I was a little bit disappointed by those expenses charged by BBC executives and revealed by the corporation last week in another of those sudden outbursts of “openness and transparency”. I had hoped we might be able to gather once more around the guillotine like a tricoteuse, finishing off the sweater we started with the bankers and which now has 12 sleeves as a consequence of our ghastly politicians.

I yearned for disclosures about houses, whores and yachts, but all we got was claims for half a handbag and a book about Britain’s most boring football club, QPR (this latter for the rather weird Mark Byford, deputy DG).

The BBC executives’ venality and arrogance was only mildly irritating and, sort of, beside the point. It is not their incidental expenses, their occasional demands for a taxi and a bottle of bubbly sent to Bruce Forsyth on the 80th anniversary of his chin; it is, in 60% of the cases, their salaries and the fact that they are there at all.

Why, for example, does the corporation need a “director: vision” on a salary of £400,000 per year, or thereabouts? Shouldn’t the director-general have written into his contract that he ought to have a sort of vision for the BBC and that he should, at some point, attempt to put that vision into practice? If not, what does his job entail? You might argue that this is particularly the case when, over the last few years, the BBC has shown all the vision which you might expect from a blind man kept in a blacked-out basement with a sack over his head.

Successive director-generals have taken office insisting that they will scythe down the dead wood in the corporate bureaucracy (apart from John Birt, whose masterplan was to dramatically increase the amount of dead wood, a cunning strategy in which he was very successful); all have seen the bureaucracy expand, at the expense of the people who actually make programmes.

Only rarely can organisations reform themselves, much though they insist that this is precisely what they are doing, or intending to do: there are too many vested interests at stake.

Right now, we have a BBC which is suffocated by massively over-remunerated and not terribly bright middle managers; people who have failed ever upwards and have been removed from the difficult and genuinely creative business of making stuff people want to watch or listen to. Administrators who could not really cut it at the sharp end and have instead kept their noses clean and become that deathless thing, a “manager”, replete with a free car, courtesy of the licence payer, and a new, impenetrable vocabulary derived from a pseudo-science.

The truth about the BBC is that the overwhelming majority of employees, the people who make the programmes you value, such as Newsnight and Today and the World at One and the occasional decent drama, are on very low wages indeed, sometimes scrabbling around on three-month contracts with no security and certainly no pension.

Above them resides an ever-expanding, leaden monolith, the members of which have one overriding purpose: to ensure that they don’t cop the blame for anything and thus get sacked. And so the corporate structure militates against almost everything which is valuable in programme-making — originality, the truly different, the challenging, the controversial.

Public attention will soon be focused again on the huge sums the BBC spends to retain its light entertainment talent, and perhaps rightly. It is inconceivable that any sentient being would think Jonathan Ross is worth six million quid a year. But hell, at least Ross’s salary involves a vague nod towards the marketplace; a lot of people, perhaps inexplicably, enjoy his shows.

There is at least a connection between the money Ross makes and the pleasure he gives to people. There is none whatsoever between those who take home in excess of £200,000 a year for being head of diversity, or compliance, or vision, or strategy or any other of those abstract nouns which pervade the BBC.

At last the mystery is solved — we now know the real reason why Jacqui Smith resigned as home secretary. In a typically penetrating interview, the BBC’s Carrie Gracie teased out of Jacqui the fact that she thought she’d been a terrific home secretary who had suffered quite unjustly at the hands of the press, largely because she was a woman.

Being called “stroppy” by a journalist was the tipping point, it seems. It often is those little things, isn’t it? All credit to Ms Smith for not letting the other stuff get to her — the Labour party opinion poll which suggested she was by far the worst cabinet minister; the criticisms over the £116,000 second home allowances she claimed while she designated a room in her sister’s house as her principal residence, an act described by Sir Alistair Graham, of the committee on standards in public life, as being “near fraudulent”; her catastrophic legislation to lock people up for 42 days, described in the House of Lords as “fatally flawed, ill thought through and unnecessary”; or, indeed, her husband’s claim for porno films. Bravely, she was entirely uncontrite about all that stuff. It is a terrible thing when political giants are brought low through sexism, isn’t it?

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