by Roger Mosey
Did this ring alarm bells? Yes and no. On the one hand, George had been in better shape in recent days – and he had been impressive in leading the discussions that evening. But I suppose those of us who supported him, and knew how much was at stake, also realised that this was double or quits. He had done the Today programme twice already in his short time as DG, and if he couldn’t survive another Today interview as editor-in-chief about a major editorial issue, on which we’d got a clear and rational management response, then the game was up. He was right that, at this moment of BBC crisis, the leadership could come only from him. If he had disappeared and sent out a surrogate, the game would have been over too.
My last chat with him on the Friday night was just after ten o’clock, when a new mini-crisis erupted. I was called by network presentation because Newsnight were refusing to include the apology within their programme and were asking for it to be read before the show by a continuity announcer instead. Little did they know that the future of their entire programme was at stake that night. I made it clear to them, somewhat forcibly, that an apology within Newsnight meant within Newsnight not before Newsnight, and another small disaster was averted – which I told George about in a ‘guess what the daft arses have tried to do now’ fashion. I also agreed to take any calls for him late at night because he needed to get to his son’s 18th birthday party, which was underway without him.
The next morning I listened, along with the rest of the chattering classes, to the car crash that was George’s interview with John Humphrys. It was the first time I wasn’t able to summon up an immediate text response to one of his media interviews. I could not think of anything helpful to say about it, and I therefore left it a couple of hours before sending a feeble ‘How are things?’ and expecting he would send his customary honest response when something had not gone to plan.
There was no reply. This was unusual but not unprecedented, and I had no idea that events were moving so rapidly to a conclusion – with the Trust’s patience at an end because of the Today debacle compounding the disobeying of some of their views on Newsnight. It was also a Saturday, an unusual day for Trust activity; and I was due to go to a match at Arsenal, where I have season tickets, with Gabriel Walker, one of my godsons, fifteen at the time. This meant an afternoon of surrogate parenting: picking him up at Waterloo, feeding him, entertaining him through the highs and lows of Arsenal and then getting him home.
Bothered by George’s silence, I texted him again on the way to the Emirates Stadium, asking if he wanted a chat. But by the time I had got there, and had bought Gabriel his favoured footlong hot dog, there was an email from the DG’s office saying that we should be on standby for another executive board conference call that afternoon – most likely at 4 p.m. This did not look good.
I calculated the place in the stadium concourse where I could take part in a call in relative privacy, and texted George once more to see if I could offer any help. By this stage I had no doubt, really, that it was all over. Piecing things together afterwards, I discovered there had been a phone conference involving George and the Trust in the late morning. It was, he told me later, apparent that he had lost the confidence of some, or even most, of the trustees, who argued that his package of measures was not enough. Some had pressed again for Newsnight to be scrapped. What followed was a one-to-one conversation, in which Patten’s later public account is in harmony with George’s recollection: that the chairman was not urging George to go, but he was also not urging him to stay. George then offered his resignation, and the discussions turned to his contractual entitlements – otherwise known as the pay-off. I blame him not one jot for seeking to protect his family and reputation to the best of his ability in dreadful personal circumstances, and I suspect almost everyone else in that situation would have had the same negotiations about the ending of their employment.
The conversations between lawyers continued. The emails to the rest of us kept pushing back the time of the executive board call, and I could see no better option than taking Gabriel back to his parents and going for a (large) drink with them on the South Bank. I had not intended to eat out, but Conrad and Annabel thought the best thing was to propel me into dinner with them and pour some more wine down me – which is why, when the executive board finally convened just before 9 p.m., again with people scattered all over the country, my own location was outside a branch of Brasserie Blanc with the phone on ‘mute’ to shut out the noise of Saturday-night revellers.
George made a brief, dignified statement that his resignation would be announced shortly, and a couple of us paid tribute to him. In doing so, the sadness flooded over me: George’s decency and intelligence were sorely needed by the BBC, and it was the cruellest of outcomes that someone so full of promise for the future should have been destroyed by the evils of the past, which were none of his doing. Shortly afterwards I walked to the railway station, and on board the train home to Richmond I composed a tweet: ‘I’m deeply, deeply sad that George Entwistle has resigned. He is a good, honourable man and I’m proud to call him a friend.’ I am pleased I did that then, and I believe it even more now.
The next day it was a case of ‘the King is dead; long live the temporary King’. Tim Davie was asked to act as director-general, which my kitchen cabinet and I had predicted. Also on that miserable Sunday morning, we spotted that there was an extra torment possible for me. If, as seemed likely, Helen Boaden would be sidelined from BBC News until the Pollard Inquiry was completed, they would need someone else to run news in the interim. As one of the tiny number of people left standing, and a former news executive, there was a finger pointing in my direction. I talked to a range of friends about ‘what if…?’ We all agreed: it would be the triple-strength poisoned chalice. To add to my temporary incumbency of television, with no full-time job on offer, I would be ushered into the lion’s den of news without any long-term authority and with a director sitting unjustly in the wings. Head and heart came to the same conclusion: that the only sensible course was to dodge the lions and decline the chalice, though I also knew that, as a corporation man, it would be the first time I had said ‘no’ to a role that the top bosses wanted me to take.
The call came on my mobile around teatime as I trudged back from Richmond town centre with darkness falling. It was Lucy Adams, the likeable head of Human Resources, asking me to take on BBC News. I felt a bit sorry for her in retrospect but I was proud of myself that I came out with the direct answer: ‘No.’ I explained this was a combination of it being the wrong thing professionally, because a temping role would never have enough credibility to sort out news, and equally bad for me personally. I just didn’t want to do it. She sounded taken aback, probably because the glad tidings of my move were about to be announced to an emergency meeting of the Trust, and we agreed that Tim would call me later. I said the same to him, and to his credit he took it with more magnanimity than I might have done if the roles had been reversed. Fran Unsworth was asked to do the job instead, which was a much better outcome given that she was already within BBC News and it was simply a case of stepping up from her existing role.
This was not quite the end of my BBC career. I didn’t leave until September 2013, and there were occasional brighter interludes after the storms of that autumn. But as someone who had worked in the BBC for more than thirty years, and who had always believed in it as an organisation, there was a terrible sadness about seeing it so exposed and internally riven. The Savile crisis was first and foremost about a wicked man and his victims. What was uncovered about the past was deeply distressing. But it was also a crisis of the modern BBC.
There were many institutions tainted by Savile. The particular focus on the BBC was because it had created him as a national figure and sustained his popularity. It then had the additional misfortune of bringing the past evils into the present with the aborted Newsnight investigation. We handled that poorly, and we dealt with the consequences of that decision ineptly.
But in losing George as DG, an
d in the onslaught that many executives faced, it could hardly be argued that the old clichés applied: it was not ‘assistant heads will roll’. Rather, it was a decapitation at the top of the organisation, and of someone who was later exonerated of the main charge against him. Helen Boaden was cleared too. The big question for Pollard was: ‘Had there been improper conduct to suppress the Newsnight report on Savile?’ and the answer was unequivocal. He concluded: ‘The decision to drop the original investigation was flawed and the way it was taken was wrong but I believe it was done in good faith. It was not done to protect the Savile tribute programmes or for any improper reason.’
These events were a personal tragedy for George Entwistle. The irony is that when the process for appointing the DG was running, earlier than expected, the Savile documentary was in preparation over at ITV. It was a bomb primed to go off in the early autumn of 2012, and on the original timings it might have detonated in the closing months of Mark Thompson’s director-generalship. Instead, it exploded in the face of the new man in the job. Someone who had been in the role for seven years might have been able to ride out the storm. George would have had a fighting chance if he had been a couple of years into his leadership of the BBC, but he had little protection when the biggest crisis in years landed just two weeks into his tenure.
You always hope that in adversity colleagues will come together to support each other, and that a corporation will throw its arms around the employees who are doing their jobs to the best of their ability. That did not happen with Savile, or with the Hutton Report eight years earlier, or in other bruising episodes that saw executives depart. This was sometimes for good reasons – public accountability has to come first – and sometimes for bad. When the stress tests have been at their most extreme, the corporation has tended to fracture rather than unite. There is an additional jeopardy in the BBC’s structures, and in the separation between management and the governors or the Trust. This seems to have got worse, as the subsequent meltdown in management–Trust relations over pay-offs showed.
I reflected on some of this in my farewell interview with the BBC staff magazine, Ariel: ‘The point is that the BBC is about a collective endeavour – most decisions are collective. Individuals do make mistakes, and there’s accountability for that, but unless they’ve made completely bonkers, reckless decisions, they should be supported. For the most part, they are people doing the best they can.’ I could have added that critics needed to take a wider view too. Many of the people at the heart of the Savile affair were the ones who, only weeks earlier, were part of the team that had successfully delivered the Olympic Games.
From this greater distance, it is easier to see that the BBC is, thankfully, a resilient organisation. Tony Hall immediately brought maturity to the DG’s office, and the glories of the corporation’s programme-making remain. I will always be grateful to the BBC for the opportunities it gave me. But the autumn of 2012 was a dreadful time; and I saw good people being added to the list of senior colleagues who had departed feeling battered by what had happened to them. Sometimes they might have been wrong to feel aggrieved. At other times it felt as if the difference between survival or resignation was whether you happened to have read a specific email or not. The sense that you could be next in line for the ducking stool of public opinion was not a pleasant feeling, and it was shared by many. I therefore feel lucky that I left on a relative high – that, after decades of doing some of the BBC’s most scrutinised jobs, I got out alive.
CHAPTER 2
BRADFORD
IHAVE ALWAYS SAID I was born in Bradford in Yorkshire, but that isn’t true. I was born in a mothers-and-babies home in Warrington, on the other side of the Pennines. Bradford came six weeks later when I was adopted, and when I was issued with a new birth certificate. My natural parents were from St Helens, and they did something obvious and then something unusual for the 1950s. My mother became pregnant – but her boyfriend, for reasons we can only guess at, didn’t do what boys usually did in those times. He didn’t marry her. And that’s why she ended up giving birth to me in secret and away from home, and why I was immediately put up for adoption.
My natural mother called me Stephen during the three weeks we were together in the January of 1958. ‘Roger’ came from my adoptive parents. Ending up with the surname ‘Mosey’ was a somewhat random process because my adoptive father wasn’t born a Mosey: that was the name of his mother’s second husband, who adopted my dad when he was ten or so.
It sounds like the recipe for an identity crisis, but in Yorkshire – which runs through my blood as surely as if I had been born there – you just get on with it. I was told when I was very young that I had been adopted, but until I was in my twenties I never talked about it outside the family and it was only in my late thirties that I asked to see my original birth certificate. This was accompanied by the social worker’s report from 1958 with the few sketchy lines I know about my natural parents. But when I was interviewed for the role of Master of Selwyn College, I felt secure enough to tell them about my families’ histories, and my relatives, blood and adopted, who were miners and train drivers and farmers and shop assistants. They would never have dreamed that their offspring would even get to university let alone make it to senior roles within the BBC and end up being head of a Cambridge college. ‘Talk sense and I’ll talk to you’ would have been my grandfather’s response to those kind of ideas.
What I regard as my real family – my life with the people who adopted me – was reasonably conventional. My parents ran a sub-post office in Bradford at the end of a terrace of Yorkshire stone houses halfway up the hill from the city centre to the suburb of Undercliffe. I was pushed in my pram around the nearby Victorian cemetery with its spectacular mausoleums from the age when Bradford was the wool capital of the world. In our shop we sold tobacco and sweets and greetings cards, and a photograph of the time shows my mother displaying the calendars that were a special line for Christmas. My aunt and uncle ran a larger sub-post office, this time supplemented by a travel agency, a few hundred yards nearer the bottom of the hill. It was a poor, inner-city area with densely packed back-to-back houses, many of which were demolished in the late 1960s; within it, shopkeepers were the relative aristocracy. But we never had much money spare, and the working hours for my parents were long. On Saturday nights I was plonked in front of the TV to watch Doctor Who while the weekly accounts were calculated, with happiness if they all balanced and disaster if there was a missing pound or two.
Nowadays, Bradford’s glories are its hills and valleys. In the early 1960s, you could seldom see them. My memories of the city’s panoramas are of smoke from the mill chimneys mingling with the northern rain or fog to create a dispiriting murk, with only a windy and bright day opening up the views. I turned five during the brutal winter of 1962/63, which allowed daily sledging down the slopes of our local park but also brought ice on the inside of the house windows, and paraffin heaters struggling and failing to warm the bedrooms. I had bronchitis as a child, and no wonder, given the brew of pollution and bitter cold.
We explored Yorkshire on sunny, happier days. Along with the children of relatives and friends, I was loaded into a car – we had one of the early Minis – and we would go out for a ‘motor-run’: up into the Dales, with particular excitement about gated roads or crossing fords, across to see family friends in York, sometimes making it as far as Scarborough or Bridlington. The family photos show me as a blond-haired little fellow, carefully picking his way across the stepping stones of the River Wharfe at Bolton Abbey or looking alarmed by a hefty cow at the Bingley Show. We had a dog, a grumpy Corgi inaccurately called Chummy. Despite being an only child, I was never lonely – though I developed a reputation for being at my happiest when I was engrossed in a book without the need for any more company.
But I liked going along to sports events. My first football match was about as low-key as it gets, at the crumbling Bradford Park Avenue; we switched to Bradford City when Park Avenue went out o
f the league. However, my dad and family friends were promiscuous in their football tastes and we went to Leeds United during their Revie glory days and to Huddersfield Town when they were in the First Division. At Elland Road we had cheap tickets for behind the goal, and a small wooden stool was taken along for me to be able to see the pitch from the sunken terracing at the front of the stand. We watched cricket at Park Avenue and Harrogate and Headingley, and I was devoted to Geoffrey Boycott and the great Yorkshire sides of the 1960s. In Rugby League it was Bradford Northern, and my parents’ badge of sporting pride was that they had been at Odsal Stadium for the Challenge Cup final replay in 1954, with its record crowd of more than 102,000.
My first school was Hanson Infants’, just along the road from the lower post office. I made my own way there even at the age of five or six, taking the bus down the hill and then sometimes meeting my cousins Brenda and Lucy for the final part of the journey. There were journeys home on autumn nights when pea-souper fog, mixed with the city’s trademark smoke and soot, meant you could barely see your own feet. The school was ethnically mixed because Bradford, a melting pot from the days of Irish immigration in the nineteenth century, had been one of the destinations for Pakistani migrants in the early 1960s. One of my friends was a boy called Tanvir Ashgar, whose parents were from Lahore and whose dad drove a city bus. His mother used to stroke my fair hair when I went to collect him on the way to school, and my family managed to be both personally courteous and interested in their different lifestyle while still disapproving of immigration in general. My granddad thought Alf Garnett was spot-on in his political views, and didn’t regard Till Death Us Do Part as satirical in any sense, though he declared himself to be a Liberal all his life, as his generation of Yorkshire non-conformists traditionally did.