The coordinator of the Pilot Whale Campaign to bring the Faroe Islands "to their knees" has left her job after admitting one of the fundamental tenets of the campaign - that pilot whaling is a blood sport - is false.

For two years, Gillian Stacey was hired by the Environmental Investigation Agency to run a campaign in Britain boycotting Faroese fish. The aim of the campaign, in the words of the EIA's Allan Thornton, was to bring the Faroes "to their knees". Stacey recently left the EIA to join Oxfam in a move that will earn her more friends, more satisfaction, and probably more money (her last job only paid £20,000 a year). But sources close to the campaign believe Stacey's move, far from being voluntary, was forced upon her because she refused to take the hard line of her bankrollers.

One of the central arguments of the Pilot Whale Campaign has always been that Faroese pilot whaling is a blood sport. In a 1994 brochure, the EIA boasted of being "the first group to expose this brutal blood sport". Two years ago, a poster welcoming the Faroese national football team to England proclaimed that "in the Faroe Islands there are two favourite sports: Football ... and killing whales." In a letter to the Faroe Island Solidarity Committee, the Sainsbury supermarket chain refers to "recent evidence that whales are now being killed for sport" as a cause of great concern for its customers. The "evidence", of course, came from the EIA.

But on March 1 of this year, in a letter to the Guardian, Stacey wrote: "Pilot whaling is not a blood sport." She was responding to an earlier article in which she had been quoted as saying that pilot whaling was "little more than a blood sport." Her letter continued: "I would argue that the atmosphere of a kill is 'sportslike' - thousands of people turn up to watch a hunt, and cheer the participants along." True, Stacey was only giving an inch to the pilot whalers. But the other fundamental tenet of the EIA has always been: don't give an inch!