This New Noise

by Charlotte Higgins

  All of that is easy to write: real life is not so simple. The crisis did not feel linear, like a row of dominoes. It was a complicated tapestry of events, in which a thread pulled loose in one part of the elaborate pattern affected the whole. Seemingly small decisions made by not terribly senior people had consequences that affected the entire corporation. According to Professor Charlie Beckett, founder of Polis, the journalism think tank at the London School of Economics, ‘It was like a medieval medicine chart. The humours, the flows, were radically dysfunctional.’

  But what if you were there? What did it feel like to try to survive the tempest as the waves crashed over your head? Much had changed since the 1980s. The pace of news had accelerated. There was the 24-hour news cycle: BBC executives at the centre of the Savile–McAlpine stories found their houses surrounded by reporters and cameras, feeding a ravenous monster that they themselves had reared. There was the echo chamber of Twitter: one of the catastrophes of the McAlpine story was that tweets started to appear before the screening of the report, causing speculation to coalesce around McAlpine as the probable public figure whom Messham had identified, mistakenly, as his past abuser. ‘As soon as I saw that first tweet,’ said one Newsnight staffer, ‘I knew I’d lost my job.’

  What was clear was that no one involved emerged unaffected. Two years on, there remained bitterness, damaged careers, deep feelings of injustice. Investigative reporters Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones, who had doggedly investigated Jimmy Savile’s appalling abuse of young people in the first place, have been morally vindicated: there is now little doubt that, as Jones has written, ‘Jimmy Savile was a predatory paedophile who had attacked many children in many locations.’ The essential mistake was not to have run their journalism in the first place. But that notion was swamped as the BBC turned in on itself in the autumn of 2012. Accounts of what actually happened as the BBC attempted to contain the crisis – who was to blame, who did what to whom – differed sharply. All this was of course played out at a meta-level. No comparison could be made with the depth of trauma suffered by Savile’s victims or those who had suffered abuse in children’s homes. I spoke in detail to two people about the events inside the BBC in 2012 – not so as to provide a definitive account of what happened, or to apportion praise or blame, but to seek to express the lived experience of two individuals who had in different ways been caught up in the institutional crossfire.

  Paddy Feeny was working in the press office at the time. Even on an ordinary day before the Savile crisis unfolded, he explained, the default position was of defence against endless incoming fire: ‘Overnight there would have been anonymous BBC sources saying such-and-such an exec is a kiddy fiddler and such-and-such a journalist is an anti-Semite or whatever it was they were talking about that day. Plus 25 allegations of bias, plus a BBC presenter being arrested. All the usual kind of stuff.’

  The morning would be spent ‘agonising with people about what the accusations were, whether they were true and how and whether to defend them’. The afternoons, through to about 8.30 p.m., were devoted to fielding calls from papers; between 10.30 p.m. and midnight the calls would resume, after reporters had scoured each other’s first editions. The whole cycle would begin again at about 6.30 a.m.

  The normal quotidian business of dealing with reporters was a rough game. Feeny recalls one journalist who was ‘personally vituperative, bullying, rude, stitched you up, never ever represented what you’d actually said to them’. Another, though working for a paper whose editorial line was hostile to the BBC, was ‘in an odd way incredibly fair … They would call up and say, “So apparently somebody sneezed during the 8 p.m. radio news bulletin so obviously we’re devoting pages four and five to why the BBC is spreading the plague”, so you’d talk about that for a bit. And you knew perfectly well that it didn’t really matter: you could have talked in Turkish for all the difference it would make. But you could sometimes say, “I am telling you emphatically, completely that is not true. No version of that is true. I’m not choosing my words carefully here because it’s a little bit true. It’s just not true,” and that would be taken on board.’

  The music modulated into a far darker key once the Savile crisis was in full swing. One of the grimmer aspects was the extent of the internal rancour it stirred up. According to one staff member who was embroiled in events, ‘Everybody decided that they would take sides and take the opportunity to knife rivals or ex-lovers in the back.’ On Newsnight, according to another, the sense was that ‘when things did start to unravel the upper chain of management just disappeared, basically, and left the editor, Peter Rippon, to swing’.

  The hangman was Panorama, by way of its investigation into Newsnight’s failings. This scenario – of one set of professionals spectacularising the errors of their own colleagues – is, on the one hand, admirable; on the other, disturbing. The journalists were all together, in glassy open plan, in New Broadcasting House, where they had just moved from White City. ‘People from Panorama would be going through a script slagging off Helen Boaden and Steve Mitchell [the former director and deputy director of news], while Steve and Helen were literally in the next office having a meeting,’ according to a Newsnight staffer. ‘The way to save the BBC and the way to save Newsnight had become to get a rival programme to say how shit we were, and that was supposed to lance the boil. That was the cunning plan.’

  In the opinion of the same employee, Rippon was virtually made a proxy for Savile by the press: ‘Peter had his kids being followed while he was taking them to school. It was basically like he became Jimmy Savile.’ ‘Everyone on Newsnight’, said Feeny, ‘was exhausted and frightened and shouting. I have never seen so many tears.’ He said of the Panorama report, ‘I don’t blame them at all. It was a good thing to have done. But they did take an enormous amount of pleasure in doing it in a slightly “we’re-the-proper-journalists-around-here” way.’ Panorama journalists passionately denied this: it had been done heavy-heartedly out of a sense of journalistic duty – and a premonition that their own careers would be unlikely to prosper as a result.

  One Newsnighter remembers a colleague receiving a list of allegations from Panorama and ‘just sobbing, saying, “My career is over.”’ ‘But now I look back,’ said the member of staff, ‘I was a very junior producer on Newsnight when the David Kelly affair happened, and the fact was that there was a similar sang-froid within Newsnight about [the failings of] the Today programme.’

  As the crisis moved into its final phase, the geometry of the press office’s responsibilities became dizzyingly complex. Some of the team became caught up in the lengthy, and personally destabilising, matter of preparing evidence for the quasi-judicial process of the Pollard inquiry. ‘I and others had their computer hard drives taken, had all their emails searched, lockers searched. I had to transcribe all my notebooks,’ recalled Feeny. ‘I had to provide a witness statement. I received a letter saying, “Go and find yourself a solicitor because you will need one when you are cross-examined.”’ In short: ‘We were being investigated ourselves, and having to defend George Entwistle although he had effectively disappeared. We were promoting the Newsnight editor’s version of events; dealing with the fact that other members of staff on Newsnight appeared to be anonymously briefing journalists every day that he was lying; and we were promoting Panorama, which was an investigation into why we were lying when we were defending Newsnight.’

  The whole affair had not only been a crisis – but there had also been a failure to contain it. Instead of damping the flames, they had been fanned. Lord Burns, the chairman of Channel 4, who once ran the Treasury, said, ‘It seemed to me to be symptomatic of what happens when somebody gets left holding the baby and doesn’t quite know what to do and has nobody to turn to. When a crisis hits a poorly functioning organisation people run for the hills, because they don’t want to be the person who’s left holding the baby. But it is in those moments you actually need not only a good organisation but people who rise to the occasion, and
who are able to work together, and who put their personal interests to one side.’ It was in the context of this crisis over Savile that the second blow hit Newsnight – the wrongful naming on Twitter of Lord McAlpine as a child abuser, a claim made in relation to a separate Newsnight investigation. (The programme itself did not name the Conservative chairman.)

  George Entwistle, the 54-day DG

  These ugly days of fratricidal strife ended with the destruction of Entwistle, by John Humphrys on the Today programme. (Perhaps it is truer to say that Humphrys simply knotted a rope and handed it to his boss.) It was 10 November 2012, two days after the Guardian story establishing that Messham had been mistaken in believing that it was Lord McAlpine who had abused him. The interview was 15 minutes long, and an agonising listen. It ended at the point where Entwistle’s very grip on language seemed to run out:

  John, I am a director general who has encountered these problems and is doing everything, I’m doing, I am doing everything I can. I believe I am doing the right things. I know that there, that there, that there are times when I was thought to be being a bit slow over Savile. I could have been a bit quicker to move to announcing the, um, independent inquiries by a, by a few days, I, I, I’ve admitted that. But the truth is I am doing the right things to try and put this stuff straight. I am accountable to the [BBC] Trust in that endeavour. If they do not feel that I am doing the, er, the, er, right things then obviously I will, I will be bound, bound by their judgement.

  What, indeed, of the Trust? It is in the nature of BBC rows to escalate quickly to question the very basis on which it is run. Some of the corporation’s enemies clearly hold the view that if one undermines the foundations, the edifice might be more swiftly destroyed: like digging a mine in a medieval siege. In 2008 it took only a couple of weeks after Radio 2 broadcast prank phone calls by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to the actor Andrew Sachs, about Brand’s having supposedly had sex with Sachs’s granddaughter, for David Cameron, then in opposition, to forge the row into an argument about the BBC’s lack of regulation and its ‘squeezing and crushing of commercial competition’. (He was writing, strikingly, in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun.)

  BBC governance historically worked like this: from 1927, when the BBC became a corporation, the broadcaster was accountable to twelve independent governors, with a chair, who represented the interests of the audience, appointed the DG and set the broadcaster’s strategy. But in 2007, after the Hutton report on the death of David Kelly, the governors were replaced by the BBC Trust.

  According to Lord Grade, the then chairman of the BBC who set the Trust’s shape:

  What went before was highly unsatisfactory, because all the information that was necessary for the governors to make their decisions was edited, prepared and slanted by the management. They had no means of getting information themselves. And therefore all the investment decisions created a huge amount of suspicion that the management were trying to put one over on them … Management felt that the governors were a pain in the neck, and there was a lot of tension and conflict … and so I set about creating separation.

  The Trust – which, unlike the old governing body, was set up as a separate organisation, with its own staff and premises – could act, explained one of its officials, ‘to test rigorously any proposals from the BBC to get the tanks out of the garage and start heading off towards lawns. And it can carry out reviews of value for money, reviews of editorial standards.’ But the question remained: was the distance of separation between the Trust and the executive set correctly? Was the Trust in fact in some ways simultaneously too close to the BBC and too distant? Was it possible for one person, the chair, to act both as cheerleader and regulator of the BBC? Did the governance structure contribute to the severity of the Savile crisis?

  An alternative had been mooted before the Trust was adopted. Lord Burns had been commissioned by the then culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, to write a report on BBC governance. The suggested model was ‘for the BBC to have a conventional board, with a non-executive chairman, a chief executive, a group of non-executive directors, and probably a small number of executive directors’, explained Burns. ‘And then there would be another organisation that would do the job of looking after the licence fee, a public-service broadcasting commission.’

  There were some who remained attached to the view that the Burns model, or something similar, would have protected the BBC from the worst of the Savile–McAlpine crisis. When I visited Sir Christopher Bland, chairman of the BBC from 1996 to 2001, he said, ‘I don’t think the Trust is working. It’s an unworkable model, because on the one hand it’s asked to be separate and distinct from the BBC itself. The chairman is called the chairman of the BBC, but of course he’s not. He’s chairman of the BBC Trust, in a separate building, with separate staff, and no involvement in day-to-day decisions except on a post-hoc basis. But on the other hand, when things go wrong, the Trust is blamed for actions that are the responsibility of the executive.’

  In Bland’s view Entwistle ‘would not have been fired and wouldn’t have got himself into quite such a mess if he’d had a non-executive chairman to talk to … He couldn’t ring up [chairman of the Trust] Chris Patten, still less walk into his office, and say, “Do you think I should go on the Today programme?”’

  Bland had little time for Grade’s arguments. ‘I absolutely disagree with Michael Grade when he says there is not a problem with the structure. That’s complete bollocks. That’s Grade justifying the structure that he negotiated, put in place and then abandoned.’ (Grade resigned as chairman of the BBC in November 2006 just before the Trust was due to take over from the governors.) Patten, who on 6 May 2014 announced his departure from the chairmanship after major heart surgery, was ‘as good as you can be in that impossible job. I think he was unfairly reviled.’ He remembered Patten telling him, ‘I thought Hong Kong was difficult until I went to the BBC.’ The former Conservative chairman, as the UK’s last governor of Hong Kong, supervised its handover to the Chinese in 1997.

  For his part, Grade said, ‘The whole governance debate from beginning to end is crap, because governance is no substitute for judgement. I can cite you endless examples of plcs that had perfect governance and are no longer in existence.’ In March 2015, though, Rona Fairhead indicated that a radical overhaul of BBC governance ought to be considered, suggesting a unitary board and an external regulator.

  Lord Patten himself agreed that there have been difficulties of perception about the Trust’s role, but he defended the principle – in public, at least. We met in his offices on Great Portland Street, five minutes’ walk from New Broadcasting House, not long before he announced his resignation. ‘One of our functions is of course to protect the independence of the BBC, and to stand up for the integrity of the BBC, and to expect the BBC to constantly surprise us by the way in which it meets its national obligation as part of this country’s notion of civic humanism. And to the extent that the BBC does that, I think we should cheer,’ he said. ‘But when it falls short of that I think we should say so. And that’s partly about regulating, it’s partly about openly challenging, and what we’re trying to do after the last few years is to make the separation between the Trust and the executive more clear, which will sometimes mean that we step back from things that previously we might have got drawn into.’ I asked him: do you think of the BBC as ‘us’ or ‘them’? ‘I don’t want to be accused of heresy,’ said Patten, ‘but it’s two in one.’ He emphasised his points by tapping the desk in front of him with a plastic teaspoon.

  I asked him whether he felt a closer relationship with Entwistle could have helped; did he know, for example, about the tweets on the morning of the Newsnight broadcast that contributed towards misidentifying McAlpine as a paedophile? Patten said he did know.

  So why didn’t he warn Entwistle?

  It would I suppose have been open to me to phone up George Entwistle and say, ‘Are you mad? Is this really serious?’ If I’d done that, and George had intervened, and
pulled the programme, the front pages the next day would have been: ‘Ex-Tory chairman intervenes to stop Newsnight programme on ex-Tory treasurer.’ It would have been regarded as a monstrous example of interfering in the BBC’s editorial independence. What I did do was to phone up George and say, ‘Are you sure that Newsnight is being properly run?’

  And he didn’t mention the tweets? ‘No, because it seemed to me improbable that the director general of the BBC didn’t know about something that everyone else was talking about.’ Was Entwistle the right appointment? ‘There was no reason for supposing that he would find the heat of Savile led to a sort of meltdown.’

  Had he ever felt direct pressure from the government? Almost none, he said. ‘But nothing had prepared me for the ubiquity of hostility in the press. When you have a newspaper saying that the latest script for Sherlock showed that the BBC is a left-wing conspiracy, you clutch at the air in desperation. When you see newspapers which have reported the infamy of the BBC five or six times as much as they’ve reported what President Assad is getting up to in Syria, then it makes you scream.’

  How hard was it to run the BBC? ‘Ten times more difficult than I thought it would be,’ he said. ‘I agreed to do it because I think it’s a great national institution, it’s an important part of our culture, because I have a romantic attachment to the things that the BBC has done at its best.’

  I couldn’t help wondering – especially in retrospect, after his heart problems became a matter of public record – just how far the difficulties of chairing the BBC Trust had worn him down. He had taken on the role through a romantic attachment to the societal virtues of the BBC, not, I felt, through any desire to take up arms in a cultural war zone. He was genial and gung-ho when we met, and occupied his large leather swivel chair with the full-bodied confidence of a tycoon. But all the while we spoke I could not stop summoning up his face as he stood next to the resigning Entwistle. In the film – mercilessly viewable on the BBC website – he chewed his lip distractedly. He looked haggard, forlorn, and very much alone.