It is one of the great hypocrisies of British public life — of which a good many have been on display this week — that the BBC is independent of government control. This convenient fiction suits both politicians and broadcasters alike. “I want to make it absolutely clear,” said Tony Blair on Thursday (a phrase which usually heralds the moment at which it wise to start counting the spoons), “that I fully respect the independence of the BBC.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Prime ministers do not “respect” the independence of the BBC. They are obliged to tolerate it. But when their patience is strained, or they scent danger, they move with ruthless dispatch to show just how limited that independence really is.
If anyone doubts this, consider the following statistic. There have been just seven director-generals (or, to be more accurate, directors-general) of the BBC since 1960. Of these, three — that is, very nearly half — have been obliged to resign as an indirect result of prime ministerial action. “Independent”? These are more like the survival odds for the manager of a struggling third division football club.
It is, of course — that British hypocrisy again — never as crude as a direct sacking. There are many, more subtle ways of killing these particular Establishment cats. Harold Wilson’s method of dispatching Hugh Greene was to appoint a Tory chairman, Charles Hill, in 1967 to rein him in. As Greene’s biographer, Michael Tracey, puts it: “Wilson had realised that the only way to change the BBC was to suffocate Greene slowly by providing him with a chairman with whom he could not work . . . (Hill) was merely required to inject doses of ‘responsibility’, ‘maturity’, ‘professionalism’, ‘propriety’ and ‘traditional values’.” Greene resigned less than two years later.
The sacking of Alasdair Milne in 1987 was much more ruthless. Having antagonised Margaret Thatcher by defending the BBC’s coverage of the Falklands war, and then by supporting a Panorama programme alleging far-right infiltration of the Tory Party, she — like Wilson — decided to install a chairman more to her liking, with instructions to sort out the BBC. Less than three months later, that chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, called Milne into his office and fired him (“I am afraid this is going to be a very unpleasant interview. We want you to leave immediately.”) Milne, humiliatingly, was sent home without an opportunity to speak to his staff. “Anguish,” he wrote afterwards, “was followed by despair.”
On the face of it, Greg Dyke might have expected somewhat gentler treatment. Far from being out of sympathy with the party in power, he has in the past been a substantial donor to it. But his fate was equally brutal. True, Tony Blair’s fingerprints were nowhere to be found on the weapon that was wielded by the BBC’s board of governors on Wednesday night. But who can doubt that a single telephone call or even a hint from Downing Street would have saved him? No such gesture of mercy was forthcoming. In the crude mafiosa code of new Labour, Alastair Campbell had demanded the delivery of “several heads” at “several levels”: the departure of the BBC’s chairman, Gavyn Davies, would not be enough. Dyke was duly decapitated and the grovelling apology issued by the vice-chairman, Lord Ryder, and delivered in the tone of a defendant in a Stalinist show trial, completed the surrender of the “independent” BBC.
I find it hard to be reassured by Mr Blair’s second platitude, also uttered on Thursday, that “I have no doubt the BBC will continue, as it should do, to probe and question the government in every proper way.” In the aftermath of Hugh Greene’s resignation, the kind of political satire pioneered by That Was the Week That Was left the BBC and has never really returned (ITV took Spitting Image, Channel 4 has Rory Bremner). Similarly, once Milne had gone, the whole climate of the BBC’s current affairs department was changed by the arrival of that arch flatterer of politicians, John Birt.
As for the departure of Dyke: anyone who seriously believes that the BBC might any time soon commission a major investigation into the central political question of our time — why were the British people misled over the decision to go to war with Iraq? — is not living in Labour’s Brave New World.
The only cause for hope, paradoxically, lies in the bullying arrogance of the man who has so successfully brought the BBC to heel. More than any government minister — and certainly more than the prime minister, who is too shrewd a politician to be seen to crow openly — Alastair Campbell has hogged the airwaves over the past few days, revelling in his triumph, delivering statements and interviews in various grand presidential settings like a cut-price General de Gaulle. His self-obsession is almost comic, and anyone in need of a good laugh in these depressing days should be sure to catch his sports column in The Times.
Last week’s effort (“not for Clan Campbell the loser’s mentality that participation is as important as winning”) included a priceless anecdote of an encounter with Bill Clinton: “As he headed for the presidential limo, he stopped, shook me by the hand and said, ‘Thanks for everything’ . . . I said, sincerely, that it had been a pleasure and an honour to work with the greatest all-round political communicator of the late 20th century.
He . . . replied that it had been a pleasure working with the best communications adviser in the world.”
“Pass the sick bag, Alice,” is one’s first reaction. The second is that far from being the best communications adviser in the world, Campbell is well on the way to establishing himself as the worst. By choosing to pick a fight with the BBC on the issue of intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Campbell has selected, from the government’s point of view, the worst possible ground to defend. No one, not even President George W Bush, now expects to find WMD in Iraq, and the BBC’s reports on this issue — bar a couple of slipshod sentences, delivered in the dawn’s early light, and for which the corporation long ago apologised — look stronger every day. In Tony Blair’s phrase, the BBC deserves to be judged on “the totality” of what it claimed.
Given this, the government’s most sensible reaction to Lord Hutton’s report would surely have been a conspicuous display of magnanimity. Instead, the Campbell approach of grinding the BBC’s face into the dirt has succeeded in turning a victory into a public relations disaster. Instant polls are unscientific, but they do give us a rough snapshot of public feeling. Those taken on Wednesday and Thursday by AOL and Sky showed almost exactly the same proportion — 75% — in sympathy with the BBC. The 34,000 viewers of Channel 4 News — the bulletin of choice among the political classes — who telephoned to register a vote, came out on Friday nine to one in favour of the corporation.
None of this will bring back Davies, Dyke and Gilligan, nor alter the practical reality that the BBC has suffered a terrible defeat. But it does suggest that the government, too, is in for a rough time. There has been more than a touch of Richard Nixon about Campbell’s recent, indiscriminate lashing out at the media — a similar kind of compulsive, tough-guy, foul-mouthed paranoia; a similar loss of all sense of proportion; a similar small-minded bitterness in victory. Even the BBC’s broadcasting rivals — even newspapers traditionally unsympathetic to it — have begun to close ranks in the face of this onslaught. And it is deeply unwise, as Nixon discovered, to unite the whole of the media class against you.
Lord Hutton’s was a devastating verdict on the BBC, against which there can be, in legal terms, no appeal. But there are other courts and other verdicts that may count for more in the long run. I doubt whether public opinion and history will find so overwhelmingly in favour of Campbell and the government.
Tony Blair has secured a greater victory over the BBC than either Wilson or Thatcher were ever able to manage, but in the words of another of his predecessors, a man who had even more experience of war: “I always say that, next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.”
John Humphrys is away
