by Roger Mosey
The following evening, Michael Tilby phoned me. I had been nominated by the Fellows of Selwyn to be the college’s next Master. In a long and overwhelmingly joyous conversation, there was a flicker at one stage as if Michael was concerned that I might say ‘no’. The chance of that was zero. It is extremely rare in life that a decision is 100 per cent clear in your mind, but this was one of those cases: when it came to the moment to choose between the BBC and the outside world, it was the world that won by a landslide. I was sworn to public secrecy for an agonising two weeks before the formal election took place, and I was only allowed to tell my family and the most senior members of my kitchen cabinet. But I never hesitated for a moment. When I was finally able to talk to Tony Hall, he was gracious and encouraging: ‘I’m delighted for you,’ he said. ‘Cheesed off for me, but delighted for you. It’s like when I took the Royal Opera House. I knew it was something I really wanted to do, and I can tell you’re like that with Selwyn.’ We told the BBC management board, which was meeting on the morning of the election, about my new destination, and it must have come as the greatest surprise to Tim Davie, a Selwyn alumnus. One of the student papers took a suitably satirical line. ‘New Master to make Selwyn “more like London 2012”’ was the headline, claiming that ‘the current Dean of Degrees, due to retire imminently, is set to be replaced with Clare Balding’ and ‘the Selwyn Ball has been cancelled in favour of artistic opening and closing ceremonies at the beginning and end of every year’. The reminder of other events of the past year was in the final line: ‘“It sounds really awesome, but I’m not sure that the proposed inquiry into the culture and practices of Selwyn Fellows in the 1970s is really necessary,” said Lisa Stone-Jones, second-year Selwynite.’
I negotiated a relatively speedy exit from the BBC – without, of course, a pay-off, because I was leaving of my own volition. I would go at the end of August, and for much of the time I would be acting director-general because of Tony’s holidays and a business trip he was planning. This had been the case a couple of times before, but never for such a long spell: a month in total. It was a month that confirmed that being DG was not for me, and that it is an extraordinarily tough role. The crisis still running through that summer was about pay-offs. We knew that there were bruising parliamentary battles ahead in which the Trust v. management war would continue, and we needed to be sure that all the skeletons were out of the cupboard. The initial NAO report had sampled a few prominent cases, but we had to get a picture of everything that had gone on. It was around this time that a senior colleague said to me, ‘I can never answer the phone without a sense of dread,’ and as acting DG I knew that feeling: someone inside the organisation had found a new problem, or the papers were in pursuit of a previously unknown transgression, or we had been freshly lambasted by a politician. There was one day when the press office phoned me with updates on four damaging stories, on a range of issues, that might appear in the next edition of the papers – only to discover in the first editions that we were back with pay-offs and the claim splashed across page one of the Daily Telegraph was that the BBC might be investigated by the Fraud Squad over the alleged misuse of public funds.
There turned out to be nothing new in the story, not least because the NAO had found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, and the police ruled out an investigation a few days later. But we had already decided to invite the auditors, KPMG, to review any cases where guidelines might have been breached, and the NAO was back at the BBC looking at outstanding severance payments made in the three years up to 2012. Many an executive’s summer holiday was interrupted by conference calls with the office in which we tried to make sure that every angle had been covered and that we had credible replies to the questions that were being asked. This was a depressing way of spending July and August for those of us manning the bridge.
To our relief, there was a lull in the ‘BBC crisis’ story in the second half of August. I looked forward keenly to Tony’s return from holiday, and to the start of my new life. Meanwhile, I was able to invite some of my future Selwyn colleagues to lunch or dinner in London, with a short tour inside Broadcasting House to show them what I had been used to for so many years. Watching the Six O’Clock News with them from the gallery, I remembered why my pulse had raced whenever a story broke and what had been so magical about working in broadcasting. I was sure, though, that I didn’t want to go back to it: the journalism was now safely in the hands of the next generation. It served to remind me, too, that dealing with the shenanigans between the Trust and the executive had not been the life I expected when I joined the BBC; for multiple reasons the year from the end of the Olympics to my departure from the BBC had been the toughest of times for my colleagues and for me.
I didn’t, however, want to leave downcast. I wanted my memories of my last working day in New Broadcasting House to be good ones, and, with a little re-arrangement of the diary, they were. On Friday 23 August, ahead of a bank holiday weekend, I managed to make all my calls ones that I could do from home, with laptop and mobile ready for any crisis on what was also my last day as acting DG. I didn’t go into the BBC buildings. This allowed me to have tea and cakes to celebrate my departure with friends in the DG’s office on the afternoon of Thursday 22nd, and then go that night to a Radio 2 concert with the Stereophonics in the BBC Radio Theatre. I took along my godson Jules, a music-lover who is always the most pleasant of companions, and we watched and adored the show – before repairing to the top of the nearby St George’s Hotel for a couple of beers. We looked out across the night-time London skyline, and down onto a floodlit Broadcasting House below, and I thought then that I would never regret working for the BBC. But every instinct had been right: it was time to go. Bowing out on a day of cakes and Stereophonics, and as acting DG, was a decent result.
CHAPTER 13
CAMBRIDGE
SEPTEMBER 2013 WAS my first ever month off: free from the BBC after thirty-three years, guaranteed to be unbothered by breaking news and not yet in my new role at Cambridge. In fact, I was already spending quite a lot of time around Selwyn, watching the finishing touches being put to the repainting of the Master’s Lodge and attending my first college events as Master-elect. But there came a day when I was in my kitchen in Richmond, surrounded by newly packed boxes, and I had the most powerful memories of a similar moment in Bradford thirty-seven years previously. I was once more getting ready to go to university. I had gathered together books and duvet covers, and I had bought a new kettle. A couple of London houseplants were also ready to make the journey to the east. I remembered the pride of my parents as they drove me to Oxford in the autumn of 1976, and I wished they could have been there to see me arrive in Cambridge. But my spirits were lifted by the good wishes of my extended family and friends as I made the move, and by the warmth of the welcome at my new home.
The Master’s Lodge is rather more spacious than my undergraduate rooms at Wadham. It was built in 1883 for the Master and thirteen servants, though the servants’ quarters have subsequently been hived off from the rest of the building. The ground floor is largely ‘public’ space, where we have receptions and dinners. It can accommodate up to 100 guests at a time. The first floor is my flat, and the second floor has the guest rooms. It isn’t particularly private because it sits in the heart of the college, and people are coming and going all the time – including my terrific assistant, Sheila Scarlett, whose office is in the Lodge. I like having the activity going on around me, and it is a glorious place to live, though it can sometimes be disconcerting to arrive home and find the maintenance team in a bedroom or the catering team clattering round and preparing for an event in the dining room. It took me some time to get used to my title, too. On my first day in the Lodge, when I was upstairs unpacking, I heard a voice from below trying to find out where I was and shouting, ‘Master! Master!’ I realised after a few seconds of bafflement that they meant me. This was not the way I tended to be addressed at the BBC. However, there is plenty of space to get lost, and the
most terrifying thing is when my youngest relatives come to visit and they announce they are going to play hide and seek. It could take weeks to find them.
There is an installation ceremony for a new Master, and mine was conducted by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who is now also a Cambridge head of house. I was allowed to have fifteen guests, so I mixed family with the friends who had meant so much to me over the years, and they watched in the packed college chapel as I was led to the Master’s stall by Rowan, reflecting the literal meaning of ‘installation’. I felt for a moment that I was being made a bishop rather than becoming an academic. There was music from the college choir on that dark autumn night, reminding me of when I had first heard them, and been so moved, on a summer’s evening. Around us were Fellows in the scarlet gowns reserved for special occasions, and representatives of the students and the college staff. I was particularly touched that Owen Chadwick, the longest-serving and most distinguished of Selwyn’s Masters, now in his ninety-eighth year, was among the congregation. This exemplified how much community and Fellowship matter in a college, and how change must be accompanied by a respect for traditions.
I then did what I had promised, and set about learning about the college and the university. I went to see students and academics in their lecture theatres, labs and seminar rooms. I visited the Cavendish Laboratory to see a new generation of solar panels being developed; I had a look at the wind tunnels and robot test-tracks of the engineering building; and I watched the dissection of a dog’s leg conducted by first-year students in the veterinary laboratory. Everywhere I went, I found incredibly bright, committed people – and some of them had amazing stories to tell. If I had still been on the Today programme, I would have had a dozen cracking items about research being done in Cambridge. I rediscovered my roots as a historian, too. Within a few days of each other, I visited the library at Corpus Christi College and gazed at a letter handwritten by Anne Boleyn, and I was taken round the archive at Churchill College, where the original text of Winston Churchill’s ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech is kept in a plain box folder. It was extraordinary to see the yellowing, typewritten manuscript, with the sentences set out like poetry, that Churchill had held in his hands in the House of Commons.
Within the college, I relished the discussions with Fellows about their work and I rapidly discovered that chatting with the students is one of the greatest pleasures of all. They are almost all hardworking, super-intelligent and much more socially poised than my generation. Our suppers in the Lodge for the first-years, where we shipped industrial quantities of chilli con carne and curry to the new students, were hugely entertaining, and the conversations often ran an hour or more past their scheduled finish.
Being head of a college entails operating much more as a chairman than as a chief executive. The idea that you could sit in your study and issue orders to the academics is ludicrous. Despite the grand surroundings, it is still a job: there are the scrapes students get into, the personnel issues, the tasks of refurbishing historic buildings and the ever-present need to keep our finances on track. Selwyn is one of the poorer colleges, with an endowment of around £40 million compared with the hundreds of millions that the richer colleges receive. But I am well supported by an excellent bursar in Nick Downer, who belies his Twitter handle @grumpybursar, and by a constructive and non-factional governing body. Selwyn, like the other Cambridge colleges, is an independent entity operating under statutes approved by the Privy Council – so we hold our destiny largely in our own hands, and day-to-day college life is a model of simplicity. We have a college council, including student representatives, which meets every three weeks or so, and the governing body, with all the Fellows present, meets once a term and is where sovereignty rests. Where the complication comes into Cambridge life is in the cherished independence of all thirty-one colleges, which means agreement on a common line can take a while to achieve. Then there is the relationship with the university. For a newcomer, the university’s structure of Regent House and Senate and Council and the General Board of Faculties and more is complex, and it is sometimes hard to know where decisions are made. Some of those involved aren’t too sure either. A senior figure in the university headquarters at the Old Schools on Trinity Lane advised me that the process is actually that you put policy documents in front of every committee you can think of, and when everyone has lost the will to object it is deemed finally to be agreed. This may be unfair: there is leadership from our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, who is known to all as ‘Borys’ and has the added distinction of being an Arsenal fan. And most of all: Cambridge works. It is Britain’s leading university, and in every survey one of the best in the world, and it has deftly combined the needs of the modern world with its 800 years of tradition. Cambridge is able to boast that it has backed more than 300 high-tech companies and 200 computer-based companies to the tune of £1 billion, and its links beyond the city and the region meant that in 2014 The Independent could write the headline ‘Why Cambridge is at the heart of Britain’s economic recovery’.
We sometimes discuss whether the rituals and dressing-up of academic life hinder the image we want to project of a world-class university helping to drive the UK’s economy. When I am wearing my cap and gown and processing with colleagues, I am always amused when we are spotted by tourists and there is a shout of ‘There they are!’ followed by a rush of cameras to capture the lesser-speckled academics in their natural habitat. For a new head of house, some of the rules of academic dress are puzzling. We wear caps and gowns and hoods for some occasions, and doff the cap on entering the Senate House, but no hoods on days of mourning like Remembrance Sunday. Scarlet days mean full finery. Caps are not worn when walking through a college that is not one’s own.
Then there is the language of degree ceremonies: Latin. I never thought I would be so grateful for my O-level Latin from Bradford Grammar School. Sitting in the Vice-Chancellor’s seat wearing the robes of office with a packed congregation around you is nerve-racking enough, but having to greet the graduands in Latin is an extra trial. We begin ‘Auctoritate mihi commissa admitto te ad gradum…’ (‘By the authority committed to me, I admit you to the degree of…’) and I have come to fear vets and engineers for the ‘veterinaria’ and ‘ingeniaria’ – each made up of six syllables – that loom in their section. There is room for some playfulness. When I received my own Cambridge MA, a conversion of my Oxford degree, the Vice-Chancellor’s role was performed by Stuart Laing, Master of Corpus Christi College. As I went forward to kneel before him, and for him to clasp my hands and confer the degree, he greeted me with a cheerful ‘Salve Magister!’ (‘Hello, Master!’) I doubt that it would have had them rocking with laughter at the Bradford Alhambra, and the truth is that all of this is endlessly parodiable. The people who do not like it will never like it. But I have seen that it matters to the students and academics here, and it respects the traditions of a university that goes back over so many centuries. The important thing is to remember that it is both ‘traditions’ and ‘the future’, inseparably linked, and not one or the other.
I am impressed by how hard academics work. There is the cliché about them having long holidays, but almost all of them have a towering pile of commitments. Teaching and looking after students during term-time; preparing series of lectures; helping to run their colleges and their faculties; and, most acute of all, the need to show that they are active in their research – making an impact in their specialist field and regularly publishing their findings. Many are practitioners too, most conspicuously our medics, who are also consultants at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. The pay of most academics is low compared with what people receive at the top of the creative industries. A junior research fellow with a doctorate might expect to get around £20,000 a year and a relatively experienced college teaching officer might be on £45,000. Rewards for professors are, naturally, higher, but attracting academics on this kind of pay scale will be an increasing challen
ge in a city where the property market is almost as crazy as London’s.
This was one of the themes we tackled in an informal strategy review during my first year at the college. I was conscious of the need to avoid a media-type consultant-driven exercise, though simply mentioning the word ‘strategy’ in an email to students prompted a diary item in The Times saying that, thanks to me, ‘management-speak has invaded Selwyn College, Cambridge’. But the conclusions were resolutely practical: we came up with a set of measures to strengthen our teaching and to reinforce our commitment to academic excellence, and we know we will have to increase our support for less well-off students in the coming years. There are two things which reinforce each other: aspiring to be excellent, and also being a nurturing community. I have been reassured that the people who emerge as Cambridge alumni, like my friends from Oxford, are the very opposite of pompous or self-satisfied, and they are not driven by a sense of entitlement. Most of them have put back into society far more than they have ever taken out, and they are proud of the education and of the values that inspired them.
In a Cambridge autumn, surrounded by novelty, New Broadcasting House seemed a long way away. But I wanted to keep an eye on media issues, and I had always intended to use the freedom I had to comment on current topics. I had made a pledge to the staff newspaper when I left the BBC: ‘The most dreary thing in the whole world – and shoot me if I ever do it – is people who write to the newspapers to say things were better in my day.’ But I did plan to talk about the future of broadcasting, and ideas had been swirling round in my head during my early weeks in Cambridge. I believe unequivocally in the BBC as a force for good in British life; it would have been odd to stay there for thirty-three years if I did not. But the most dramatic change for me had been leaving an organisation that from the inside often felt beleaguered and battered down, and realising that from the outside it looks surprisingly formidable. When you are a BBC executive, you start the day reading the collated newspaper cuttings about how beastly the press are being to you today, and when you are not a BBC executive, the criticism drifts past you and makes little impact, while the strength of its programmes is manifest. But it seemed to me that the organisation needed to think boldly about its future, and to learn the lessons from what had gone wrong in the recent past. I bounced ideas around with friends and some former colleagues.