Nick Pollard has written to the BBC Trust to apologise for telling a journalist that his report into the Jimmy Savile scandal was flawed and that he made ‘a mistake’ by not including key evidence that Mark Thompson had been told allegations about Jimmy Savile were going to be made by Newsnight in December 2012. Pollard admits the tape that Guido published this morning was genuine and that he regrets getting busted:

It has taken 10 months for the BBC Trust to finally kick into action after the flaws in the report came to light. And it’s still murky…

Four trustees, whose identity we did not know, have met in secret and concluded that though ‘a mistake’ has been made, it’s best to just ignore it:

“The unanimous conclusion of the four Trustees is that they are satisfied that Nick Pollard properly weighed all the evidence that was available to him and that the conclusions of his report are robust. They remain confident that Nick Pollard conducted an independent, fair and thorough examination of the issues raised by the dropped Newsnight investigation.

While the Trustees did not consider that the recording undermines the conclusions of Nick Pollard’s report, they agree it would have been preferable for a reference to Helen Boaden’s legal letter to have been included. They also felt it was regrettable that Nick Pollard had decided to try to correct the record through an off-the-record conversation with a journalist, rather than raising this point directly with the BBC, who commissioned the report.”

Yet Nick Pollard himself confessed that he had not “properly weighed all the evidence that was available to him” and this statement does not address the fact that the BBC Trust have been aware of the flaws in the Pollard Report for ten months and were only forced into acknowledging the problems after threats to make the tape public. £3m spunked up the wall in a flawed report and still Patten is trying to save his arse.