Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC

by Roger Mosey

  Some of those close to Birt at the time say that what provoked this behaviour was fear of his own instincts. He had studied engineering, and one of those who observed him at close quarters said he sometimes seemed to yearn to think like a machine: if all the data could be collected, the answer could be definitively nailed down.

  He was not a compelling public speaker, and his meetings with staff tended to be stiff and over-formal. A briefing with a group of editors before the start of the Gulf War in 1991 needed an Agincourt-style rallying cry as we began one of the most challenging and intensive periods of broadcasting, but instead he turned in a stumbling performance – which, I wrote later, ‘left us thinking it might be better to strap ourselves to an Iraqi power station than cover the war Birt-style’.

  Yet his instincts, as I had found when I took over 5 Live, were good. And actually I enjoyed most of my encounters with him, as long as they didn’t involve the BBC cathedral. He would send notes about incidents on 5 Live, which proved he was listening. I had a handwritten note from him in April 1997: ‘Roger – out of curiosity: why did the line go down so many times during the Liverpool v. Man United match? John.’ He also did more than any other DG in my time to invite middle-ranking staff to dinners and social events. The dinners in the Broadcasting House executive suite had a Birtian twist: you had to look under your plate at the start of the evening to see if it had a red dot underneath. If it did, it meant you had to move four places to your left after the main course to ensure a circulation of hosts and guests around the table. After he had left the BBC, I sat alongside him at the Germany v. Argentina match in the 2006 World Cup, with his passion for football overflowing. But he allowed himself a wry joke about my transfer from news to the former lads’ paradise of BBC Sport: it proved the critics wrong, he said, in that the BBC had clearly moved upmarket since his departure.

  But Birt’s personal style mattered much less than his achievements, and here I am an unalloyed fan. He came to the BBC as Michael Checkland’s deputy after one of the routine periods of internal turmoil – in this case the sacking of Alasdair Milne – and he captures the scale of what he faced in his autobiography: ‘I battled on many fronts. Against old Lime Grove, against green-eyeshaders in the newsroom, against bone-headed baronialism and obstructionism in the television service, against an illiberal government – all under the eye of a hostile press. I experienced deviousness, lack of steadfastness and dishonourable behaviour.’ That could have been written by any number of senior BBC folk over the years, though I used to call the old guard in the newsroom ‘the men in cardigans’.

  But Birt managed more than anyone else to change the organisation. He rightly invested in news and in journalistic specialism. He was correct, in my view, that BBC News needed to be distinctive and what we reported should pass a test of its significance, and he saw the potential of digital technology way before anyone else. As far back as my World at One days we were contemplating a future in which people could opt for the news they wanted to consume in the order they themselves chose – a decade or more before this became mainstream. When I went on a course to the INSEAD management school in 1999, expecting the public service BBC to be way behind the curve in modern business, I was surprised to find that we were talking a language that private industries were still struggling with: I knew a lot more about the potential for e-commerce than they did.

  It was smart of Birt to seize on the possibilities of 24-hour news after the experiment with Gulf FM – the Radio 4 rolling news service – during the first Iraq War. That led directly to Radio 5 Live. Then he pushed the BBC into online news and the launch of BBC News 24, all the time taking money out of the conventional services and investing in digital to a background of incessant moaning from the people who were losing out. He was right and they were wrong, and the BBC’s benefits from its first-mover advantage in online are visible to this day.

  There were also positives from John’s emphasis on management. The flipside of the frustration of senior managers as they ground through their iterations was compensated for by the process, at least, being clear. There was a corporate machine that took in the data and eventually churned out a signed-off plan. This was a contrast to the Dyke and Thompson years, when at times it was difficult to work out where decisions were made. There was a helpful image in the offices used by the different DGs. Birt’s was oak-panelled, at the front of Broadcasting House and was used by the great figures of the past. Dyke and Thompson moved into modern spaces, even open-plan, and there was something of the spirit of the time in their move towards sofa government.

  The immediate thanks that John Birt got when he left was his replacement by Greg Dyke. There was a telling vignette about the way power changes in the BBC at the leadership lunches, which Birt had introduced. They had no seating plan and for years ambitious executives manoeuvred their lunch tray to sit as close as they could to Birt. At the first meeting when Greg was in attendance as DG-designate, the crowd had moved on: John sat at a sparsely attended table while Greg was surrounded by courtiers and job-hunters. The Vicar of Bray came to mind. Later, Greg cheerily described his manifesto for the job as ‘anti-Birtist’ and, in an entertaining clash of autobiographies, Birt claims he helped Dyke get the job, while Dyke asserts he knows how hard Birt worked to stop him. In this case I think we can safely say that Greg is right, and when he started working at the BBC he found the outgoing DG and his senior team ‘were disliked, even loathed’ by large numbers of the staff. Within the executive itself, he wrote, ‘they had learnt how to operate as competing individuals within a climate of fear’.

  Within BBC News, there was trepidation about the new regime. Birt had, rightly in our view, transformed the resourcing of the news division; Dyke was seen as more of a showman, with his LWT background and his fostering of Roland Rat at GMTV. Our boss Tony Hall had been his rival for the director-general job and, in what had been at times an unedifying campaign, there had been leaks and insinuations about all the candidates, leaving an atmosphere of mistrust. Indeed, we were marched off to a news board away-day at which the facilitator said that we should have the same mentality as a company that had just been subjected to a hostile takeover. In the event, Greg left news largely untouched, except for the hugely enjoyable Ten O’Clock News campaign, and Tony’s departure for the Royal Opera House removed any remaining tensions as the calming figure of Richard Sambrook moved into the top job in news.

  I owe my best time in the BBC, outside the Olympics, to Greg. He was determined to change the culture of the place. To do that, he set up what seemed initially like another set of task forces and working groups, so loved by Birt, but Greg’s ‘Making It Happen’ project was different. He wanted to involve all the staff – and he meant all the staff – in debating how the BBC could be better: being more creative, hacking back the bureaucracy and finding the best leaders. He signalled his intent by theatrically brandishing a yellow card and proclaiming his mission to ‘cut the crap’. Initially, my role seemed unpromising. I was put in charge of the group called ‘We are the BBC’, which Greg explained to me as trying to counter the apparent view that ‘the BBC’ was something alien to its own workers: staff would blame ‘the BBC’ for decisions they didn’t like, and they would regard the corporate centre as ‘the BBC’, which was somehow in a different universe to their daily lives. My job was to identify how we could become ‘one BBC’, with everyone feeling they were part of the same enterprise, and I was charged with defining the values of the organisation to help that along. Greg emailed a brief after an exploratory visit he made to US companies:

  In every organisation we visited, the values that organisation lived by were clear and were articulated to everyone in a simple way. At the BBC we don’t do that. We need to be very clear about our objectives and the values that support them and then we need to tell our staff and the world what they are and make sure we all live by them. Simple.

  This fuelled what turned out to be the most interesting of the Making It Happen grou
ps. Despite the predictable sniping from inside and outside the organisation, most of the staff loved the idea of being able to nail down what it was that made them proud of the BBC. Discussions were held from Aberdeen to Truro. Cynics were gratifyingly outnumbered. The coalition of the willing relished the chance to define how people should behave: respecting each other as colleagues, and showing the right attitude to the public who funded us. I would not pretend that the values we came up with are quite the equivalent of the Gettysburg Address, and I still have some friends who ruthlessly mock them, but they felt right to people within the organisation and are still to this day on the back of every BBC identity card:

  Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.

  Audiences are at the heart of everything we do.

  We take pride in delivering quality and value for money.

  Creativity is the lifeblood of our organisation.

  We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best.

  We are one BBC: great things happen when we work together.

  Hearing from the staff, and realising that we wanted to achieve the same thing, was uplifting, and presenting the values back to the BBC was a strangely emotional experience too. We held a management conference in the Custard Factory in Birmingham, as a mark of Greg’s funky new BBC – and Peter Salmon, presiding over a session in his customary folksy way, urged everyone to thank me for my work on the values by giving me a hug whenever they next met me. The result was being pursued around Birmingham by tipsy members of the Human Resources department, keen to capture the hugging spirit of the times, while other colleagues moved smartly in the opposite direction to avoid the embarrassment of it all. But I felt Greg gave us permission to be ourselves. It was at that conference that I talked in a plenary session about growing up adopted in our post office in Bradford, to fill in some of the story about me as an individual and to enable others to feel that, whatever their background, the BBC was for them too.

  Some of this openness was inspired by a visit to companies in the United States that Greg laid on for the Making It Happen team. It started farcically. We were in the departure lounge at Heathrow when one of our number spotted two men unknown to us who were perusing photographs of the BBC senior management team. This could mean only one thing: the Daily Mail were on our case. We could see the headlines about BBC profligacy as we boarded our plane, business class, en route to the agreeable W Hotel in downtown San Francisco. An in-flight emergency conference decided that we would split up when we got to San Francisco to avoid the photo that would make the story complete: a luxury bus-load of BBC executives busy metaphorically shredding dozens of licence fees. It was only some days later that we saw the two men again. They were Europe-based executives of one of the companies we were visiting, who had been innocently doing their homework about the BBC people they were going to meet in America.

  But the trip made me and others think radically about the world of work. We criss-crossed the US, visiting a restaurant run by former convicts in California, and a shampoo factory in Chicago. We loved the spirit of Southwest Airlines and their willingness to bust conventional ways of doing things, and we shied away from the over-formality of Ritz-Carlton Hotels. We realised that creativity isn’t achieved by waiting and hoping that someone comes up with a good idea, but by working at it and understanding audience needs, before you test ideas and shape them again and again. Most of all, we understood what it means to be a team. One night, weary after an early start on the west coast, we flew into Dallas just as the city was emptying for the night. Most of us wanted to go to the hotel and crash out before another working dinner, but Greg had other ideas. ‘We gotta go see the grassy knoll,’ he proclaimed, and redirected the bus to take us to the Texas School Book Depository, where he marched us round the JFK museum just before its closing time. He was right, of course, and the week in America was when I felt closest to my senior colleagues in seeing what Greg’s BBC might become.

  This is not to say that Greg was relentlessly sweet and fluffy. Like anyone who gets to the top of the media industry, there was a core of steel, and you wouldn’t choose to get on the wrong side of him. I had a flavour of that when a lecture I gave at St Andrews University displeased him because of my criticism of some aspects of digital television. I had run the speech past an array of senior colleagues, including the press office, before delivery, so the DG’s indignation turned on them and I came across Richard Sambrook doing a version of the old sight gag of holding the phone a distance from his ear while Greg berated him for letting me say what I had said.

  Which brings us to Hutton. This was the prolonged crisis started by Andrew Gilligan’s report on the Today programme about the intelligence assessments of Iraqi weapons and whether they had been sexed up by Downing Street. It is, looking back more than a decade, one of the oddest of all the BBC’s crises because Gilligan was overwhelmingly right, and Greg’s instincts were right in defending the BBC against the bullying of No. 10. It is Lord Hutton’s report into the affair that has not stood the test of time, looking more one-sided than ever and uncomprehending about the nature of journalism. And yet it was while events were unfolding, rather than with hindsight, that there was unease about the way Greg handled things: one of his strengths became, in that unremitting spotlight, a vulnerability.

  Even as head of television news, I was an observer of this crisis rather than a participant. It was one of the hallmarks of the way it was handled that it was kept to a small core team: Greg and his people in the corporate centre with Richard Sambrook and Mark Damazer from news. I remember anguished conversations with senior colleagues claiming that the Gilligan affair had barely been mentioned at executive board and asking what I had gleaned from news board – to which the answer was the same: very little.

  It is, of course, perfectly understandable that the DG would lead on a matter of this gravity, but what he lacked in enough volume were the voices of caution asking what the exit strategy was from his increasingly ferocious war of words with Alastair Campbell. As John Ware said in a Panorama report on the crisis, Greg effectively bet the farm on Gilligan’s 100 per cent accuracy – and, even allowing for the flawed Hutton process, almost no daily journalism can bear that kind of stake. I was reminded of what I had told Peter Oborne for his study of Alastair Campbell, published in 1999, which described the rapier strikes within the bludgeoning by Campbell and his spin doctors: ‘Often Labour complaints had some substance. That was their cleverness. If there was a glimmer of an inaccuracy they were on to you.’ Alongside the incoming fire on the corporation from Downing Street, I was receiving emails from Labour MPs who were friends of the BBC, questioning our approach. ‘What is going on, Roger?’ said one. ‘I have the impression the BBC is still in total denial. The very future of an organisation that I love and value is being put at risk.’

  In his book, Greg describes it as a mistake that he responded too quickly and too vehemently to one of Alastair’s provocations, and it was: the approval from the staff for Greg’s ‘standing up for the BBC’, perhaps fuelled by the spirit of Making It Happen, drowned out the more measured arguments about de-escalating the row. The model of how to handle it was already there: Thames Television’s setting up of an independent inquiry into its documentary ‘Death on the Rock’ showed how a broadcaster could best retain control of a spiralling controversy. Greg could similarly have told Alastair he wasn’t going to reply to any more of his letters until an investigation had got the bottom of Gilligan’s story. This may sound like the caution of someone wearing the grey suit of the BBC bureaucracy, but it is in the nature of the BBC that its independence has to be defended with care and due process. The point at which your employees are cheering you on and the adrenalin is coursing through your veins is the point at which you need to pause, take a deep breath and call for a few wise old birds from the corporate backroom who will guide you through.

  Yet, despite any misgivings about how he
had handled it, it felt like a terrible blow to the BBC when Greg was forced to resign immediately after the publication of Hutton. What was unedifying was that this had been a battle that the BBC collectively had waged, and at key moments the governors had backed the position of the DG – which then made it illogical that they demanded his head based on a strikingly unbalanced assessment from a judge. But yet again there was no room for a wider assessment of the DG’s worth or any sentiment about an individual who had fought bravely for what he believed to be right. I have never before or since seen the mass emotion from the staff at anyone’s departure, let alone a senior manager – and I watched as the normally cynical television newsroom gave Greg a standing ovation as he made his farewell tour of the building. The contrast could not have been greater with the joyless ‘clapping-out’ of John Birt by a small number of corporate centre apparatchiks when he left Broadcasting House for the last time.

  At this point, Mark Byford made a five-month appearance as acting director-general. I had not encountered Mark much before, but what I had seen hadn’t created a favourable impression. There was puzzlement about how someone so young and so professionally Yorkshire had got to the top of the BBC, fuelled by a question about who the real Mark Byford was: the populist, bear-hugging enthusiast or the strategic wise-head who had ended up as John Birt’s preferred successor. He had then been propelled into the deputy DG role towards the end of the Gilligan crisis, allegedly at the behest of the governors, and people muttered darkly about the nightmare ticket for creative freedom if Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke were forced out: ‘Pauline Neville-Jones or Richard Ryder as chairman, Byford as DG.’