Are Alastair Campbell and the American rap star Eminem related? The charges and counter-charges between the BBC and Downing Street must for most people boil down to the following: a confusing story about a man who you have vaguely heard of, radio, “sex” of a strange sort, weapons and verbal abuse. Much like rap music, really.
In the United States, political institutions, media outlets and pressure groups are clustered in and around Washington DC, which is itself encompassed by an orbital motorway commonly called the “Beltway”. A controversy that ignites immense excitement within that community but not outside it is known as “inside the Beltway” material.
Here, the geography works differently. A line can be drawn, starting at the BBC in White City, through Westminster and Whitehall, to Wapping, finishing at Canary Wharf. Not a “beltway”, more an outstretched belt across London. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that the dispute over who said what to whom, and whether or not to put it on the airwaves, is a classic “inside the belt” argument.
If so, this is significant. That view helps Downing Street and hurts the BBC. The polls indicate that, though most voters think ministers did overstate the case for war, they are, perhaps pragmatically, indifferent about this. It is not, after all, as if the allies intend, if they search for biological and chemical arsenals in Iraq for two years, fail to find any, and then conclude there were none, to say “Oops, sorry” and invite Saddam Hussein back to reoccupy one of his presidential palaces. In that sense, this saga is one for historians tomorrow, not hysteria today.
The BBC’s future, however, rests squarely on its position “inside the belt”. Which is why what happens this morning is more important for its executives than for Tony Blair or even Mr Campbell. If, as expected, the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee clears No 10 of “sexing up” the case for going to war, then the corporation has two realistic options. It could be defiant, offer no expression of regret and hint heavily that the MPs have been duped. Or, instead, it could defend its journalism but acknowledge that its source could have been mistaken. The decision largely rests with Greg Dyke, the Director-General.
Mr Dyke’s instinct may be to concede nothing to Mr Campbell. By temperament, he is a man who would cross the streets of Monaco during the Grand Prix to join in a fight. The BBC’s governors may choose to encourage him. This would be a mistake. It would be better to eat a small slice of humble pie now than initiate a war of attrition. The BBC would be being perfectly consistent if it insisted that the seniority of the source meant it was right to publicise his claim, while conceding that any implication that intelligence was fabricated appears unfounded.
For this affair has left the BBC dangerously exposed. It has served as a catalyst, allowing diverse complaints about its news coverage to resurface simultaneously. The Beeb has been accused of, among other matters, fanatical suspicion of the motives of those in power and unrelenting hostility towards the Conservative Party. It has been attacked for a wholesale scepticism about capitalism, combined with a weakness for quack environmentalism and health-scare speculation over hard science.
Reporting the Middle East, it sometimes seems so remorselessly anti-Israeli that Mr Dyke might as well be open about it and allow his reporters to appear speaking Arabic, riding a camel, stopping occasionally to suck from a long pipe in a crowded souk.
Put bluntly, the BBC, a public sector bureaucracy funded by a poll tax, with a privileged status that looks starkly anomalous in an age of hundreds of television channels and thousands of radio stations, needs more friends. It is already detested by other broadcasters, derided by the print press for squandering its vast resources and damned by publishing houses for its increasingly aggressive marketing activities in their domain.
If the BBC wants to retain its privileged position when its charter is due for renewal in 2006, then it must construct a coalition of supporters broader than the Liberal Democrats, Friends of the Earth, Friends of Yassir Arafat, the sort of people who believe that taking an aspirin will inevitably result in limbs falling off and its own staff. It requires mainstream allies as well.
This is not to say that the BBC should be biased in favour of any particular body or party — far from it. It does, though, need to avoid prompting the impression that it is itself actively prejudiced. Many of the protests aimed at the BBC are spurious and reflect the private agendas of those pressing the protest. There is, nonetheless, enough smoke to allow a credible suggestion of fire. The BBC’s unique position, and unusual vulnerability, means that it must be seen to be painfully objective, hyperactively judicious, better balanced than the average spirit level.
That is what the BBC must keep in mind when it responds to the select committee. The old consensus that Auntie should be preserved and protected is fraying; the contention that “something must be done” about the corporation is acquiring serious credibility.
Simon Jenkins wrote about the BBC on this page recently, teasingly comparing its excesses to Cardinal Wolsey’s but vigorously defending its “right to be wrong”. This was once the stance of virtually all reasonable and respectable people (plus Simon); it is no longer. The “right to be wrong” is not the same as the liberty to be a law unto oneself.
The better historical comparison, perhaps, now comes from a century after Wolsey. The BBC risks being viewed by too many people as the equivalent of the Duke of Buckingham, a pampered favourite so vain, wasteful and threatening to the interests of others that, alas, assassination may be necessary.
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