radio programme reached more people than any other outlet.

For an audience who had been given teasers about the dramatic nature of what was to be said in the interview recorded a day earlier, the first image they saw of the politician – kneeling in a television studio – was compelling. A few moments later, seated languidly across a studio desk from Nolan, Bell’s opening words were dramatic:

I have undertaken before God that I will tell you the truth and yes hundreds of millions of pounds has been committed and significant amounts of money has [sic] been spent. I am authorising every detail, every document, every civil service document that I signed, every submission that I signed to be made publicly available and to be examined exactly as the truth I now give you.

By Wednesday, 14 December 2016, the day the interview was recorded ahead of broadcast the following night, Bell had been talking to Nolan for a full week. When he arrived at the BBC’s Ormeau Avenue headquarters that afternoon, it was amid unusual secrecy. Rather than coming through the front entrance, he drove into the internal car park and was brought into the building through a side entrance. From there, it was a short distance to Studio 1 – a rarely used windowless studio, which had been commandeered for what would be one of the most dramatic political interviews in the history of Northern Ireland.

Inside the studio, one of BBC NI’s most senior editors, Kathleen Carragher, was crouched behind a screen, unseen by the cameras, following what was being said. A few yards away, BBC NI’s veteran political editor, Mark Devenport, and a handful of senior production staff were crammed into a tiny nearby room under a staircase, which had been hastily rigged to receive a live feed of the interview as it was recorded.

Bell was a willing interviewee and quickly got to the point. He was there to unburden his soul about his role in keeping open a disastrous green energy subsidy – the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) – when it could have been reined in or shut. By now, much of Northern Ireland was aware that the decision to keep the flawed scheme open was projected to cost taxpayers about £500 million.

Pressed by Nolan on why he, as the minister in Stormont’s Department for Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI), did not close RHI at the first opportunity, Bell replied: ‘Other DUP spads involved themselves in the process … I was then informed by my special adviser in the department that other DUP spads were not allowing this scheme to be closed.’

The word spad, an abbreviation for ministerial special adviser, would have meant little to most viewers. But to anyone familiar with Stormont it was instantly clear what Bell was doing: he was accusing some of the DUP’s most powerful figures of deliberately wasting vast sums of taxpayers’ money. Within the DUP’s ultra-centralised structure, spads were people of immense power.

Bell went on to name the two spads as Timothy Johnston, the DUP’s most senior backroom figure, and Andrew Crawford, the long-standing adviser to Arlene Foster. Foster had been Bell’s predecessor as DETI minister and had set up the scheme. By now she was both DUP leader and First Minister.

It was a clever move by Bell to seize the initiative. He was putting himself up against one of the most aggressive interviewers in Northern Ireland. However, as much of the information was new, Nolan did not yet have the full picture as to what had gone on. Bell’s story was particularly compelling because he was committing to full publication of every document and demanding a judge-led public inquiry – the most rigourous investigation possible under British law. Why would he be doing that if he had any doubts as to the accuracy of what he was saying?

The constant references to God gave Bell’s interview a confessional quality, which attempted to elevate it above the dirty world of politics. By underpinning the drama with theology, Bell was making it harder for the DUP to make him the scapegoat for what had happened. Some people – even some Christians – viewed the prayer scene at the start of the broadcast as a gimmick that undermined Bell. Standing in the studio, Bell had asked Nolan if he could pray before they began and the broadcaster agreed. It is unclear whether Bell knew at that point the cameras were rolling; he soon did because producers were concerned that a decision to air that scene could appear to be intrusive. At the conclusion of the interview Bell was asked if he wanted that segment to be broadcast. The politician gave his consent and that was the first image a quarter of a million viewers saw the following evening.

The interview was littered with the insistence that he was telling the truth; the late Ian Paisley had exhorted him to tell the truth, his wife that morning had told him to tell the truth, even God had told him to tell the truth.

The broadcast contained a slew of remarkable allegations, including the claim that the second-most senior civil servant in his department had come to him to whistleblow about Bell’s spad. According to Bell, the civil servant had been asked ‘behind my back’ to ‘cleanse the [departmental] record’ by removing Foster’s name and a reference to the Department of Finance from a departmental submission about RHI.

He then spoke of the period just after cost controls were introduced, where Stormont received confirmation from the Treasury that it would have to bear the full bill for the overspend – a colossal sum for a devolved administration. At that point, in January 2016, Bell said that he had been advised by the civil service to shut RHI immediately, which he wanted to do, but he was ‘ordered’ by a ‘highly agitated and angry’ Foster to keep the scheme open. He said: ‘She walked in and shouted at me that I would keep this scheme open. She shouted so much that then Timothy Johnston came into the room.’ Breaking down, he said he had tears in his eyes because ‘children are dying’ as a result of the NHS losing money: ‘The regret that I ultimately have now, when we’re seeing terminally ill children being sent home from hospital, is that I didn’t resign … I think we all should hang our heads in shame for what has occurred.’

It was an explosive, gripping performance. But although some of what Bell was revealing was accurate, sceptical viewers might have wondered why he had not thought to tell the public about this for almost a year – until the point where he thought he was going to be blamed. Nolan asked the 46-year-old politician: ‘Are you involved in a coup to take Arlene Foster down?’ Bell replied: ‘Nothing, as God is my judge, could be further from the truth.’

But all was not quite as it seemed. What Bell presented as a straightforward case of political corruption was more complicated. The public inquiry Bell demanded would ultimately dissect his ministerial career and expose an unflattering portrait of a minister who took limited interest in the work of his department, while acting in ways which did not sit easily with the devoutly religious image he had cultivated.

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Almost a year later, at the opening of the public inquiry into the cash for ash scandal, a section of the Bell interview was played on video screens in Stormont’s old Senate Chamber – where for 111 days witnesses would give evidence about the scandal. Counsel for the inquiry David Scoffield QC described it as ‘gripping television’ that had an ‘explosive’ impact. The lawyer said: ‘It’s probably unprecedented in contemporary Northern Ireland politics as an example of a former minister turning on senior party colleagues, including his party leader, the then First Minister.’ But until now the story behind that theatrical – and bitter – split with his party has never been told.

It began a full week before he recorded the interview. Bell rang Nolan, who on his morning radio show had picked up on the scandal after the broadcast of an exposé by colleagues in BBC NI’s Spotlight team the previous night. Nolan had a sharp eye for spotting the significance of a story but his instinct was reinforced by quantitative evidence. Whereas a good Nolan show would involve about 150 calls from the public, in the days after Spotlight, the programme was getting upwards of 300 calls a day, with most of the callers – unionist and nationalist alike – expressing fury. Responding to the sense of anger and interest in the story, the programme would break multiple revelations about the scandal for weeks.

Bell was eager to talk, and he had gone to the man who could deliver his words to a bigger audience than anyone else in Northern Ireland. Nolan invited Bell to his salubrious home on the shores of Strangford Lough that day. That in itself was indicative of the story’s significance because Nolan valued his privacy. Although an ebullient media personality, only one politician – Martin McGuinness – had ever been to his rural home.

Bell did not hold back. What he had would blow the government wide open, he claimed, and the former minister spoke candidly about what he knew. What Nolan did not know was that the man in front of him was secretly recording him, something he would admit to several days later.

The following night, Bell returned to Nolan’s home. This time the broadcaster was joined by his senior backroom team, composed of his editor, David O’Dornan; producer, David Thompson; and BBC’s Ireland correspondent, Chris Buckler, an old friend of Nolan’s from their days at the Belfast’s Citybeat radio station.

Bell, who agreed for the meeting to be recorded so that the journalists could fact-check his claims, positioned himself at the end of the dining room table. With a tape recorder in front of him, the MLA opened up. At points, he would veer off to relate tales that were irrelevant to RHI but revealed the level of distrust that now existed between himself and DUP colleagues. He had brought tape recordings and bulky paper files from his old department to back up his riveting tale. Some of what he said has never been broadcast for legal reasons and because it is not clear whether it is accurate. He referred to allegations that one senior DUP politician had been having an affair with another politician and that another senior DUP member had taken drugs. Seamlessly, he would shift from those lurid tales of alleged iniquity to impressing upon his listeners the fervency of his faith. Over coming days, Bell would repeatedly tell Nolan that God had told him to come to him with the story.

Demonstrating the vanity which had not endeared Bell to many of his party colleagues, he spoke about himself in the third person, with the journalists attempting to steer him back to the topic in hand. Showing remarkable trust in the journalists, at Bell’s own suggestion he handed over the password for his personal email account, which he had used for government business, and gave them permission to search through it for any relevant material.

Over the coming days, the small team moved into the office of a BBC executive who was on holiday and began going through Bell’s paperwork and recordings. Nolan, who flew to Manchester every weekend to present phone-ins on BBC Radio 5 Live, withdrew from those programmes and worked round the clock to get the story on air.

But the MLA still had not committed to going in front of a camera. He wanted the BBC to do the story – but he did not necessarily want to be seen to be their source. Bell told them that if they did the story he would then come out after it to confirm that what had been said was accurate. Several days into the contact with Bell, he arranged for Nolan to meet him in an isolated spot near his County Down home. Nolan parked beside Bell’s car and the MLA got into the passenger seat. After a brief conversation, he handed over another audio recorder containing a secret recording of a senior civil servant.

As Nolan drove back to Belfast he listened to what he had been given. Whether deliberately or inadvertently, the recording finished and another conversation played. This time it was a conversation between Bell and former First Minister Peter Robinson. They were discussing what Bell was doing and whether he should go to The Times or to Nolan with his story. Robinson sounded cautious in what he said, with Bell driving the conversation. Nevertheless, the involvement of Robinson – just a year after he had stepped down as DUP leader – added a new layer of intrigue to what was unfolding.

By Monday evening, it seemed that Bell would not do an interview, though he had given enough material for a one-off TV programme. Nolan and Buckler went to meet Peter Johnston, BBC NI’s controller, to make their case for bringing the story to air. Now less than a fortnight to Christmas, Johnston asked: ‘Can this hold until after Christmas?’ Convinced by the journalists’ arguments for urgency, Johnston gave them the green light. He now sent for Carragher. As the most senior editor in the BBC’s Belfast newsroom, Carragher had frequently clashed with Nolan – who operated within a silo and was as fiercely competitive with BBC colleagues as he was with rival organisations. One senior BBC source said that there were ‘massive tensions’ between them but they quickly agreed to work together professionally and agreed that they could press ahead without Bell speaking on the record.

The following night there would be a furtive meeting between the journalists and Bell, which would be decisive. The BBC had booked a room in the Holiday Inn, a mid-market hotel across the road from Broadcasting House. Arriving separately, the politician, Cleland and the BBC men – Nolan, Buckler and Thompson – gradually entered the bedroom. Cleland, an adviser and religious companion, was a figure whose role has not been fully understood and who would crop up again in the story. It was clear to the journalists that Cleland was very influential in Bell’s decisions. One BBC source described him as ‘the strategist’ who referred throughout to himself and Bell as ‘we’, and it appeared to the journalists that Cleland was the key figure who had to be convinced if Bell was to talk.

During the half-hour meeting, a deal was struck, with Bell giving his word that if The Nolan Show revealed parts of the story the following morning, then he would do a TV interview. The next morning The Nolan Show made a series of revelations based on Bell’s conversation, his secret recordings and the paperwork he had turned over to the BBC. The story threw the Executive into a tailspin. Stormont Castle released a statement to the programme, which said that no one from the DUP or the Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister had sought to delay closure of the scheme. But within an hour, Stormont Castle had contacted The Nolan Show to retract its own statement, which then only came from the DUP – not the joint office shared with Sinn Féin. Cleland was delighted with the coverage and Bell agreed to now come and be interviewed.

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On the night the Bell interview was broadcast, what viewers did not know was that his allegations were heavily reliant on a secret recording of one of Stormont’s most senior civil servants just two days earlier.

Four days before the interview was broadcast, Andrew McCormick, the permanent secretary of Bell’s old department, was at home on a Sunday afternoon when he received a phone call from his former minister. Now five days after the Spotlight programme and amid a fevered political atmosphere, Bell wanted to exercise his right to view ministerial papers about the scheme, which had come to him as minister. Unknown to McCormick, Bell was taping the exchange.

In a lengthy conversation, the politician said that the attempts to rein in RHI when it had been out of control the previous year had been delayed by Johnston, the DUP’s most powerful backroom figure. When Bell asked if there was documentation that would show that, McCormick said it was unlikely because ‘people know when to use emails and when not to’, and went on to admit that ‘the actual to-and-fro of what’s really going on very rarely goes down on paper, you know’.

During the conversation, McCormick inadvertently – perhaps out of nothing more than politely attempting to hurry the conversation along – agreed to Bell’s suggestion that delays were the responsibility of the First Minister’s spads. That bolstered Bell’s belief that there had been a hidden hand interfering in his department – and he was now potentially going to be thrown to the wolves to protect that unseen individual or individuals. In fact, McCormick had at that point no evidence that the First Minister’s advisers were involved and instead believed the delays to have been primarily the work of Foster’s spad, Andrew Crawford.

Parts of the conversation revealed Bell to be hopelessly confused about the key timeline of the delays. At one point he suggested that the spike in applications – where claimants piled in before cost controls – had come after cost controls. McCormick agreed to meet him the following day and Bell said he would bring ‘one of my researchers’ with him.

By this stage, the DUP was suspicious of what Bell might do. Prior to McCormick allowing Bell to view documentation in his office, the mandarin spent more than an hour with Timothy Johnston and Richard Bullick, the First Minister’s two key lieutenants, who had asked to go through the material with him in advance.

In that meeting, McCormick told Foster’s closest advisers that he had understood that Crawford had worked in the background to delay cost controls. The civil servant felt exasperation at what seemed to be a reluctance by the DUP spads to accept the evidence of delay from someone in their party. By the time McCormick left that meeting and travelled a mile across the Stormont Estate to his department’s Netherleigh House headquarters, Bell was already waiting to see him.

But alongside the former minister that evening, Bell was accompanied by someone familiar to McCormick – Ken Cleland. Cleland was a somewhat mysterious figure, known to many at Stormont and an associate of some senior DUP figures. He and his wife had been extremely close to Peter Robinson, the former First Minister, and his wife Iris. After the revelation of her affair with a young man and subsequent financial transactions with property developers, Mrs Cleland stood by her friend, taking her shopping and looking after her at a point when some of the former DUP MP’s erstwhile friends forsook her.

Peter Robinson had trusted Cleland with a sensitive Stormont appointment, putting him on the board of the Maze Long Kesh Development Corporation, a body with responsibility for developing the economically significant and potentially lucrative site of the former Maze Prison, but whose work was riven with political arguments. In that role, Cleland had travelled with the then DUP Health Minister Edwin Poots and McCormick, Poots’s then permanent secretary, to Germany three years earlier for a study trip. The three men had discussed their shared Christian faith, meaning that when Cleland arrived with Bell he was a figure known to the civil servant.

On entering Room Two in Netherleigh House with Bell, Cleland said to McCormick that he was probably wondering what had brought them together. Answering his own question, Cleland told him that they had become close companions in Christian fellowship. McCormick recollected that they presented themselves as ‘seekers after truth, indeed potentially as “agents of righteousness”’. Cleland proceeded to inform the mandarin that he had arrived bearing a prophecy about Bell. The self-proclaimed prophet went on to predict that Bell would be vindicated over RHI. The agent of righteousness then admonished the civil servant: ‘We’ve got to be very careful what our motivations are here … and we’re not going to allow any motivation, which is a wrong motivation, because God will not bless that.’ Later, McCormick would ponder whether Bell had engineered the encounter to appear motivated by high religious principle so that he would lower his guard.

With the politician’s spiritual adviser having prepared the path, the MLA then turned to more pressing temporal matters. Bell, who was prone to exaggerated earnestness, even if answering Assembly questions on mundane matters, did not undersell the significance of his mission. He told McCormick that he was determined to make public the truth of what had happened even if it cost him his career. He assured McCormick that he would strongly protect the interests of officials and not allow them to be blamed for the failures of others.

McCormick, one of Stormont’s most experienced senior civil servants and someone who was respected across the political spectrum for his integrity, handed over a file of documents to Bell and left the room for him to study it.

Prior to contacting McCormick, Bell had spoken to Robinson who advised him that as a former minister he could go and ask for documentation from the department. Bell’s closeness to Robinson and the fact that there was some contact between the two men about the issue in this period led to speculation within the DUP as to whether Bell was acting as part of some wider plan.

During a whispered conversation while McCormick was out of the room, Cleland asked Bell: ‘Why did you decide to go to the fount of all knowledge or of all wisdom?’ A source familiar with Bell’s thinking in this period said that this was a coded reference used by the two men to refer to Nolan. But before Bell could answer, McCormick reappeared in the room.

On his return, Bell asked McCormick what he would say if he was asked why there had been a delay in reining in the scheme. Speaking bluntly, McCormick replied: ‘Well to be totally honest with you, I’d be saying I was aware that there were discussions within the party and the ministers and the special advisors had been asked by others within the party to keep it open – that’s the truth.’

After more than an hour at Netherleigh, and with the alarm for closing time ringing, Bell and Cleland bade their farewells and disappeared off into the night.

Throughout the encounter, Bell had made a series of references to preparing himself for some future occasion on which he might have to answer for what had happened on his watch. For three months, the Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee had been holding hearings to investigate the scandal, and McCormick assumed that was what Bell had in mind. He never considered that he might have a more immediate and more public plan. But the day after his meeting with the former minister, the DUP spad in McCormick’s department, John Robinson, informed him that his meeting with Bell and Cleland had been recorded.

It is still not clear how Robinson had knowledge of the recording, but within the DUP it was known that Bell had a habit of covertly recording conversations. McCormick was profoundly disturbed. For a former minister to secretly record his most senior civil servant was not just outside of his experience; it was unprecedented. Over coming days, it became clear that Bell had given the recording to the BBC and was threatening to give permission for it to be broadcast.

It was a period of intense personal turmoil for McCormick. After a long career in the civil service, just three weeks earlier he had been interviewed by the First and deputy First Ministers in what was the final stage of the competition to be Head of the Civil Service. At that point he did not know whether he had got the £180,000-a-year job, but he knew that the rules had recently been changed to allow the DUP and Sinn Féin ministers to conduct the final interviews for the appointment – a level of political control over the politically neutral post which does not exist anywhere else in the UK. In the days to come, DUP minister Simon Hamilton said in a message to senior DUP spad Richard Bullick: ‘His concerned reaction suggests he has said things he knows he shouldn’t have. This could be very bad for him. And us.’

Bell had told the public in his Nolan interview that McCormick was ‘a man of the utmost integrity and one of the finest servants of the civil service that the public could ask for’. Yet he had secretly recorded him on at least two occasions and was holding over this ‘man of the utmost integrity’ the threat of releasing those conversations if he did not act in a certain way. Almost two years later at the public inquiry, Bell would be pressed repeatedly to explain why he had felt it necessary to act with subterfuge. He told the inquiry that ‘all I wanted to do was have a valid record of what my concerns were’. But when David Scoffield QC asked him why he had not chosen to use ‘more transparent ways’ of securing that objective, Bell did not answer the question but gave a rambling reply, which included everything from the scale of the RHI overspend to the fact that he had been a premature baby and a comment on his political career.

Eventually, inquiry chairman Sir Patrick Coghlin interjected:

You have told us already that you regarded him as a man of integrity. All I’m trying to find out … is why, given that assumption on your part, your acceptance of his integrity, you found it necessary to carry out a concealed recording. Now one possible inference is that you did not consider him to be a man of integrity.

Bell paused for several seconds before saying: ‘My answer to that is that I do believe him to be a man of integrity. I also believe I needed a contemporaneous, accurate account and … the permanent secretary had to act to [the wishes of] his current minister, who may or may not want information released.’

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The interview with Bell had been recorded on the afternoon of Wednesday, 14 December and clips from it were trailed on Nolan’s radio show the following morning. It was clear that Bell had spoken out in a way which was sufficiently significant for the BBC to immediately bring it to air, inserting it into the schedule so late that it did not even feature in that morning’s newspaper TV listings. The DUP top brass consulted David Gordon, who as Executive Press Secretary was just three months into his job as Stormont’s top spin doctor.

As a former editor of The Nolan Show and one of Northern Ireland’s sharpest journalistic minds, he could see the scale of the unfolding crisis. Knowing Nolan inside out, Gordon had a cunning plan for how to manage the growing mess. That afternoon he phoned Buckler – who was covering the story for the News At Ten – and asked him if he was to interview Foster could he guarantee that the interview would also be played as part of the special programme in which Bell was speaking out. It was a shrewd move, which attempted to not only save Foster from Nolan’s aggressive interview style but also potentially split the BBC team by offering the major opportunity to one of Nolan’s closest friends. But when Buckler relayed the call to Nolan and Carragher it was Carragher who – despite her years of clashes with Nolan – ruled out the idea, saying firmly that Stormont would not be dictating who could conduct a BBC interview.

Having attempted to circumvent Nolan, the DUP now accepted that it was better for Foster to face his questions rather than allow Bell’s allegations to go out unchallenged. The news was relayed to the BBC at about 5.30pm, with the interview scheduled for 8pm – a rapid turnaround for such a major broadcast – and a satellite truck was despatched to the Stormont Estate.

During the negotiations about whether to do the interview, Foster had spent that day in Stormont Castle being briefed by Johnston and Bullick. McCormick was also present in the baronial castle which served as the Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister. McCormick’s DUP minister had asked him to personally attest to the accuracy of a fact sheet which was being drawn up for the BBC.

Although Nolan was Stormont’s most feared journalistic inquisitor, the BBC personality had a reputation for being somewhat chaotic, and he was late arriving at Stormont for the interview with Foster. As the DUP and civil servants waited for the BBC crew to arrive, someone produced fish suppers which they ate while making final preparations for what would be a career-defining moment for Foster.

It was after 8pm – just over two and a half hours before the Bell interview was to be aired – when the presenter finally arrived at the castle’s security barrier. With him was a senior BBC editor, Kevin Kelly, and producer, David Thompson, as well as the technical team. At the front door of the castle, they were met by Gordon.

As they walked down a corridor in the castle, one of the journalists saw a group of elderly men in a dimly lit room. It appeared to him that they were praying.

As equipment was set up in the First Minister’s ground floor office, the atmosphere was frosty. The delay in Nolan’s arrival meant that McCormick had just 30 seconds to quickly speak to him as he passed through the castle entrance. A pale McCormick, who was described by one of those present as having seemed ‘petrified’, was asked to confirm that an RHI fact sheet was accurate. ‘Yes, I can confirm that,’ he said. Having been kept waiting by the DUP so that he would have a conversation with Nolan, the mandarin later recalled how he was ‘very frustrated’ that he had only seconds to converse with him and as a result he left the castle immediately to go home. That small detail would become significant much later.

But despite the fact that Nolan had been late, Foster now took her time in appearing. Nolan sat and waited as the clock ticked down on what he knew was already a tight timetable until the interview aired. When Foster did arrive, she just said: ‘Stephen. You have been a busy boy’, and sat down. As her microphone was fitted and technicians checked the lighting and sound, the First Minister said nothing to Nolan and kept her head to the side, choosing not to look at the broadcaster.

Unseen by viewers at home, Foster’s two key spads, as well as Gordon and DUP Press Officer Clive McFarland, had positioned themselves at the back of the room in Nolan’s eyeline. But, just minutes into the exchange, it was Foster who was visibly uncomfortable, breathing heavily and speaking over the interviewer’s questions. With cables running out of the castle to a satellite truck, footage of the interview was being viewed live in the BBC newsroom in central Belfast where Buckler was communicating directly to Nolan via an earpiece.

Foster presented a simple version of events in which officials had failed to ever raise problems with the scheme during her tenure and she had made no mistakes. As Nolan probed her about the fact that on her watch the scheme was launched without cost controls and then a proposal to put in cost controls was abandoned, Foster facetiously said: ‘Yes, Stephen, so I’m supposed to have a crystal ball in relation to these issues?’

Nolan went on to ask her: ‘Do you know why there were these delays [in introducing cost controls], then?’ Foster shot back: ‘I’ve no idea.’ An incredulous Nolan said: ‘You haven’t asked?’ Laughing nervously as she replied, Foster said: ‘No, that’s a matter for Jonathan. Why would I ask? I was Finance Minister at the time.’ Pressed on how she could not have enquired, given the scale of the overspend, Foster pinned the blame on her colleague, saying: ‘I am bemused as to why he would leave it open for such a period of time.’

Under acute pressure from the interviewer, Foster was asked: ‘So let me get this right – we are hearing now of people who have been putting boilers into sheds and blasting heat into the sky. We know that these delays were a factor. And as our First Minister you still haven’t asked what the delays were about. You still haven’t briefed yourself.’ Again with a smile on her face, Foster replied: ‘No, because Jonathan signed off on a submission on the 4th of September …’

Nolan cut across her: ‘Do you not want to know?’ Again shifting the focus to Bell, she replied: ‘Well, I’m sure you’ve asked him the reason why he’s left the scheme open for that period of time. I’d be very interested to hear why he has said that …’ Foster went on to deny Bell’s allegation that she had shouted at him to keep the scheme open, and counter-alleged that it was Bell who had ‘used his physical bulk to stand over me in quite an aggressive way … he is a very aggressive individual’.

Foster presented the final two-week delay in closing the scheme – a point after cost controls were in place but which led to a multi-million pound increase to the bill for taxpayers – as being down to civil service and legal concerns. It would later emerge that in reality that delay had been a political price extracted by Sinn Féin. Even at this stage, when fighting for her political career, Foster was still trying to cover the full story to protect the DUP’s relationship with Sinn Féin – a fact republicans would soon forget as they rewrote history and presented her as someone with whom it was impossible to work.

As soon as the interview finished, Foster took off her microphone and left the room, without saying goodbye. Johnston immediately got to his feet and approached Nolan, threatening legal action over Bell’s allegation about his role in the scandal.

After the interview aired, the broadcast returned live to Nolan in the studio with BBC NI’s political editor, Mark Devenport. Devenport, a hugely experienced journalist not given to exaggeration, began by saying: ‘Words are almost failing me.’ The programme ended with a flurry of rights of reply from those named by Bell, all of whom denied wrongdoing.

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Later at the public inquiry, Foster was grilled on why she had told Nolan she had ‘no idea’ why cost controls were delayed. By then it was clear that her closest aides – who spent hours preparing her for the major interview – had been aware of the allegation that it was her spad who was responsible. She told the inquiry that McCormick had not spoken directly to her about that prior to the interview, but she ‘became aware of his belief after the recording of The Nolan Show … once the recording was over, I went into the junior minister’s office … and Andrew sheepishly said it was his belief that Andrew Crawford had delayed the scheme’. She went on to say that it was ‘certainly … after The Nolan Show that I spoke directly to Andrew about the issue’. Hamilton, who was also there that night, gave similar evidence to the inquiry about a conversation with McCormick ‘definitely after the interview’.

However, McCormick said that if that conversation did occur it could not have been after the recording – and therefore would have to have been before Foster told the public she had ‘no idea’ why cost controls were delayed. The civil servant – who, like Foster, was giving evidence under oath – said that Foster and Hamilton’s version of events ‘could not possibly have happened’. Speaking gravely, he told the inquiry: ‘I’m very concerned by what I’ve had to say this morning.’

The credibility of McCormick’s explanation was strengthened by what had been his immediate reaction to Foster’s interview when it went out that night. After watching her ‘no idea’ answer, he texted DUP spads in shock to say: ‘Difficult to understand why she said she had no idea … when I have said I would have to tell [a Stormont committee] that.’

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On the day after the Spotlight programme went out, Bell discussed the issue by phone with North Antrim DUP MP Ian Paisley – a figure removed from the party leadership, and perhaps an indication that by this stage Bell was looking beyond the party hierarchy for advice. According to Paisley, they discussed the situation on 7, 8 and 9 December with the contact taking the form of a phone call, a conversation in Parliament Buildings and then a personal visit to Bell’s home.

Paisley found a ‘troubled’ party colleague who ‘was concerned about his future’ but insisted they never discussed an appearance on The Nolan Show. During a ‘rambling’ discussion over tea in Bell’s home the MLA advised with characteristic self-importance that he had ‘a team of the greatest legal minds in Britain working on the case for him’, Paisley later told the inquiry. In Paisley’s evidence to the inquiry – by which point he knew that his former colleague’s DUP career was over – he said he had listened in ‘amusement’ to Bell’s claim that he had ‘recordings and documents’ that proved corruption. Naming senior DUP colleagues, Bell claimed that some of them were making vast sums of money out of RHI, Paisley said. The MP said that ‘frankly it was quite sad’ but they ‘parted on good terms’. Paisley went on to discredit his former colleague’s version of events, saying: ‘I was aware I had just met Walter Mitty in the flesh.’ However, the fact that Paisley had such extensive contact with Bell at the point where he was about to go public with his allegations was in itself striking. For years, there had been enmity between Paisley and the DUP leadership.

By contrast, Bell was closer to Robinson than any other DUP MLA and was reverential towards him. Bell employed Robinson’s son, Jonathan, as his constituency office manager and Robinson’s daughter-in-law as his part-time secretary. At a time when, as DUP leader Robinson felt under internal threat, he rewarded his friend’s loyalty, promoting him to junior minister in 2011 and then a full Stormont minister in 2015 – a decision which inadvertently led to Bell taking responsibility for RHI at the point where it was about to fall apart. There were also sensitive personal circumstances which meant that Bell had a unique bond with the Robinsons, which went beyond simple transactional politics.

One Stormont source who observed the DUP at the closest of quarters over more than a decade said: ‘Peter could ask Johnny to murder someone and he’d do it.’ That metaphor could not have been used for many of the others around Robinson. He had always been feared and respected within the DUP rather than loved.

Robinson did not have many close friends and was wary of several senior colleagues whose loyalty he suspected. But Bell’s devotion to the DUP leader was such that while still a minister – and around the time that RHI was falling apart – he began work on a PhD about his party leader and told colleagues that Robinson had agreed to turn over some of his personal papers to him for the academic study.

Although Robinson had stood down as DUP leader by 2016, given Bell’s closeness to Robinson, his contact with Paisley – who was from a rival internal faction – stands out.

The picture is further complicated by comments Cleland and Bell made to the BBC journalists as they discussed the story in that period. Both men gave the impression that they were concerned about Foster’s leadership, seeing it as an attempt to liberalise the party and move it away from its religious roots.

If that was a significant motive for what Bell did, it does not sit easily with the idea that Robinson was in any way orchestrating what was going on. Robinson was the man who had spent years gradually modernising and moderating the DUP. He had a vision of the party replacing the Ulster Unionist Party as the dominant party of unionism, and knew that to do so meant reaching beyond the narrow world of Protestant evangelicalism.

When contacted for this book, Robinson was reluctant to explain why he had discussed with Bell whether to go to The Times or Nolan and whether he was encouraging him to speak out as he did.

Instead, he responded – along with other DUP figures to whom separate questions were asked – with a solicitor’s letter which claimed that what had been put to him was ‘replete with inaccuracies and defamatory content’. The letter did not specify anything which was actually inaccurate but threatened that ‘in the event that publication of inaccurate and defamatory material occurs our clients are fully prepared to issue appropriate legal proceedings’. Further attempts to secure answers to the questions drew no response.

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After the BBC Spotlight exposé on 6 December, the foundations of the Stormont Executive – which with the DUP and Sinn Féin jointly at the helm had ruled Northern Ireland for almost a decade – were rocking. By the time the Bell interview went out, they were crumbling. A massive audience had watched the extraordinary programme. When it was broadcast on BBC One NI, 56% of everyone watching TV in Northern Ireland at the time was tuned in. The average for that 10.40pm slot was for BBC One to have 18% of all viewers. The following day, the Sinn Féin deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness phoned Foster to ask her to step aside as First Minister while an investigation took place into the allegations. She instinctively refused, and from that point devolved government in Northern Ireland was on a path to implosion. But to understand why the revelations of December 2016 shook Northern Ireland, we have to go back in time.