LONDON — The British Broadcasting Corp. yesterday was plunged into a dispute over the upcoming general election after it admitted wiring three hecklers with microphones and sending them into a campaign meeting addressed by Michael Howard, the Conservative Party leader.
The Conservatives made an official protest after the hecklers, who were given the microphones by BBC producers, were caught at a party event in Northwestern England last week.
Guy Black, the party’s head of communications, wrote in a letter to Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news, that the hecklers began shouting slogans that were “distracting and clearly hostile to the Conservative Party.”
These included, “Michael Howard is a liar,” and “You can only trust Tony Blair.”
Mr. Black’s letter accused the BBC of staging the event “to generate a false news story and dramatize coverage … intended to embarrass or ridicule the leader of the Conservative Party.”
Last night, the BBC said that the exercise was part of a “completely legitimate program about the history and art of political heckling,” and said that other parties’ meetings were being “observed.”
However, the Sunday Telegraph has learned that none of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s meetings was infiltrated or disrupted in similar fashion.
The Conservatives have called for an apology and an assurance that no such incident will occur again.
It has also demanded that the BBC promises never to broadcast the recordings.
Conservative Party officials became suspicious at the meeting Wednesday when they saw a BBC camera crew focusing on the hecklers rather than Mr. Howard.
They twice challenged the two men and a woman involved, and discovered they had been equipped with radio microphones.
They were under direction from a BBC team making a program called “The History of Heckling.”
Last year, the BBC chairman and a reporter resigned during a public outcry over a report claiming that Mr. Blair had deliberately misled people in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
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