First Confession

by Chris Patten

  My predecessor, Roy Jenkins, used to say that the chancellorship (in which, as he put it, ‘impotence was assuaged by magnificence’) took up a quarter of his time and gave him half his enjoyment. I would marginally increase these figures. My principal preoccupations have not changed much in thirteen years. First, we still have to make the liberal as well as the utilitarian case for higher education. We tend to forget about the former and argue the case for spending on universities and research almost entirely in terms of alleged GDP effects, a proposition which is often risible. We pay too little attention to the learning experience of students. The government even appears to think that you can apply a matrix, which they have designed, to measure learning. They often act as though the aim of pedagogy was simply to transfer information. This was presumably the aim at Trump University, now defunct, which offered courses in asset management and wealth creation. But universities are for learning, not ‘credentialing’, or enhancing future earning capacity. Students are not simply customers in an academic supermarket. As for research, pushing back the frontiers of knowledge may (almost certainly will) improve our national competitiveness. We do not, however, regard the seminal achievements of the Cavendish laboratories as a central part of our national story in Britain primarily because they raised Britain’s growth rate. We are not proud about the development of penicillin in the laboratories of the Radcliffe Infirmary because of the money it brought in. The twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary are not scored in the national accounts. All these examples of scholarship help make us a civilized society and play their part in the improvement of the quality of life everywhere. Our scholarship is a central part of our national achievement and legacy.

  Second, given the constrained public funding of higher education, we have to raise more money from philanthropy in order to fund the best research and to give the maximum help to students from poorer backgrounds so that access to what we can offer is genuinely needs-blind. In philanthropy we still lag far behind the United States. The same is true of public support for research. Harvard gets 80 per cent of its research income from government; Oxford receives 40 per cent and this is part of the highest research income of any European university. We are getting much better at attracting private generosity; particularly gratifying is that the support from old members has increased steeply. Since we began our serious public appeal for funds a decade ago we have netted – colleges and university together – well above £2.5 billion. We shall need to be even better at this fund-raising if we lose access to EU research grants, as well as the disruption of research collaboration after Brexit.

  Broadening access without lowering entry standards is a third priority. Universities should not be persuaded that degrading their own standards is the right response to the problems of parts of our secondary education system. They should accept their share of responsibility for promoting social inclusion in order to give all young people the opportunity of as full an education as can benefit them, redressing disadvantage and tapping the potential of the whole community. Yet it would be demeaning to have two sorts of students, those who got their university places on merit, others who were chosen on the basis of postal code selection. Oxford like other universities – more than most others – has a far-reaching programme to try to overcome the poverty of aspiration in some secondary schools and to help prepare students from indifferent schools for admission to our courses. We can and will do even more, helped as we are by imaginative donors like Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman. But lowering the quality in Britain of what are still some of the best universities in the world would not do anything to reduce inequalities in our society which are a political, social and moral reproach to us all.

  Fourth, we should firmly reject the treatment of the humanities at our universities as an optional add-on indulgence. We must support the humanities not because of some alleged addition to our national GDP but because they provide us with a fuller understanding of our world and of one another. Because they enable us to think creatively and critically. Because they inform our moral sense. Because they teach us to love jazz and Beethoven, Raphael and Cézanne, a Shakespeare sonnet and a Flaubert novel. Because they teach us about life and beauty and love and death. Because we are human.

  Fifth, the controversy on some American and British campuses in recent years about freedom of speech and about the bounds of intellectual inquiry make it imperative to make again and again the case for universities, as important institutions in free and plural societies, bulwarks against the humbugging forces of populism and identity politics. Universities must themselves act as purveyors of liberal values, encouraging free speech, free inquiry, open debate and tolerance within the usual bounds of legality, decency and mutual courtesy. They should not allow their students and teachers to live within silos which enable them to avoid challenge and debate. The academy is not, as I have said, an educational supermarket, nor is it a collection of safe havens where inquiry and debate are prohibited lest they cause offence. At Oxford, we had forceful arguments about these issues in the context of the money left to the university for the support of international students by Cecil Rhodes, the buccaneering imperial adventurer whose views on race and whose commercial rapacity were deeply unpleasant but pretty typical of his times. Nelson Mandela had worked with us at Oxford to broaden the support from these funds to help more black African students. It did not seem sensible to him or to us to put the opinions and career of Cecil Rhodes centre stage in an age which should comprehend them but would (quite rightly) never condone them. I am wholly in favour of understanding history from the broadest and best-informed point of view; I am not in favour of rewriting it from a stance of contemporary prejudice or political opinion.

  It has been a privilege to be associated with at least two British institutions – Oxford and the BBC – which are world-class. We do not have so many such institutions in Britain to brag about as to be careless about their continuing welfare and vitality. When I was approached in 2011 about becoming Chairman of the BBC Trust several friends warned me that it was an impossible job because of the governance structure that had been put in place after the uproar over one broadcast during the Iraq War. The irony is that this was just about the only occasion during the build-up to that awful nightmare when the government was correct and the media wrong. I recalled that some well-meaning friends had also advised me against going to Hong Kong, to Belfast to chair the Policing Commission and to Brussels to be a European Commissioner. Why should I listen to them this time, having greatly enjoyed all these jobs which they had thought would up-end me? I am stubborn and love challenges, and have always been inclined to heed Ronnie Knox’s advice to ‘do the most difficult thing’.

  In any case, I was in love with the BBC. It was where I’d hoped to begin my career. It was and is one of this country’s greatest institutions. Merely to rattle off a list of its overwrought and ubiquitous critics is to make a very powerful case for defending it to the death. The BBC developed organically, becoming a central part of the public realm without being part of the state, a position Edmund Burke would have celebrated. It is not a way of making up for market failure, as some contend, but a core part of our civic humanism and of our shared, multi-ethnic and multi-racial citizenship. Its role is underpinned by a common British set of values and a shared sense of mutual responsibility. It is a key part of the dialogue in our common British conversation and a great global asset, with polls suggesting that its World Service (operating on too tight a shoe string) does more for Britain’s image overseas than anything else we do apart perhaps from royal ceremonials and the occasional deployment of our armed forces. The Trumpification of news (‘alternative facts’) should encourage us to invest a lot more in its invaluable news service. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democrat, is not the only world leader who has enthused to me about its importance in her life. At the UN in New York, many of the diplomats turn on the BBC World Service first thing when they get up in the morning.

  There have
always been problems of governance at the BBC, partly I suspect because it was primarily the creation of one huge, egotistical figure, Lord Reith, who was not prepared to be managed by anyone. During the Second World War the controversy often concerned what Penelope Fitzgerald in her lovely novel about the BBC, Human Voices, described as its responsibility for ‘the strangest project of the war, of any war, that is telling the truth’. For years the BBC operated under a Chairman and Board of Governors. They were sometimes a bit rum; a list of them was a roll call of British establishment history in all its exotic tribalism. In the 1980s the caftan-wearing George Howard, owner of the castle of the same name, was succeeded as Chairman by Stuart Young, a chartered accountant and director of Tesco, so it was a broad church. But, by and large, the governors protected broadcasters from external interference with only occasional blood baths and calamities. With just the odd blip (usually an editorial slip in the news organization), the BBC maintained a fine record. It was widely viewed and listened to and it was trusted; and BBC independence was unquestioned. A consequence of this was that BBC executives occasionally displayed an ingrained reluctance to accept any higher authority at all; even the Holy Trinity – for some, especially the Holy Trinity – would probably have been deemed insufficient.

  To try to improve alleged failings in governance when the BBC’s Charter was revised in 2007, the governing body and the executive were formally separated. This seemed a good idea to many, though not all, at the time; it should be a reminder that institutional changes should always be approached with considerable care. There is usually a good reason why things which have been around for some time are still there. The BBC Trust was set up to regulate the broadcaster and to represent those who paid the licence fee. It was to press for higher standards and greater distinctiveness in programming. But there was a confusion of roles. Was the Trust a regulator or a cheerleader? This was partly a matter of rhetoric. It was supposed to be both. If the BBC did well, the Trust said so; if not, it pointed this out. No problem surely? Well, it was not quite so simple. There was also a bigger difficulty. The Chairman of the Trust could call herself or himself Chairman of the BBC, but was she or he really in the Chair? Actually, no. The Chairman of the Trust was neither an executive nor a non-executive chairman of the whole organization. He or she was chairman of the regulator. The BBC itself had an executive board with its own chairman, the Director-General. But if anything went wrong the Trust’s Chairman tended to be in the firing-line. It was a very straightforward governance muddle. To make the position clear about the supposed separation of powers, the Trust was housed separately from the rest of the organization. So, among other things, Trust members missed out on the gossip and informal exchange of views so important if you wanted to know what was going on. A friend of mine calls such communications latrine-ograms. Moreover, as I have noted, the government had been persuaded – by whom? – that the Director-General should also be allowed to chair a BBC board, containing both executives and non-executives. So where did the buck stop, and did the place at which it stopped correspond to where authority really lay? Who decided editorial issues? The DG – absolutely correctly. Who decided on money and broad strategy? This was surely rather an important question given the Trust’s remit to represent the licence fee payers and public controversy about levels of BBC pay.

  The DG’s board had a remuneration committee chaired when I went to the Trust by a distinguished financier who also chaired Barclays, a bank whose views on the subject did not encompass frugality. At my first lunch meeting with the executive board at Canary Wharf (for which I arrived by Tube, which seemed to slightly discombobulate some of these directors) I raised the question of both the pay and the number of senior BBC managers. Noting the salary of the outstanding director of the British Museum (it was at that time, I think, about £180,000 a year), I asked how many BBC executives were paid this or more and how this could be justified, given the extraordinary achievements of the comparator whom I had mentioned. There was general horror at this Maoist remark. The Trust had for some time been fighting to contain pay awards (the scale of which was a hangover, I suppose, from the previous governance structure) and to cut costs. While it could say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the aggregate budgets, its say over how they were built up was confused. Eventually the Trust got a reasonable grip on pay and budgetary matters; we introduced, for example, a cap on the multiple of top pay to median salaries. We were still, however, blamed for past sins. This confusion was later used rather cynically, but effectively, to discredit the Trust in front of the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons.

  In retrospect, the BBC Trust model of governance would have worked better had the Trust avoided drilling down into too much detail about what the executives were doing and had the executives not run for cover behind the Trust when stormy weather arrived. In the meantime the Trust did some excellent work (especially on programme quality and competition issues) and had hard-working and always harassed staff and a director who behaved (to my great pleasure) like an old-fashioned Permanent Secretary. Nicholas Kroll was also funny, well-read and reasonable almost to a fault. I think that we might have been able to make all this work quite well if the later Director-General, Tony Hall, had been there when I arrived. But I did not have a particularly close relationship with Mark Thompson, the DG on my arrival. It is not in anyone’s interest to exchange tittle-tattle about what went wrong. There is no shortage of such books by former BBC executives and overpaid clapped-out divas. Sometimes relationships just do not work out, which is one reason why I have always thought them more important than institutional tinkering. I reckoned that Mark Thompson was very clever; he clearly believed that he was the cleverest person at the BBC. I knew, everyone knew, that BBC executives had undermined my predecessor, Sir Michael Lyons, and I was reluctant to go the same way. The DG was plainly the operational boss of the organization in every possible respect, dominating meetings and discussions. But I never discovered who knew about, or was responsible for, things when they went wrong. Macavity – and there is no one like Macavity – was never there. A controversial programme was broadcast, for example, or commissioned and then dropped; casualties mounted; Macavity knew nothing about it. Whatever the turbulence in the atmosphere, Macavity always – lucky fellow – landed on his feet. This doubtless took skill as well as good luck. Anyway, it was a pity that Mark and I could not make things work better.

  Mark Thompson’s successor, George Entwistle, chosen unanimously by the Trust, was an exceptionally decent man and a broadcaster with a fine record. Unfortunately he was swept away by the tornadoes that blew through the BBC when the dreadful activities of Jimmy Savile were revealed and controversy blew up over whether the BBC had self-censored a programme opening up this dark chapter in its history. This row was exacerbated later by an appalling error in a Newsnight programme on child abuse. One aspect of this affair is worth noting, an example of the problems which a Chairman would have faced even under previous governance arrangements, and which certainly arose when there was an explicit bar to the Trust’s Chairman having any editorial role. During the morning on the day of the broadcast, one of my staff saw in the blogosphere that Newsnight intended to allege that a former Conservative Party treasurer, Alistair McAlpine, was going to be named as part of a paedophile ring in Wales. I was told about this wholly implausible story and said that I must phone the DG to get him to intervene in the editing of the programme. I was quickly persuaded that this would be quite wrong, and the news that I had stopped a programme – an ex-chairman of the Conservative Party, about a former treasurer – would be leaked very rapidly. This was wholly convincing. In the event, I telephoned George to ask whether he was happy that Newsnight, which had lost its editor (over a dropped programme on Savile), was being properly run under adult supervision. He assured me on this, giving the names of the two senior executives who were looking after the programme. It went ahead, and was a disaster. George fell on his sword, without any discouragement from th
e Trust. As is often the case with inquiries, the media turbulence over the setting up of those into Savile was far greater than attended their findings. (Much the same seemed to be true later over the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War). George was the principal casualty of the whole business, a largely innocent party in a grisly affair. I had never known such a media storm, partly a consequence of the inherent horrible newsworthiness of the stories and partly of the commercial interest of some of the print media concerned, which were taking a hammering at the time over phone tapping. The BBC quite properly faithfully reported all the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of these matters, and George was mercilessly interrogated on its Today programme. This was its job.

  After George’s departure, we rapidly turned to Tony Hall, and managed to persuade him to leave his job running the Royal Opera House. He quickly restored calm, continued to cut excess and reduce overheads to one of the lowest figures in the public sector, and presided over a Corporation that broadcast an extraordinary range of superb radio and television programmes for a fraction of the money that goes to other major broadcasters. The BBC Board would have been sensible to appoint him when he first applied for the job in 1999–2000.