Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand have done too much talking. The management of the BBC has done nowhere near enough. That two of the BBC’s highest-paid stars should have been allowed to babble abuse on air about a 78-year-old actor was shameful enough. That the BBC has now lost its tongue is more shameful still.

In a private sector organisation, these two men would have been suspended or sacked by now. Yet three days into this sorry affair, we have still to hear directly either from Sir Michael Lyons, the Chairman of the BBC Trust, or from Mark Thompson, the BBC Director-General. A lack of editorial judgment in allowing the humiliation of Andrew Sachs to be broadcast to two million radio listeners has now been compounded by the failure of the BBC management to recognise just how deeply Ross and Brand’s malice has offended the corporation’s audience. The reins of the BBC appear to be in the hands of a dysfunc-tional leadership that is in thrall to its talent.

The BBC Trust, charged with policing the corporation’s affairs, says it “has noted the BBC’s management’s decision to issue an apology and to carry out a review. The trust’s editorial standards committee has requested a report from the management at its meeting next week. In light of that update, the committee will decide what should be covered in a report to the full trust at its meeting on 20 November. The trust will await this report before commenting further.”

Glaciers are melting more speedily than this. This is a statement of such haughty detachment that it sounds as if it were minted by a 1950s civil servant, not by a body that is striving daily to disseminate its varied output at internet speed.

At £6 million a year, Ross is not just the most highly paid TV presenter, he is surely the country’s most highly paid public sector employee. He is treated as if he is bigger than both the BBC and its audience. The BBC says it pays him so handsomely because that is the market price of his talent. Is there a flush commercial broadcaster who would stump up even one third of this sum?

The BBC claims that it runs as a market operation, but no commercial organisation can operate like this. It acts as if it has no need to answer to its licence-fee payers, who are effectively its shareholders. By allowing Ross and Brand to broadcast without editorial restraint, it has betrayed the trust it has been granted to police its own content. The BBC leadership has been tested and found wanting. The management is failing to manage. Instead, it has resorted to by-passing the bosses and searching for more junior scapegoats to sacrifice: deputy heads must roll.

What the Ross and Brand affair shows is that the new structure at the top of the BBC – specifically the BBC Trust – is not working. There is a cultural and management failure at the BBC.

Ross and Brand have never behaved with particular sensitivity. The lasciviousness with which Ross interrogates some of his female guests makes you wonder if he’ll be the first chat-show host to be the subject of an Ofcom restraining order. But having acknowledged that the pair have overstepped the mark, the BBC should have announced briskly what action, if any, it planned to take against the two men. It has not. The BBC likes to claim that it holds itself to a higher standard than other broadcasters. Licence-fee payers ask no more than it adheres to an average one.