by Roger Mosey
A revitalised George, who was generally positive about me taking the job, spotted the downsides as we chatted over dinner: ‘It’s the Hand of the King from Game of Thrones,’ he said. I was unfamiliar with the show, but when I checked it out later – he was right. I was used enough to catching the flak, or worse, that this aspect of the role was fine, and being involved with the Commonwealth Games and the First World War commemoration was appealing enough too, though I kept thinking that neither of them was quite London 2012. I edged from ‘say no and leave this summer’ to ‘maybe give it a go’. The next day I went to see Tony to talk about the role, and afterwards I reasoned that I would enjoy working with him again and it was a credible way of spending the next year or two. I was pushing thoughts of retiring from the BBC to 2015, after the general election, rather than straight away. I did tell him that I had a ‘live’ job application externally. ‘I hope you don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t,’ I replied. I accepted the job of BBC editorial director, not convinced I was doing the right thing, but feeling I would at least give it my best shot.
In the following couple of weeks, my Australia-induced calm was tested. I was winding up my time in television, getting ready for the new job and also dashing round the country – first to Cambridge for the Selwyn interview, and then to Lincoln, where I had put in an application for the unremunerated role of chairman of the council at Bishop Grosseteste University. It is a former teacher training college that became a university in 2012, and it owes its splendid name to the theologian and scientist Robert Grosseteste, who lived in the thirteenth century. My thinking was that the experience would be good for my CV, and it might help win a role in higher education further down the line. Rather like being editorial director at the BBC, I was unsure whether Bishop Grosseteste was right for me, but I knew it to be a decent place, and I had the family loyalty to Lincolnshire that made it more compelling. So I stayed in that process as well as the Cambridge one.
I had never been to Selwyn College before my interview on 2 May. From the website, I had formed the image that this was Cambridge’s version of Keble College, Oxford, which I had always found a rather forbidding piece of Victoriana, based on experiencing it on a foggy day in December 1976. In fact, surrounded by spring blossoms on a sunny day, Selwyn felt like Keble’s much prettier sibling, and I liked it from the start. I also immediately warmed to Michael Tilby, the Vice-Master, who was organising the Mastership election and greeted candidates with sandwiches and coffee in his rooms overlooking the Old Court. The first round’s format was simple. The college’s Fellows had signed up for one of three sessions with me, and I had to take questions from the different groups over post-lunch coffee, afternoon tea and pre-dinner drinks. I was not short of refreshments. I had no idea beforehand about the culture of the college, which in Oxbridge can range from the pleasantly informal to the frankly stuffy, but Selwyn had an instant appeal. The Fellows seemed to be down-to-earth and practical – not playing politics, and seemingly engaged with what I had to say. I told friends afterwards that I sensed one or two people at this stage saying to themselves, ‘Elect the man who brought Formula 1 back to the BBC? I don’t think so!’ But I felt heartened by the reaction in each of the sessions, and I went to the next part of the ordeal – dinner – in good spirits.
I can now say with certainty that if you are invited to dinner in Cambridge while you are applying for a role, then dinner is emphatically part of the process. The college may smile and say that it is the social finale after the hard work of selection, but candidates should not believe them: how you handle conversation and the giving or receiving of hospitality is part of the scrutiny. This is not for snobbish reasons. It is important that heads of colleges can be sociable and make guests feel at ease, because they deal with literally thousands of different individuals each year – academics, students, parents, alumni and distinguished guests – and being a hermit would be an inappropriate qualification. So your first dinner is monitored closely. I had an enjoyable meal. Possibly humouring the broadcasting executive who had landed among them, some of the High Table conversation was about Britain’s Got Talent and Doctor Who. The Law Fellow was debating whether the victory of a Hungarian dance troupe was quite in the spirit of Britain having talent. There was also a lobby for Joanna Lumley to become the new Doctor Who.
Another kind of doctor, the Vice-Master, walked me to the college gate afterwards. ‘Thank you so much for coming, Mr Mosey,’ he said. ‘You have been most…’ (and here he paused, briefly) ‘… entertaining.’ Entertaining? On the train home I had two thoughts in my mind. The first was that Selwyn was a lovely place, and it had been a stimulating way of spending a day. I relished the combination of friendliness with intellectual skirmishing. The second was that ‘entertaining’ must surely, in a Cambridge context, be a bad word, rather like ‘brave’ when attached to an editorial decision. It conjured up images of BBC One Saturday night, not the magisterial figure who had typically led a college. I concluded that it had been a worthwhile experience, and I would know in future not to be entertaining, but I should apply myself to the editorial director role at the BBC and put aside thoughts of the outside world.
Five days later I was in Lincoln for my interview at Bishop Grosseteste University. It went smoothly: so well, in fact, that they called me back in immediately afterwards to offer me the post. By coincidence, this was also the day that the BBC decided to announce publicly my new role, and I was therefore pacing the corridors of the university talking to the BBC press office about their media release as well as thanking the Vice-Chancellor for inviting me to be his chairman.
Afterwards, I met Les Sheehan on Lincoln’s Steep Hill for some pasta and beer. ‘Congratulations,’ he said, cheerily. ‘Today is the day you got two jobs you didn’t want!’ That was, of course, overstating it, and I have enjoyed my role at Bishop Grosseteste. But I felt mildly depressed that night about the BBC job, seeing the risk of a grey, corporate and uncreative future for me, even though the media comment was positive. The Guardian said I would be the ‘go-to man’ for handling major editorial issues, and The Times’s headline was ‘Roger Mosey to make the BBC’s big calls’. In The Observer, Peter Preston wrote: ‘Applaud gently as Roger Mosey, all-purpose BBC troubleshooter, becomes Tony Hall’s Mark Byford (without the deputy title, or the salary). That makes perfect sense: a seasoned broadcaster able to watch the boss’s back.’
Home again in London, I set to work back-watching. I was stationed outside Tony’s office in an open-plan area with the rest of the HQ team, and, since access is essential to making this kind of role work, I could grab hold of Tony any time I wanted to. I had teams to oversee, too. There was an area working to me that was led by David Jordan, who was director of editorial policy – which sounds satirically similar to being editorial director, and indeed our titles were often muddled up. The difference was that David and his colleagues would offer advice based on their expertise in guidelines and broadcasting regulation, while I was there to help editors by making decisions and taking responsibility for them. I also started getting stuck into the major events, and especially the Commonwealth Games. I realised that part of what had made London 2012 work was the knowledge I had of how to get the best out of the BBC machine, having run sport and television news and being able to drop a word in the ear of the people leading television or radio. It was tougher for the BBC Scotland people trying to build up the Commonwealth Games, most of whom were unaware of some of the foibles of channel controllers and knew less about which corporate button to press to get something to work.
The atmosphere in the BBC in the spring of 2013 had been lifted by Tony’s arrival. It is hard to imagine anyone doing a better interim job than Tim Davie had done, but it was Tony who had to move the BBC forward. Watching from close quarters, I was unconvinced that the structures around him were a help in doing that. The DG is chairman of the executive board and, as part of the reforms of the mid-2000s, the board has non-executive directors
too: outsiders to the BBC. They were good people to have around, but they not unreasonably took the view that one of the lessons of the catastrophe of the previous autumn was that the NEDs should be more knowledgeable about what was going on in the BBC, and sometimes more assertive in making their presence felt.
The problem was that was also the lesson that had been taken away by the Trust. They wanted to scrutinise what the BBC executive was up to, and they too had some wise trustees. One issue apparent to the management was that some of the cast lists could have been interchangeable: the former news executive Samir Shah had been an NED, while the former news executive Richard Ayre had become a trustee. What this structure had done at its worst was to make the DG and his colleagues have to jump through two hoops not one to get something done: they had to get NED approval and Trust approval for some courses of action. But even on routine business, many items went through both the executive board and the Trust – and if you factored in the management’s own routes for approval, through the various lesser boards, it too often felt like Groundhog Day. Greg Dyke’s mantra of ‘Just do it’ was some miles away from reality, and Mark Thompson’s hope of creating a simpler organisation had similarly not been realised. Tony was right to promise ‘a bonfire of the boards’, though the unwieldy structure at the top remains.
This headache might not have mattered if doing all this committee work had ensured watertight compliance and excellent decisions. We were about to be shown that this was far from the case. Tony had brought his optimism, but the sky was still full of black clouds. The first one to dump its rain upon us was the Digital Media Initiative, or DMI. Technology projects are often complex and have a high failure rate, but this was a shocker. It had started as the idea of bringing almost all the BBC’s content together digitally, allowing sharing and archiving and editing across divisions. I had encountered it during Mark Thompson’s time, when it was a brilliant concept but not actually functioning. There was one management awayday in the mid-2000s when we discussed DMI as potentially being the BBC’s gift to the media industry; something that could be shared with independent companies and partner broadcasters. But at that point it could not even connect two rooms within Television Centre, and it got little better. By early 2013 it was apparent that it just did not work, despite expenditure of around £100 million. As a management board we took the decision that it was better to kill it than try to cure it, and we went public with the admission that £98.4 million of licence fee money had been written off.
We knew another storm was imminent. In the aftermath of George Entwistle’s departure, the National Audit Office had asked if it could examine George’s pay-off and report on it to MPs. The BBC Trust refused to allow that, but instead, in December 2012, it asked for the NAO to take a broader look at severance packages for BBC executives. It was already known that Mark Byford had received a settlement of £949,000 and Caroline Thomson, more recently, £670,000 – with George’s pay-off put at £450,000. The Trust commented in a press statement: ‘We have received [the NAO’s] schedule of work for 2013, and we are pleased to see that they will take this approach in a planned review for next year.’ When the report reached them in late June, they were markedly less pleased. The NAO revealed that the BBC had breached its own policies on severance
too often and without good reason … This has resulted in payments that have not served the best interests of licence fee-payers. Weak governance arrangements have led to payments that exceeded contractual entitlements and put public trust at risk. The severance payments for senior BBC managers have, therefore, provided poor value for money for licence fee-payers.
In the weeks ahead of the NAO report, our management board had taken the best pre-emptive action we could by radically changing the pay-off structure. Tony was able to declare that in future it would be no more than £150,000, which was a potential cut of hundreds of thousands of pounds for people like me who had previously been entitled to two years’ salary if they were made redundant. There was a raft of other measures to tighten up procedures. The management response included the context that the £25 million spent on pay-offs would deliver savings of more than £90 million, but that was lost in the understandable public outrage at what had been going on. What then happened in the response to the NAO was that the Trust, in the view of many of us on the management board, overplayed its hand. It went into battle with the previous management. When we saw their statement in response to the NAO, we were dismayed by its vehemence – and partly because we could see that the Trust was not going to escape the criticism raining in on the BBC. The Trust talked of a ‘fundamental failure of central oversight and control’, and then noted – correctly – that they are ‘not empowered under the Royal Charter to intervene directly in decisions around individual employment arrangements’. But they encapsulated the confusion in this area by adding that ‘although the BBC Trust cannot play a part in approving … individual remuneration or severance packages, we do, as the BBC’s governing body, have an overall responsibility for value for money’.
It was correct that the Trust constitutionally could not and did not approve the severance packages, but it was also manifest that they knew they existed and the level of them, if only by reading about them in the papers. Mark Byford’s had been in the BBC Annual Report. Mark Thompson said they had been fully briefed, though the Trust denied it. In fact, my experience is that the Trust often asked the management for more information about issues like this, even if it was only by informal routes. Therefore, cried the outside world, if the Trust knew this has been going on for some years, and they are responsible for value for money, why did they do nothing about it? The ‘fundamental failure of central oversight and control’ was a criticism hit straight back at them.
In fairness to the Trust, they had been facing an existential crisis for some years. They were not loved by the management and the staff; they were still a shadowy force to the public; and they increasingly failed to convince politicians that they were the answer to regulating the BBC. It was understandable for them to seek to whack the management over pay-offs, but the result was that the BBC was once again at war with itself: Chris Patten’s Trust at odds with Mark Thompson’s management, and some terrible scenes were enacted in public before parliamentary committees. It might, with hindsight, have been better if there had been a collective statement by Trust and management: ‘Sorry. We all got this wrong. We’ll put it right.’
While this was starting to play out, I was called for a second interview at Selwyn College. I was surprised, but excited. I still thought I had very little chance of being elected, but I reasoned that the odds must be moving slightly in my favour. However, I almost pulled out of the contest. As editorial director I was responsible for major obituaries and a couple of days before I was due to go to Cambridge we had the breaking news of two significant admissions to hospital: Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Prince Philip in London. I was sure that being interviewed for an external job would not be a convincing reason for being absent from New Broadcasting House if the worst happened in either case, so for some hours I wavered about whether to pull out and avoid a crisis of conscience. I then decided to let fate take its course. If one of the two aged gentlemen died, I would not set off or I would hurry back to London. If they lived, I would stick with Selwyn. I have never been so grateful for medical science’s work as in that June.
The Selwyn interview started in Cambridge at 10.15 a.m. and I caught the 9.15 p.m. train back to London. It was exhaustive and exhausting. I was interviewed by, seemingly, everybody – including student representatives, heads of department and finally all fifty-seven Fellows. The biggest challenge was to chair a mock governing body, again with every Fellow present, at which I had to referee a concocted dispute between the bursar and the senior tutor. There was also a ten-minute presentation at which I was invited to set out my vision for the college. I emphasised the obvious point: I was not an academic, and I was new to Cambridge – so I would have a vast amount to lea
rn. But I believed in what they were doing, in academic excellence and creating a strong community, and I felt my own life, and the benefits I had received from education, would help in making that case. I did something that I would have found difficult in my early life. I talked about my adoptive family and my natural mother, and what linked them. They wanted, in their different ways, to do what was best for a child: a strong family is an ideal, but it is education that can be transformative. I argued that Cambridge must be open to all. There should be no selection by wealth or postcode, but a true meritocracy in which every child who is bright enough, and works hard enough, can aspire to become a member of the college and the university. I was reassured by seeing nods of agreement around the Senior Combination Room – and I tried not to cloud the serious message with too much entertainment.
Another dinner followed. During it, I spoke to the director of music, Sarah MacDonald, who was preparing for that night’s choral compline. She suggested I should drop in to the rehearsal on my way out of the college, so I did. As dusk fell on a perfect English summer’s day, I walked with Michael Tilby across Old Court to the soaring Victorian chapel. Inside, softly lit, the Selwyn choir were singing the plainsong of compline. It was an utterly beautiful sight and sound, which moved me close to tears: talented young people, in a wonderful environment, combining tradition with their limitless potential for the future. I caught the train from Cambridge station feeling, quite simply, happy. I had had a marvellous day at Selwyn, even though – or perhaps because – it had been tough and challenging. The next stage of the Mastership process, they had told me, was the vote, in which each Fellow would plump for whom he or she wanted from the final shortlist, and I would most likely be informed of the outcome in a fortnight. But I thought I might never see the college again: it was surely impossible that something I realised I wanted to do so much would become a reality.