Gatehouse weaves his American tale around the alleged “murder” of Vincent Foster, the deputy White House counsel and Hillary Clinton’s former law partner, found dead in a Virginia park in 1993 in what was quickly ruled a suicide.

Now, there certainly were crazed conspiracy theories about Foster’s death over the years, but I was not promoting them. It was the White House Clinton machine that prepared the dossier on the ‘vast Right-wing conspiracy’, playing up the most absurd allegations to muddy the waters, and inviting chosen reporters from their camp to do hatchet jobs on critics.

Only two journalists ever investigated the Foster death in any depth, by which I mean tracking down and speaking to the crime scene witnesses, and obtaining the FBI case documents (with great difficulty, heavily redacted) under the US Freedom of Information Act: myself and Chris Ruddy, now chief executive of Newsmax. Neither of us has ever written that Foster was murdered. What we both alleged was a systematic cover-up.

Gatehouse did not reveal – though I told him – that my chief source was Associate Independent Counsel Miquel Rodriguez, the US federal prosecutor in charge of the Foster case under Kenneth Starr, the Grand Inquisitor pursuing the impeachment of President Clinton.

Had he revealed that critical fact, BBC listeners would have known at once that this was legitimate journalism. They were instead left with the strong insinuation that it was the rantings of my imagination.

Rodriguez carried out the only genuine investigation of Foster’s death, empanelling a federal grand jury and taking testimony under oath for the first time.

He quickly discovered what I had discovered talking to crime scene witnesses: that their FBI statements did not reflect what they had actually said, and in many cases flatly contradicted what they had said; that nothing added up; that evidence was all being pushed in one direction only; and that the official version of events was, as he later said, “a complete sham job”.

He wanted to conduct an open death investigation that included the possibility of homicide. The Washington office of the FBI – then run by a Clinton loyalist from Arkansas – cut him off at the knees before he could finish the task.

There is a particular detail worth recounting, given the way that the BBC framed its broadcast. Rodriguez was puzzled by attempts to suppress witness statements that talked of a wound in Foster’s neck, which contradicted the official version that Foster shot himself in the mouth. The key crime scene photos had vanished. The FBI labs said others were over-exposed and useless.

Rodriguez took the discarded Polaroids to the Smithsonian Institution and had them enhanced. One showed a black stippled ring like a gunshot wound in the side of Foster’s neck. I have seen this photograph. So has Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court Justice but then working on the investigation. His handwritten notes read: “startling discovery”; “blew up portions of photo – trauma to the neck on rt side”, “appears to be bullet hole”, “how can person kill himself twice?”.

I knew that the first Fairfax County rescue worker to reach the death scene had spoken of exactly such a wound. I hunted him down – he had never spoken to the press – and when I asked him what he found, he grabbed my shoulder. “Listen to me, Foster was shot right here,” he said, jabbing his finger hard into my neck. He said the FBI had badgered him persistently into changing his story.

Gatehouse read out this exchange from a chapter in my book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, but without explaining that this witness had been the first to handle the body, and without any context of why it mattered. Listeners were left with the impression that he was a random conspiracy junkie.  

I must admit that the book’s title was beyond ghastly. I had chosen The Secret History of the Clinton Presidency, a play on the Secret History, an 6th century expose of Justinian and Theodora by the Byzantine historian Procopius. It was changed by my publishers in Washington without my knowledge.

Gatehouse seemingly had his prior agenda. He wanted to tell a story about runaway conspiracies, and use me as a theatre prop. He was not going to let large facts stand in his way. For the final indictment he solicits the veteran Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, arch-loyalist of the Clintons and author of The Hunting of the President, a source trotted out so many times over the years that his home is almost a pilgrimage for those on the anti-conspiracy tour.

But he does not identify Lyons as a Clintonista with an axe to grind. It is the BBC method: legerdemain, masked by political piety.

Lyons cuts to the heart of the problem. Extraordinary things happened under the nose of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, his journalistic alma mater. The state was a central conduit of cocaine trafficking into the US by the Medellin Cartel in the 1980s via the Mena airstrip, when Bill Clinton was governor and controlled the state police.