Andrew Gilligan

Andrew Paul Gilligan (born 22 November 1968) is a British journalist, currently senior correspondent of The Sunday Times and head of the Capital City Foundation at Policy Exchange. Between 2013 and 2016 he also worked as cycling commissioner for London. He is best known for a 2003 report on BBC Radio 4's The Today Programme in which he described a British government briefing paper on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction (the September Dossier) as 'sexed up'.

He was awarded Journalist of the Year in 2008 for his investigative reports on Ken Livingstone. and was shortlisted for the award again in 2015 for investigations which helped cause the downfall of the corrupt politician, Lutfur Rahman. He has also been a nominee for the Paul Foot Award, the Orwell Prize, the British Journalism Awards and Foreign Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards.

Gilligan was born in Teddington, London and was educated at Grey Court School, Kingston College of Further Education and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he studied history and was news editor of the student newspaper Varsity. He was also a member of Cambridge Universities Labour Club.

In 1994, he joined the Cambridge Evening News, then in 1995 he moved to The Sunday Telegraph where he became a specialist reporter on defence. In 1999, he was recruited by the editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Rod Liddle, as Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent. In May 2003, Gilligan made a broadcast in which he claimed that the British Government had "sexed up" a report in order to exaggerate the WMD capabilities of Saddam Hussein. Gilligan resigned from the BBC in 2004, in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry, after Lord Hutton questioned the reliability of Gilligan's evidence. Gilligan described the BBC collectively as the victim of a "grave injustice".

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