THE Palm Pilot that Andrew Gilligan used to make notes during his meeting with David Kelly has become crucial in elucidating the murky affair.

Mr Gilligan arrived for the meeting with Dr Kelly at the Charing Cross Hotel without his notebook and instead produced his handheld computer, normally used as an electronic address book, to make notes of the conversation.

Lord Hutton’s inquiry will not have the power to seize the Palm Pilot, but if the BBC volunteers the machine for testing it will add credibility to the journalist’s evidence.

The BBC denied reports that Mr Gilligan made the notes after the conversation, saying that he used his handheld computer to make “contemporaneous” notes. They would not clarify whether he had typed on a mini-keyboard or inputted the notes on screen with a stylus, an important issue given that the former is slightly slower than handwriting, the latter much slower and too cumbersome to keep up with normal speech.

The BBC have consulted their lawyers on the status of handheld computer notes in legal proceedings; the lawyers are hopeful that they will stand on a par with conventional shorthand.

Paul Gilbert, a media lawyer at Finers Stephens Innocent, agreed: “For some journalists the handheld computer is the equivalent to their notebook, and I expect the judge will regard it just as much a piece of evidence as a handwritten note at the time.”

Palm said that the company was fully prepared to work with the investigation, but it would not be clear how easy that would be until it was known how the notes were inputted. Their “Notes” function has an automatic date stamp on most models, but if another method, such as a Word file, was used “the investigation may have to go back to engineers in the States”.

Charles Christian, editor of Legal Technology Insider, a trade journal, said that entries could be marked indelibly in the “meta-data” binary code.

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