Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  More importantly, the conference failed to agree on a legally binding strategy to deal with climate change. I summed it up at the time as ‘too many people, not enough fresh air, and a vast amount of energy expended to produce not very much’. It definitely did not live up to its advance billing as ‘the most important gathering in the history of humankind’ which is what the then Environment Secretary Hilary Benn had rashly called it. It was a shambles, and trying to report sensibly on a shambles is no fun at all.

  Over the years, I developed a deep loathing for news stories that could be characterised as ‘men in suits talking to other men in suits’. They rarely produced news that was of genuine importance and too often involved far too many reporters kicking their heels and creating stories out of thin air. Dozens of reporters gathered in the same place at the same time have a tendency to produce something that can closely resemble what bears produce when left on their own in woods.

  I developed a similar dislike for Budgets, those annual parliamentary rituals in which Chancellors of the Exchequer drone on endlessly about how well they are running the UK economy and try to disguise the reality, which is that they have no idea at all what they are doing. I have never understood why British governments cannot simply announce their spending plans – and any changes to taxation – in the same way as they announce any other policy, without all the fake excitement that is generated on Budget Day.

  Quite apart from any other considerations, it is an unfortunate fact that most of what the analysts say on the day of the Budget turns out to be either wrong or irrelevant within a matter of days, so we could all be spared a huge amount of unnecessary guff if we simply reported what was in the Budget and waited to see what happened.

  I admit, however, that part of my antipathy towards Budgets stems from my irrational dislike of any story that has big numbers in it. Show me anything that contains the word ‘billion’ and I will rapidly look for something else to read. So when the global banking system teetered on the edge of meltdown in 2007–08, I had to dig deep into my reserves of professionalism to report, night after night, on stuff that I had great difficulty understanding.

  I spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to work out what collateralised debt obligations and credit default swaps were, and then had to practise saying ‘quantitative easing’ without sounding as if I had developed a stutter. Not for the first time, I realised that I really should have known much more than I did about what makes the world go round and, not for the first time, I felt immensely fortunate that I was being paid to get my head around a story that everyone else was struggling to understand in their own time.

  The BBC excels at many things: world-class TV drama, innovative entertainment formats (Doctor Who, Top Gear, Strictly Come Dancing, Bake Off), wildlife documentaries and much, much more. Its programmes – Test Match Special, BBC Proms, The Archers, EastEnders – enrich the nation in a way that no other institution can dream of. In 2012, when the think tank Chatham House commissioned a survey to find out which institutions voters thought best served the UK’s national interest, the BBC came second, with just the armed forces ahead of it.117

  But it is also in a league of its own when it comes to corporate meltdowns, and I had the great misfortune to be granted a ringside seat at far too many of these ghastly displays of managerial incompetence. All institutions get things wrong, but what the BBC wins gold medals in is getting things wrong when it gets something wrong.

  Exhibit One: the Hutton Report into the death of the government scientist David Kelly in 2003 after he was named as the source for a BBC report that said the government had ‘sexed up’ a dossier about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Lord Hutton was an appeal court judge and former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland who had been appointed to investigate the circumstances surrounding Dr Kelly’s apparent suicide – and he came down spectacularly hard on the BBC while largely exonerating the government.

  At seven minutes past six on the morning of 29 May 2003, the Today programme had reported that the government was facing more questions over its claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, including a claim in what became known as its ‘dodgy dossier’ that some of those weapons could be ready for use within forty-five minutes of a deployment order being given. The programme’s defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan reported in a live interview with John Humphrys:

  What we’ve been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that dossier was that, actually the government probably erm, knew that that forty-five minute figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in. What this person says, is that a week before the publication date of the dossier, it was actually rather erm, a bland production. It didn’t, the, the draft prepared for Mr Blair by the Intelligence Agencies actually didn’t say very much more than was public knowledge already and erm, Downing Street, our source says ordered a week before publication, ordered it to be sexed up, to be made more exciting and ordered more facts to be er, to be discovered.118

  It was, as the programme’s editor, Kevin Marsh, later put it in an internal BBC email, a ‘good piece of investigative journalism marred by flawed reporting’. The suggestion that the government had published a claim that it ‘knew’ to be wrong was clearly incendiary, but when Tony Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, complained with the full force of the fury of which he was capable, the BBC did exactly what it should not have done: it robustly defended what Gilligan had said without properly examining whether it really could justify the exact words that he had used.

  This is not the place to reopen all the old wounds, but the row that ended with the resignations of both the BBC’s chairman, Gavyn Davies, and its director-general, Greg Dyke, as well as the departure of Andrew Gilligan, all within three days of the publication of the Hutton Report, was a dismal time to be a BBC journalist. On the day that the report was published, the World Service decided in its wisdom to broadcast Lord Hutton’s announcement of his findings live and in full. I was asked to present the special coverage, and when Hutton had finished what amounted to a full-scale attack on the BBC’s editorial standards and practices, I said simply, and with feeling: ‘Well, that’s very good news for the government, and very bad news for the BBC.’

  My conclusion, more than a decade later? When two alpha male elephants (in this case, Alastair Campbell and Greg Dyke) clash in the jungle, a lot of lesser creatures get hurt. Both men were spoiling for a fight – Campbell believed that the BBC’s journalists had been consistently hostile to Blair and his support for the US-led invasion of Iraq, and Dyke was determined to show Campbell that the BBC was not prepared to be intimidated. His mistake – and it was a serious one – was to fight the battle on the ground of Gilligan’s reporting.

  Exhibit Two: Sachsgate, when the actor and comedian Russell Brand and the radio and TV presenter Jonathan Ross lost their senses and broadcast on Radio 2 a series of voicemail messages that they had left for the then 78-year-old actor Andrew Sachs (best known as the Spanish waiter Manuel, in Fawlty Towers). On one of the messages, Ross could be heard saying: ‘He [Brand] fucked your granddaughter.’ Although the programme had been pre-recorded, no one who heard it ahead of transmission thought it presented any problems.

  Interestingly, after it was broadcast, there were no immediate complaints. But when, a week later, the Mail on Sunday drew attention to what had been said, the complaints came flooding in. Russell Brand resigned, as did the much-respected head of Radio 2, Lesley Douglas, and Ross was suspended without pay for twelve weeks. The BBC went into one of its meltdowns and eventually issued an apology, calling the voicemail messages ‘grossly offensive’ and a ‘serious breach of editorial standards’.

  But it all went on much too long. The BBC’s response to the furore, artificially fanned though it might have been, was far too late in coming. The Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Culture Secretary had all had their say by the time the corporation had got its act together, once again leaving the
impression that too many well-paid executives were spending too long trying to duck their responsibilities.

  When the director-general, Mark Thompson, agreed to be interviewed on The World Tonight, I questioned him as robustly as I would have done had I not been working for him. When it was over, he smiled wanly at me across the studio desk and commented: ‘You guys really enjoy this sort of thing, don’t you?’

  He was wrong. I hated it when the BBC fell short. But what use is a BBC interviewer who is not prepared to ask tough questions of his own bosses?

  Exhibit Three: the Savile crisis. Yet again, the BBC went into meltdown after its shambolic decision-making processes proved to be utterly inadequate. There is no need to rake over the sordid details: an investigation by Newsnight into allegations that Jimmy Savile was a serial child abuser was halted, apparently because the programme’s editor was unconvinced by the available evidence, and then, in the midst of a gruesomely public inquest into his decision, the same programme broadcast similar allegations against another public figure, only for those allegations to turn out to be totally unfounded.

  It was a catalogue of ineptitude that would have shamed the most shambolic student newspaper. For an institution that likes to think of itself as the world’s most respected broadcaster, it was an unparalleled disaster. What made it particularly toxic was that although Newsnight’s Savile investigation was axed, two tribute programmes went ahead after his death, despite misgivings about Savile’s ‘dark side’ having been expressed in internal BBC emails. It still seems to me that the real scandal was that executives who had worked closely with Savile over many years, and who were well aware of the suspicions over his sexual behaviour, authorised the transmission of those programmes.

  I find that much harder to excuse than an editorial misjudgement over the strength or otherwise of a complex journalistic investigation. No editor’s judgement is infallible, and as I had worked closely with the Newsnight editor, Peter Rippon, during his time at the World Service, I was convinced that he had made his decision, rightly or wrongly, in good faith. In a piece that I wrote for The Guardian – coincidentally, just one day after my last appearance on air as a BBC presenter – I remarked: ‘My former colleagues in BBC News might well feel aggrieved that they are taking the brunt of the criticism while light entertainment gets away almost unscathed.’119

  Another director-general’s head had rolled as a result of the crisis: George Entwistle, who had lasted a mere fifty-four days in the job, resigned after a devastating Today interview with John Humphrys. Entwistle had joined the BBC as a trainee at about the same time as I joined as a presenter; he had spent some time on The World Tonight in his early days and I had always liked him.

  Perhaps I have a weakness for thinking the best of people – except when I am interviewing them, naturally – but after more than two decades at the BBC, I came to the conclusion that with very few exceptions, it is run by good, intelligent people with all the right instincts. Sometimes they are asked to do jobs for which they are ill-suited and sometimes they are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Greg Dyke was not temperamentally suited to run a major national institution, and George Entwistle was engulfed by crisis before he had had a chance to find his way around. Both men made mistakes, and they paid the price.

  It does not make them villains.

  CHAPTER 14

  QUITE BIG IN BOSTON

  Mr Lustig, even my hair is happy.

  MAYA ANGELOU

  IT WAS 5 NOVEMBER 2008, the morning after the election of Barack Obama as the first black President of the United States, and I was interviewing the poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou. She was eloquent and emotional, and she did something no other of my thousands of interviewees, either before or since, had ever done.

  She started to sing.

  By and by

  By and by

  I’m going to lay down this heavy load

  It was one of America’s best-known traditional spirituals, dating back to the days of slavery, and it sent shivers down the spine of everyone who heard it that morning. ‘My reaction can be described as “thrilled”,’ she said. ‘I am “thrilling”, but in the classic sense of that word. It used to mean having a physical reaction when the whole body responds. Even my hair is happy.’ One of the BBC’s best-known correspondents sent me a note after the interview was broadcast: ‘My wife and I stopped in our tracks and cried.’

  Whenever I am asked which is my favourite country to report from, I reply that it is the United States of America. Not because of its obvious importance as a global power, but because of the openness of its people. It is a reporter’s paradise, where everyone has something to say and is more than happy to say it. Even better, they can nearly always say it in English.

  The scene: a golf course at the US military base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, one of the biggest military bases in the world, with a resident population of around fifty thousand. A colleague and I approach a couple of golfers who look like army veterans and we shout across the fairway.

  ‘Good morning, we’re from the BBC.’

  ‘The BBC? So you’re Commies, huh?’

  I fell in love with the US on my very first visit in 1968 and I have never tired of going back. But I am not blind to its failings, because one of the great advantages of travelling through a country as a reporter is that you get to meet people and see places that most visitors would never know even exist. Yes, we admire the White House, the Grand Canyon and the Golden Gate Bridge, just like everyone else, but we see the underbelly as well.

  In Philadelphia, for example, which has a reputation as one of the most violent cities in the country, with an exceptionally high rate of gun crime, I met an African-American woman whose son had been shot dead in a petty argument over a parking space. I asked her what she would say to her son’s killer if she ever had the opportunity to meet him.

  ‘I would ask him where all that anger came from,’ she replied. It struck me as a very good question, and applicable to so much more than the country’s appalling number of gun crimes. (In 2015, more than 13,000 people were shot dead in the US, more than four times as many as were killed in jihadi attacks worldwide.120)

  According to figures compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the murder rate in the US is four times as high per head of population as it is in the UK. That would suggest a very large number of very angry people in a society that still likes to boast of offering limitless opportunity to every citizen. One of my aims during nearly fifty years of visiting, observing and reporting from the US has been to find a way to explain the vast gulf that separates the national myth from the reality. American politicians routinely describe their country as the greatest nation on earth, but to millions of its citizens, it feels anything but. That’s one of the most important reasons why, in November 2016, they elected Donald Trump as President.

  My first opportunity to report from the US for the BBC came in 1993, when Bill Clinton was inaugurated as President. Like me, he was a baby boomer, born just after the Second World War – in the words of one of my American cousins: ‘He likes the same kind of music we do.’ On inauguration day, as I was walking along Pennsylvania Avenue, I passed the White House just as George H. W. Bush was leaving for the last time as President. As his black limousine swished by, I peered in to see if he was as moist-cheeked as Margaret Thatcher had been when she drove away from Downing Street after being ousted in 1990. As far as I could see, there were no tears.

  In most movies about reporters, there comes a moment when a telephone rings early one morning, a half-asleep reporter answers it, and a voice says: ‘There’s a plane to Los Angeles in an hour. Make sure you’re on it.’ My phone rang late one Sunday night, and it was World Tonight editor Prue Keely’s voice at the other end.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, Robin, but I’ve booked you onto a flight to Washington tomorrow morning. It leaves at 7.30 from Heathrow.’ Mind? I could not have been happier; it was the height of
the Monica Lewinsky scandal and much of the world was engrossed in the less-than-dignified detail of who did what, with what, and to whom in the Oval Office.

  The flight to Washington turned out to be a flight to New York. After we touched down, producer Shaun Waterman and I sprinted through JFK to catch a shuttle to DC, jumped in a cab and made it to the BBC bureau with about thirty minutes to spare before going on air. (We learned later that our frantic arrival at the bureau had been captured by a crew from Newsnight who were filming in the street outside just as we were tumbling out of our taxi.)

  Our Washington colleagues had thoughtfully prepared everything we needed, including all my scripts, which left me with just one task: to sound as if I knew what was going on and interview a stream of studio guests who had been booked for us while we were cruising across the Atlantic at 35,000 feet.

  I remember one of the interviews to this day: it was with a highly respected female White House correspondent on the subject of Clinton’s ratings with women as more details emerged of his liaison with Lewinsky.

  ‘Why do you think the President is still so popular among women, given what we now know about his behaviour?’

  The pundit paused, looked me in the eye, and sighed.

  ‘Because he’s gorgeous.’

  Some years later, after Clinton had left office, he addressed the Labour Party conference in Blackpool. My former Observer colleague Simon Hoggart memorably described how, after Clinton had spoken (‘He raised his head, smiled, and scoped the audience, gazing deeply and fondly into their eyes … He is the Princess Di of world politics’), a senior minister was spotted having a quick cigarette outside the conference hall.