As the dust begins to settle on a mad week at the BBC some of us have that “we told you so” feeling. By we I mean a motley collection of members of the House of Lords, academics and former BBC chairmen and directors-general who told everyone who would listen that the new system of running the corporation wouldn't work.

This week it faced its first big test and failed dismally.

Sir Michael Lyons, the Chairman of the BBC Trust, demonstrated the problem quite clearly when interviewed on the Today programme yesterday morning. He talked about the BBC as “they” and the BBC Trust as “we”. So if the Chairman doesn't represent the interests of the BBC and fight for the organisation who does?

There are two people to blame for the structural mess that is BBC governance today - Michael Grade and Tessa Jowell, the former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. When the BBC Charter was up for renewal Ms Jowell asked Lord Burns, former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, to chair a small committee that would make recommendations about the future structure, regulation and governance of the BBC.

The Burns committee came up with the perfectly sensible suggestion that there should be a small outside regulator, “Ofbeeb”, to regulate the BBC and a board of governors responsible for running it. Each would have its own chairman. The trouble was that the Chairman of the BBC at the time, Michael Grade, hated Lord Burns's proposed structure - he would certainly have lost some power - and threatened to resign if the proposal were implemented, which is ironic given that he resigned anyway a year or so later in the forlorn hope that he'd make his fortune at ITV. Having lost one BBC Chairman in 2004 after the Hutton inquiry, Ms Jowell decided she couldn't face losing another just a year later, so instead the current regulatory system was born, a system that even inside the department they admit was a fudge.

This week that system failed - not because of the failings of the Chairman or the people on the trust, they are doing their jobs properly - but because they are trying to operate an unworkable system. There is no longer a chairman of the BBC able to fight for the cause of the organisation in weeks such as this. The BBC didn't need a regulator this week, it needed leadership at the very top.

As it happened it was half-term and Mark Thompson, the Director-General, was on holiday with his family in Italy. Now I know only too well what it's like being on holiday when all hell breaks loose back at the ranch. I was skiing when the Queen Mother died and Peter Sissons wore a mauve tie to announce it, much to the disgust of the Daily Mail. And I was away again on the day that Andrew Gilligan made his fateful broadcast about the Iraq war. In fact one of the big jokes among my team was that I was always away when the big stories about the BBC hit the papers. Welcome to the club, Mark.

With the Director-General away, an old-style BBC chairman, such as Sir Christopher Bland, would have intervened, maybe done some interviews, certainly kicked up a hell of a fuss internally and helped to quiet the whole issue down. Instead the BBC Trust set up an inquiry to report a week on Tuesday - as any good regulator would. The report was probably needed but in today's world, where stories are updated by the minute, the corporation failed to respond effectively as this rather bizarre story took a grip of the media generally and BBC journalists in particular.

So what conclusions should we draw from the events of this week? First, someone should send a message to Ms Jowell - return if possible to clear up the mess you left behind. But it's not likely to happen as politicians are never held responsible for the chaos that they cause:not a single British politician has yet resigned or been fired over the disaster called Iraq.

Secondly, it was clear that there is a generational divide. Virtually all the young people I talked to - and by young I mean under 35 - thought that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand were funny and that the whole incident had been blown up out of all proportion. The older people I met didn't feel the same way.

Personally I am a big fan of Ross. I think his Radio 2 show on Saturday mornings has been the turning point in the development of the station over the past decade. It was the first show to convince the Sixties and Seventies generations that Radio 2 wasn't just Sing Something Simple and designed for their Auntie Muriel. But of late I have felt increasingly uncomfortable at the number of times Ross uses the F-word on his chat show and when he asked David Cameron if, as a young man, he had masturbated when he watched Margaret Thatcher on the television I found it offensive. My kids thought it was funny. This is a difficult problem for the BBC but it's not a new one. I remember my father being offended by That Was The Week That Was when my brothers and I thought it brilliant. If the BBC ignores the next generation it does it at its long-term peril.

Thirdly, if the BBC is to pay enormous sums to artists, such as the £6million a year it pays Ross for, to be fair, an enormous amount of presenting work, then it must understand that it will lose public support. There is always a price that is too high for a publicly funded organisation to pay. In this case Channel 4 had offered Ross £4.5million a year to switch and the BBC should have said, very reluctantly, goodbye.

The final lesson is for Ross. Don't say you are worth more than a thousand journalists even if it is a joke. Journalists are not known for their ability to laugh at themselves and what goes around comes around, as Ross discovered this week, particularly from BBC journalists.

So has the corporation been damaged? Probably not. Over the years there have been many weeks like this and the BBC has survived and prospered. But two things worry me. First, the resignation of Lesley Douglas as Controller of Radio 2 is a serious loss and arguably deeply unfair. I wonder whether Mr Thompson considered refusing to accept it - after all, this happened on his watch as well. And secondly, what is clear from this week's coverage is that the BBC has many more powerful enemies than it has powerful friends - not a comfortable position to be in.

Greg Dyke was Director-General of the BBC, 2000-2004

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