by Roger Mosey
This gave us a laugh but reinforced our determination to win. Given how important football in particular was, Mike Lewis and I set ourselves the task of meeting every Premier League chairman for lunch or dinner before the next rights negotiation was due. We discovered that Chelsea’s Ken Bates really did hand the keys of his Bentley to the maître’d and ask him to look after it while he ate. Afterwards, Bates sent me a typed note of thanks that referred to our conversation about the BBC being on another corporate economy drive: ‘I hope we can work together to our mutual benefit. Meanwhile, keep up the savings.’ He then added by hand: ‘So that you can pay us more!’
At Southampton, Rupert Lowe greeted us in a towering bad mood because of rude things said about him on 5 Live by David Mellor, and said he could spare us a meagre forty-five minutes, only to relax considerably and spend more than two hours with us. There followed invitations for a number of visits to the Dell and then St Mary’s, which showed the benefit of personal contacts.
The lurking nightmare on 5 Live was that a new Premier League deal, inevitably negotiated well under the radar, might be threatened by some of the news and sport journalism on the station. This was not because the Premier League was over-sensitive but because some club chairmen were. It was, and always has been for me, a matter of faith that we would never curtail our journalism because of rights considerations. I was proud of Rob Bonnet’s tough weekly magazine Inside Edge calling the sport administrators to account, and I had introduced Sportsweek to bolster the journalism further. However, on the day that we knew a contract was going for approval to a rights holder, there was always some relief if that was not a day chosen by our breakfast programme to duff up their chief executive. Experience shows that the Chinese walls between the journalism and the corporate interests of the BBC are widely understood and supported inside the organisation – but they almost never convince outsiders, especially in sport, who would naturally choose the promotion of their wares over scrutiny.
I also never had any doubt that some sporting bodies might be tempted to put commercial gain over sentiment. The best ones do consider the quality of the broadcaster, and in television they think about getting the big audiences that only free-to-air channels can deliver. But it is a remarkable chief executive who tells his governing body that they will turn down an offer that may be double or treble the BBC’s in order to stay in their traditional home. So I developed a wariness that also stood me in good stead when I became director of sport, though I would pay tribute to the good guys like Ian Ritchie at Wimbledon and Richard Scudamore at the Premier League who were tough but trustworthy in negotiations – as opposed to a few who were in the ‘tough and would sell their granny twice over’ category.
Towards the end of my time at 5 Live, I was delighted when Kelvin MacKenzie paid me a compliment, telling The Guardian I had done ‘a bang-up job’ – though I had to look up the phrase in a dictionary of slang to check it was as complimentary as I hoped it was.
Certainly, I was proud of my time at the station: we became the Sony Station of the Year; audiences rose to over six million; the sport side remained in glowing health; and news programmes had improved in listening figures and range. Most of all, it was stimulating working with a great management team and pretty much doing what we wanted with a radio station. It was nothing like as much the place for networking with the political establishment as Radio 4, though the more astute politicians were beginning to engage with it. It offered a different audience – ‘real people’ rather than the chattering classes – and it encouraged politicians to take a more open and conversational approach to interviews. John Major recognised this by agreeing, as Prime Minister, to a phone-in from Downing Street, and some of my Today contacts kept in touch with me in my new home: most notably, the man who had become Chancellor of the Exchequer – Gordon Brown.
The episode that stands out was a visit with him to Rome to watch the England football team play a crucial game against Italy. The Chancellor had government meetings to attend, but the idea had been developed during the previous months that business would be combined with pleasure, and a party of journalists would accompany him to watch the football. As a dutiful BBC apparatchik, I checked with my bosses and advisers that this was acceptable, and they sensibly took the view that contact with the new Chancellor was a valuable thing. I was cleared for take-off. The experience began with a reception at the British ambassador’s residence, and then a hair-raisingly fast journey through the streets of Rome on which our foreign VIPs’ coach was accompanied by police outriders. This felt more, rather than less, dangerous in the narrow streets. At the match, Gordon was seated with the true VIPs, while we journalists were with rank-and-file England supporters. This had the unfortunate consequence that, owing to crowd trouble, we were detained within the stadium after the game and not allowed out for the best part of an hour. We tried in vain, and in pidgin Italian, to convince the security people that the British finance minister was waiting for us and we must be released, but they were unrelenting. We finally made it back to the bus to find Gordon waiting with surprising patience. However, by the time we got back to our hotel, its restaurant had closed and there seemed to be nowhere nearby to eat, either. At this point, Geoffrey Robinson, who was in the travelling party, had an idea: Harry’s Bar was not too far away! After a phone call to persuade them to accept a late booking – in every sense, because it was getting close to midnight – we set off to the Via Vittorio Veneto. As pinch-yourself moments go, a night watching England in the Olympic Stadium in Rome, followed by eating lobster in Harry’s Bar with the Chancellor is definitely up there.
That may have led, during my last few months on 5 Live, to the most extraordinary job offer of my life, which started on a nippy January day during an awayday meeting of the station’s editors. I took a call on my mobile from Gordon Brown’s office, asking if I wanted to pop around for tea at the end of the working day. This was not unusual, because I still got calls from the Chancellor’s office if he fancied a chat, and I had once had the pleasure (for a political anorak like myself) of eating a sandwich with Gordon while watching a televised speech by William Hague – with Gordon expertly dissecting what he was getting right and what he was getting wrong.
I was naïve about the agenda for the January tea. Just before Christmas, Charlie Whelan had been forced to resign as Gordon’s press spokesman and fixer in a nasty meltdown for the Labour government that had also included the (first) resignation of Peter Mandelson. When I arrived at the Treasury, Gordon made small talk while the tea was poured but then gradually edged into a conversation in which it became apparent that he was asking me if I wanted to step into the role of being his special adviser.
I remember a number of things from the conversation. First, Gordon was playing the unity ticket with the Prime Minister: he emphasised that they both wanted to put the disaster of the past month behind them and start with a clean sheet of paper. They wanted to raise the tone after the spin accusations that had beset the Whelan incumbency. And here was I, just the man for the job.
While listening to this, and smiling as calmly as I could as I stirred my tea, I had a shuddering clash of emotions. On the one hand, it was incredibly flattering to be sitting in Whitehall being offered a job by the Chancellor. There was a big hint that if I did the role well in the coming months then I would be helped to find a seat at the next general election, and my family had always suspected that one day I would become an MP. On the other hand, much as I liked Charlie Whelan, I thought the role was one in which I would be highly likely to be eaten alive by the internal politics of the government and by the ravening press. I also hadn’t voted Labour in twenty years, and becoming one of its advocates was an improbable step. I was therefore resolutely non-committal, while Gordon was unstoppable: ‘Come for lunch on Sunday!’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about it more!’
As I got the Tube home I was in turmoil, though I don’t think I ever came close to accepting. The first thing I did the next day was t
o tell Tony Hall and Jenny Abramsky because ethically I couldn’t keep this as a secret to myself. They told me later they had both believed I would take the job. But I let Gordon know via Ed Balls, who was involved in the discussions, that I was too busy to have lunch on Sunday, while thinking to myself that it was an odd state of affairs for a boy from Bradford to be telling the Chancellor of the Exchequer that he didn’t fancy sharing a plate of roast beef at the weekend.
Most of my kitchen cabinet thought I would take the job too, and my hesitation about joining Team Gordon prompted a very serious love-bombing. Gordon asked me to go out for supper instead if I was unable to make Sunday lunch, and I accepted because I couldn’t plausibly be busy every night for a year. I therefore found myself in a Chinese restaurant down the Horseferry Road with Gordon, his then unknown girlfriend Sarah, and Ed Balls. I knew that associates talked of ‘Good Gordon’ and ‘Bad Gordon’, but I have only ever seen Good Gordon, and he was charming, persuasive and non-factional in all our discussions. The brief was to build bridges with No. 10, not blow them up. The latter order presumably came if you got the job.
For moral support I was driven to and from the restaurant by my friend Chris Rybczynski, who was the only one of my circle to be consistently against the offer. She had diagnosed that working for Gordon when I was used to running my own show would be a nasty jolt to the system, even leaving aside the sharks that patrolled the political waters. But the incentives kept coming, including the one added to many job offers: foreign flights. I could travel around Europe as one of the Chancellor’s personal emissaries, assessing the lie of the land on the Euro, which was the knottiest political challenge facing the government.
By this stage, my heart was shouting ‘no’ even while my head still entertained subversive thoughts of ‘yes’. I liked Gordon, but I knew definitively in these exceptional circumstances that politics was not for me. There was more I wanted to do in broadcasting, and I had had signals that a senior job in television might be on offer soon. I was also not sure I could take the financial risk of a special adviser’s post with zero security, against the more cushioned BBC. On a Sunday night I sent a fax to Ed Balls:
I’ve thought about this for much of the time since we last spoke – and I’ve come to the conclusion, with great sadness, that we shouldn’t take our discussions any further … The sadness is, of course, because I’m aware that chances like this don’t recur. Without wanting to sound too pious, I’m honoured that it happened at all.
Even at the time, I think ‘sadness’ was stretching it a bit. ‘Relief ’ might have been a more honest word. I knew with absolute clarity that this was a once-in-a-lifetime offer and I got it that it was a momentous decision one way or another; but I never really had any doubt about what was right for me, and subsequent stories about the TB–GBs have confirmed that view. Indeed, a few years later at a programme recording, I met Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, who had been aware of the discussions, and they fondly recollected life within Team Gordon while also giving me a distinct sense that I had had a lucky escape.
There were no hard feelings from Gordon. I was invited to his wedding reception when he married Sarah, and he came to Twickenham as my guest when I was director of sport. I admire a politician who can both enjoy the sport and talk about his favourite books during the breaks in play, and he was amused to be offered a pint of Guinness by the fan sitting directly in front of us. However, ever the cautious politician, he only sipped it before gently manoeuvring it under his seat, and the Chancellor’s glass was left half-full.
I never pass through Westminster without a flicker of wondering what might have been if I had made a different choice, but I cannot pretend to have any regret. For all that John Inverdale said about my obsession with politics, I prefer to be an observer rather than a participant; and the Brown episode was useful in confirming that.
CHAPTER 8
TELEVISION
IN THE AUTUMN of 1999 the plan for me to move to television became a reality. I had always loved radio, but I had a feeling about working in television of ‘if not now, then never’. I didn’t want to exclude myself completely from the most powerful medium of our age. I had spent part of the year being acting director of continuous news, the pantomime horse department with which Jenny Abramsky had been saddled. It included the recently launched BBC News 24 and BBC News Online as well as 5 Live, but it also had within it Ceefax and the Travel Unit. This meant that management meetings sometimes underwent conversational detours about roadworks and the need to service multiple outlets with traffic news. It was the last manifestation of John Birt’s bimedia, or even tri-media, approach: the idea that television and radio and then online should work together – which was sensible in principle but had led to curious forced marriages, of which continuous news was probably the oddest.
Now, though, Tony Hall was proposing to do something more sensible. One of the problems in his news division was that the programmes department included the flagship BBC One bulletins at 1 p.m., 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. – while the 24-hour television operations, domestic and international, sat in continuous news. There was a similar barrier in radio with Today and The World at One in programmes, and 5 Live in continuous. It was obvious that all those beloved management concepts such as synergies and efficiencies would be far better delivered by re-creating a television department and a radio department. In particular there was an urgent need to add some of the TV bulletins’ credibility to the struggling News 24. So that is what Tony did, and I was asked to run television news while Steve Mitchell ran radio news.
I will always be grateful to Tony for taking the gamble of putting someone who had never worked in television into running the biggest TV news operation in the UK. I had it on good authority that, a few years earlier, senior figures in BBC Television had wanted me to edit Newsnight – but the move had been vetoed by BBC News because I wasn’t a television animal. Now here I was running the whole lot. I believe that, in reality, editing is editing: if you know a story in newspapers or radio then you know it in television too, and running orders have a lot in common with each other even if the technology is different. But there was still a lot to learn, and sometimes I yearned for the simplicity of radio, where you could pop a few phone interviews on the air on a breaking story and not have to worry about satellite trucks or the pictures still being stuck in the edit suite. I know in the early days I would sometimes question a Newsnight running order late in the afternoon, and suggest they did something different, which would have been easy for The World at One but was close to impossible for a programme that has sent out its cameras and outside broadcast vans to far-flung parts of the country.
The new structure generated the predictable headline ‘Here is the BBC News: Birtism is dead’ with the journalist Maggie Brown writing of my new job: ‘The appointment in itself is an indication of the end of Birtism and the birth of fresh thinking.’ She added that abandoning the old structure ‘is clearly an acknowledgment that it didn’t work’.
What certainly had not worked was creating two heavy and competing management teams for one medium, and my immediate problem was sorting out a mini-mountain of managing editors and commissioning editors from the old regimes. It was a grisly process, reducing nine managers to just three. I hated having to do it and it caused a permanent rift with some of those affected; but that kind of decision is unavoidable as you become more senior, and it felt right to protect jobs in the newsroom by streamlining the management. When I started at 5 Live, a newspaper profile said: ‘The saintly image has taken firm hold … It is hard to find anyone at Broadcasting House with a harsh word to say about [him].’ However, that would not have been the case at Television Centre four years later.
Television news was often a bumpy ride because it was so much bigger and more multi-tentacled than anything else I had done, and whereas people have an intimate relationship with Today and find 5 Live likeable, in TV news there is a harsh spotlight from which few emerge unscathed. An immediate lesson I l
earned was that emails sent to television staff other than my most senior colleagues could swiftly appear on Media Guardian or in Broadcast magazine. I empathised with Will Wyatt’s account of turning down the job of controller of news and current affairs because previous senior figures in that area had variously been rubbished by official reports, been exiled to the regions, cracked under pressure, taken endless flak or hit the bottle. That was without having to deal with two continuous news channels, bulletins on four different television networks, the death of the Queen Mother, 9/11, 7/7, another war in Iraq, a tsunami and two general election campaigns.
But in my first year we had an exhilarating flurry when Greg Dyke, as the new DG, showed just how different his BBC was from John Birt’s. There had long been a view inside the corporation that our main news should be at 10 p.m. not 9 p.m., because it was both a better time for the bulletin – taking in parliamentary votes and a flavour of the next day’s papers – and also kinder to the BBC One schedulers in their battle with ITV. There was a convenient gap left by ITV’s daft decision to move out of the 10 p.m. slot. Greg correctly diagnosed that the old BBC would have taken years to make this kind of decision, if ever, but by August 2000 he proclaimed it would happen in 2001. There was a general caterwauling from politicians about the BBC moving news from the middle of the evening and being too competitive, and the Daily Telegraph said bizarrely that the DG was ‘yielding to the forces of Philistinism at the corporation … A philistine BBC is a supine BBC; a nation kept in ignorance is a nation easily led.’ Delighted by the heat being turned on the BBC, ITV retaliated by saying it was going to move its news back to 10 p.m. early the next year – which prompted Greg, characteristically, to escalate the arms race by asking us if we could move to 10 p.m. that autumn at three weeks’ notice.