Greg Dyke: Inside Story

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I went back to my office and sat there stunned. I had worked flat out for four years to try and turn round a deeply unhappy and troubled organization and was now being thrown out by the people I respected least in the whole place, the BBC Governors. I sat there in disbelief. Fancy being fired by a bunch of the great and the good, people whose contribution to the BBC was minimal to say the least, and who, in recent months, had become more and more obsessed about the survival of the Governors as an institution.

I asked Fiona to come into my room. We’d been together a long time at LWT, Pearson, and now the BBC. She’d arrived later than me at the BBC because Christopher Bland believed that her friendship with the Blairs would be a political liability for me and the BBC. That night I got up and gave her a hug and told her it was over, that the Governors wanted me out, and that I was going to resign.

Over the next hour or so I talked to Stephen Dando at some length. When he learnt what was happening he told the Governors that they were making a disastrous decision and warned them how the staff would react. Pat Loughrey, the Director of Nations and Regions, came in and told me not to go. He too went downstairs to demand to see the Governors, but they wouldn’t let him in. Several members of my immediate team also came in and urged me not to resign.

Around 9 p.m. I changed my mind. I decided I wouldn’t give the Governors the satisfaction of getting rid of me without a fight. I asked Simon Milner to come and see me. He looked horrified when I told him that I didn’t intend to resign and that they would have to sack me.

Ten minutes later I was back in a meeting with Ryder and Neville-Jones. I told them I wasn’t going willingly and that I had never intended to resign, a veiled reference to the discussion Gavyn, Pauline, and I had had the night before. Richard Ryder got angry and slightly threatening, the sort of approach he must have adopted almost daily as a Chief Whip. I stayed firm and told them they must inform the other Governors that I wasn’t resigning. I then went back to my office.

During that evening I talked on the phone with the three people who probably have more influence over me than anyone else. Firstly I reached Sue and told her what was happening. Her response was predictable: ‘Fight the bastards, and if it means you get sacked, get sacked. Who cares?’ That’s my girl. She summed up the very reason why we’ve been together for twenty years. Sue was never very fond of my being at the BBC anyway. She thought the job was too time consuming, and she didn’t like some of the senior people she met there. She thought they were lacking in fun, highly political, and falsely sycophantic.

I also phoned Christopher Bland, my former Chairman at LWT who’d gone on to become Chairman of the BBC and who, in turn, had persuaded me to join the organization in the first place. He had given up being Chairman two years earlier after he became the Chairman of BT, but before he did so he put his future in my hands. He told me: ‘I brought you here so if you want me to stay I’ll turn down BT and stay.’ I thought he was right to take the BT job: he was in his sixties and he obviously fancied one last big challenge, so I advised him to go.

Christopher and I had been in battles together before. Some we’d won and some we’d lost, but he was great to have on your side. He never lost his nerve and I’ve known times when he supported me even though it was not in his personal interests to do so. I’d like to think I’d do the same for him. I loved working for him over the years, and he was always one of my two mentors. When I rang him and told him what was happening he couldn’t believe that the Governors were trying to get me out and promised to do all he could. He appeared on Newsnight later in the evening. He also agreed with Sue and told me that I should tell them to ‘fuck off’.

The third person I rang that evening was Melvyn Bragg, a close friend and my other mentor. Melvyn is probably the cleverest person I know; he knows so much about so many subjects. I first met him many years earlier when I was a young researcher at LWT and he was the famous Melvyn Bragg, editor and presenter of the South Bank Show. I remember being very flattered when he even remembered my name, but as a boy from a working-class background Melvyn had never lost the ability to relate to all around him, no matter what job they did. Much later, when I was Director of Programmes at LWT, I elevated the Arts Department into full departmental status just so that I could have Melvyn on my immediate team.

Melvyn was also one of the people who had encouraged me to join the BBC and had supported what I was trying to do there, although not uncritically. During those last three days at the BBC, he gave me all the support you could ask for from a friend, including writing a wonderful appraisal of what I had achieved in four years in that weekend’s Observer. I got hold of him late on the Wednesday night, by which time I had had a further meeting with Ryder and Neville-Jones. They told me that the Board was adamant: I either resigned or was fired that night. Melvyn recognized that I was terribly upset and asked me how would I want it to be seen in six months’ time: would I rather be seen to have resigned or to have been sacked? I answered ‘Resigned’.

Normally when top executives leave or lose their posts these sorts of decisions are about pay-offs. But money was largely irrelevant in this case. The BBC would have had to pay up on my contract either way.

While all this was happening, Emma Scott – a feisty project manager who had worked with me from the first day I joined the BBC – decided she was going to rally my supporters by ringing around members of the executive team to get them to come in and support me. She persuaded Caroline Thomson to come back and talk to the Governors, Pat Loughrey stayed around for the whole evening, Andy Duncan, the BBC’s outstanding Director of Marketing and now Chief Executive of Channel Four, turned up to support me, and Peter Salmon, the Director of Sport, phoned in to tell me to hang on in there.

Meanwhile Mark Byford, my recently appointed deputy, had been sitting outside the Governors’ meeting for several hours, like the schoolboy summoned to the headmaster’s study. Mark and I have always got on well and I’ve always liked and respected him as a professional broadcaster, but I still wonder why he didn’t just wander up one flight of stairs for a chat that evening. Instead, he just sat there on his own for hour after hour. I suspect he was under instructions from the Governors not to talk to me, which would explain it.

I always saw Mark as a possible successor to me within the BBC, but that evening, and in the days that followed, his chances of becoming Director-General were wiped out. It was clear to me that, with Gavyn and me both gone, any new Chairman would want his or her own Director-General, not someone tainted by the events of that night and the weeks that followed. To be fair to Mark, he was put in a terrible position by the Governors, a position that wasn’t of his own making. I have no doubt he did what he thought was his duty: he is that sort of man.

The pressures of that day finally told and I succumbed. I abandoned both the Atkins diet and abstinence from alcohol and ate a whole pizza and drank at least half a bottle of wine while all sorts of people were coming in and out of my office. I’m not sure I can ever forgive a combination of Lord Hutton and the Governors for forcing me to break my diet.

Gavyn Davies, who had been out of the loop since we left the Governors’ meeting together earlier that evening, decided at about 11 p.m. to go home. I had already told him that the Governors wanted me out, but we’d agreed there was little he could do about it. Before he left, he decided to say a final goodbye to his former colleagues, but when he walked into the room he found the atmosphere had changed completely in five hours. It was a very hostile environment, with the aggression mainly coming from Sarah Hogg, who, according to him, was ‘seething’.

I’ve since discovered that Sarah had told Gavyn the day before that he shouldn’t resign but that I should go. Gavyn had told her then that there were no circumstances in which he’d let me go while he stayed, and I genuinely think that that was one of the reasons Gavyn resigned. Gavyn and I had worked very closely together, particularly on Hutton, and we both believed we were right. I think his view was that if one of us should go it should be him and that way he would protect me. According to others at that meeting, when Gavyn walked in Sarah launched a ferocious attack on him, accusing him of ‘cowardice under fire’.

In the end I announced at about one in the morning that I wasn’t negotiating or discussing any more. I was going home. The Governors were still downstairs, but by then I’d had enough. I would decide whether to resign or be fired in the morning. Either way I knew I’d be leaving the BBC.

Outside there was thick snow everywhere and I remember thinking how sad that I’d hardly noticed it falling. I got into the car and told my driver Bill that I was leaving. He, too, got upset. He told me later that neither he nor his wife Ann slept a wink all night.

The following morning I took the usual precautions to avoid the journalists and the camera crews outside my house. In the car I got a call from John Smith, the BBC’s Finance Director, wanting to know what was happening. I told him and he decided to set about working on some of the Governors. He was confident he could get them to change their minds. But I knew it was too late. Overnight I hadn’t slept a lot, but I had taken a decision. I would resign, but over the next few days I would make it very clear I had been given little option by a bunch of intransigent Governors.

So why did I choose that path? Looking back now I am not sure I know. With the benefit of hindsight, I think I should have stayed and dared them to fire me. But at the time I felt isolated. I also felt hurt and had a deep sense of injustice. I didn’t believe that I had done anything to justify resignation, nor did I believe the BBC had done anything seriously wrong. I wasn’t to know then that the staff would react in the way they did and that Hutton would be dismissed so quickly and comprehensively. What I do remember thinking was that if I was to go, I wanted to do so with some dignity.

If the Governors had only waited another day or two there would have been no need for me to leave: by then, it was Blair’s people who were on the run. By the weekend Number Ten couldn’t understand what had happened. The report had exonerated them and yet the public hadn’t. They had no concept then, and still don’t have, of how fast Blair had lost the trust of the people in Britain, of how quickly he’d gone from being seen as an honest and open man to being regarded as a public relations manipulator, a man without real principles. Iraq and spin had destroyed his reputation.

I got into the office about ten past eight on that Thursday morning and immediately started rewriting a couple of draft statements I’d prepared the night before. The first was the public announcement I would make. The second, much more important to me, was the e-mail I would send to all the staff telling them I was going. I was determined that the staff would learn the news from me and that the e-mail would go out before any press or public announcement.

That morning all feels a blur now. I remember lots of people coming in and out, and lots of people crying. Most of my immediate support staff were either crying or trying to stop. I remember Carolyn Fairbairn, the BBC’s Head of Strategy with whom I’d worked so closely over four years, turning up looking as if she’d been crying all the way from Winchester, where she lived. Melvyn Bragg had been presenting his Radio Four programme In Our Time that morning and he too came up to my office and was there for at least an hour, talking to me, advising me, and reassuring my staff. They loved him for showing so much care. In the end even he got upset.

All morning the e-mails had been pouring in from staff urging me not to resign, but at around 1.30 p.m. I sent out my e-mail statement to the staff. It was typical of my all-staff e-mails. I had started sending them almost as soon as I joined the BBC and found it an incredibly effective way for a Chief Executive to communicate with every member of staff. During my four years I refused to send out long, boring e-mails; I wanted people to read them, so they had to be short, to the point, and interesting. This one would certainly have an impact. It was only a few paragraphs long, free of jargon, and in a language everyone could understand. It said:

This is the hardest e mail I’ve ever written. In a few moments I’ll be announcing to the outside world that I’m leaving after four years as Director General. I don’t want to go and I’ll miss everyone here hugely. However the management of the BBC was heavily criticised in the Hutton Report and as the Director General I am responsible for the management.

I accept that the BBC made errors of judgement and I’ve sadly come to the conclusion that it will be hard to draw a line under this whole affair while I am still here. We need closure. We need closure to protect the future of the BBC, not for you or me but for the benefit of everyone out there. It might sound pompous but I believe the BBC really matters. Throughout this affair my sole aim as Director General of the BBC has been to defend our editorial independence and to act in the public interest.

In four years we’ve achieved a lot between us. I believe we’ve changed the place fundamentally and I hope those changes will last beyond me. The BBC has always been a great organization but I hope that, over the last four years, I’ve helped to make it a more human place where everyone who works here feels appreciated. If that’s anywhere near true I leave contented if sad.

Thank you all for the help and support you’ve given me. This might sound schmaltzy but I really will miss you all.

Greg

As soon as the e-mail had gone I went downstairs to the entrance of Broadcasting House in Langham Place, where there was a massive, totally disorganized media scrum right on the BBC’s own doorstep. I walked out through the revolving door, realized I was in danger of being crushed, stepped back into the drum, and revolved back into the building. After a couple of minutes there was enough room for me to move outside and, live on BBC News 24, Sky News, and the ITV News Channel, I announced I was leaving. The irony was that BBC News 24 almost missed the whole event because their crew was stuck at the back of the scrum and couldn’t get a decent shot of me making the statement.

Then it was back upstairs and lots of drink and food with friends and colleagues. By then all thoughts of Atkins and abstinence had totally disappeared. Mark Damazer, whom I first worked with at TV-am twenty years earlier, made a short but funny speech talking about my strengths and weaknesses. I replied by telling everyone that this was not a day for bandstanding. I was going and they should protect their careers. I also told them to support Mark Byford, who was to be acting Director-General; he was a good bloke and had played no part in my demise.

Oddly, it was about that time that Mark was making a terrible mistake. He had agreed to stand with Lord Ryder while the acting Chairman recorded a statement. When asked to do this, Mark should have declined. Instead, he stood by while Ryder made the most grovelling of apologies in which he said sorry for any mistake the BBC might have made, without actually defining what the mistakes were. He apologized ‘unreservedly’. It was as if he had apologized for anything anyone in Government could accuse the BBC of. It was the style of delivery that made the apology seem so grovelling. The two of them looked like the leaders of an old Eastern European government: grey, boring, and frightened.

The statement was on the news bulletins all day and was seen throughout the world. Without realizing it, Lord Ryder had done enormous damage to the reputation of the BBC, and to himself.

When, that afternoon, Lord Ryder was asked at a special meeting of the BBC’s executive committee whether his statement would be enough to satisfy the Government, he replied that he had been assured it would, leaving a number of members of the committee with the clear impression that he had discussed and cleared the statement with Downing Street before delivering it.

I have since had it confirmed by the BBC that, before he made his statement, Lord Ryder had been in contact with Number Ten telling them both of the content of the statement he planned to make and that I was going. The BBC now say this was only a matter of ‘courtesy’, but it has serious implications. The whole independence of the BBC is based on its separation from Government, and yet here was its acting Chairman effectively clearing a statement before he made it. We don’t know if they asked for changes. What would he have done if they had?

It also brings into question whether or not Downing Street wanted my head. Gavyn had reached an agreement with Blair, in one of the many phone calls they had between June and December, that no matter what Hutton said the Government would not call for either of us to go. When he watched Blair in the House of Commons immediately after Hutton’s press conference Gavyn realized the Prime Minister had gone back on his word. He told me: ‘Blair skilfully piled the pressure on, and did nothing to discharge his promise that there should be no resignations at the BBC. I assumed he had reneged. Then I saw Campbell calling us liars, and demanding that heads should roll. I assumed that Blair had deliberately unleashed the dogs against us, and that there would be no peace with the Government until we either resigned or apologized.’

I, too, had been assured in advance, in discussions between myself and Campbell’s successor, Dave Hill – a more rational and reasonable man than Campbell – that when the Hutton report was published Number Ten would not criticize the BBC if we agreed not to criticize them. Hill had also assured me that they would be able to control Campbell, that he would be back inside Number Ten for the publication of the Hutton Report and would take orders. So on that Wednesday Blair could have stopped Campbell from calling for heads. He chose not to. And on the Thursday morning Downing Street was told what was happening at the BBC but Blair did nothing to prevent my ‘resignation’. Since then, he has let it be known through friends that he didn’t want either Gavyn or me to go and has even invited me to meet with him informally. I refused. I no longer regard Tony Blair as someone to be trusted.

Ryder’s ‘unreserved’ apology had other repercussions. From that moment onwards the BBC stopped publicly arguing the case it had argued throughout the Hutton inquiry: that while it had made some mistakes, it had been right to broadcast Dr Kelly’s claims that Downing Street had ‘sexed up’ the dossier to make a more convincing case for war. From that moment onwards no one from within the BBC was allowed to make that argument, and yet it is what I still believe happened and I will argue the case passionately in this book.

The real irony came several weeks later when The Guardian ran a story that said that Lord Hutton was ‘shocked’ by the reaction to his report and hadn’t expected any heads to roll at the BBC. If this is true, he is a remarkably naive man.

My day and my time at the BBC were rapidly coming to an end. I was preparing to leave my office for the last time when I got a phone call from Peter Salmon at Television Centre. He told me that there were remarkable scenes happening and that I ought to come over. He said that hundreds of members of staff had taken to the streets with ‘Bring Back Greg’ posters and that the demonstration was getting bigger by the minute. I turned to Magnus and Emma and said we ought to go. Andrew Harvey, a friend and talented journalist whom I had brought in to edit Ariel, the BBC’s in-house magazine, was with me at the time, so he came along too.

In all there were five of us in the car. It was a fifteen-minute drive and no one said anything. When we got to White City and drove down towards Television Centre we found the roads outside the BBC buildings thronged with chanting staff holding up placards. The scenes were amazing. As I got out of the car people were applauding and trying to shake my hand. There were news crews everywhere trying to interview me. For a brief period of my life I suddenly found out what it was like to be an American presidential candidate or Madonna. It was frightening.

Someone thrust a megaphone into my hand and I made an impromptu speech. We were all a bit scared for our safety and Magnus and Emma tried to guide me through the crowd. We lost Andrew Harvey somewhere and didn’t see him again that day. At one stage Emma even thumped a news cameraman who was getting a bit rough; but, inch by inch, we gradually moved towards the entrance to Stage Six, the home of BBC News.

Inside the building there were people everywhere shouting and applauding. I stopped for a quick but hassled interview with Kirsty Wark, the Newsnight presenter, whom I admired a lot. I then decided to go up to the BBC News room. As I walked in people started applauding and eventually I climbed onto a desk and spoke to them all. I told them that our journalism had to be fair but not to lose their nerve, unaware that it was being broadcast live to the nation on BBC News 24. I told the staff in the newsroom, and the rest of the world live on television, that all we had been trying to do was to defend the ‘integrity and independence of the BBC’. I later discovered that this really upset Downing Street, but in truth it was exactly what the whole thing had been about. We were defending the BBC from a wholesale attack on its journalism by Alastair Campbell, a man whom some in the Labour Government are only now beginning to understand was a complete maverick and who had been given unprecedented power by Tony Blair.

I also went to visit the staff of the Today programme, on which Andrew Gilligan had worked. There was a more sombre mood amongst the Today staff.

We went quickly to others parts of the building and the response was overwhelming. I then decided it was time to go. We went outside and were surrounded yet again. Someone had written ‘We love you Greg’ on my car windscreen in lipstick, and if my driver Bill and a policeman hadn’t stopped them they would have written all over the car. We drove out with hundreds of people still cheering and waving their placards.

Eventually I got back to my office at Broadcasting House to discover that what had happened at Television Centre was not a one-off. All over the country the staff had taken to the streets to protest that their boss was leaving. In Cardiff, Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester, Newcastle, and Birmingham hundreds had walked out to protest. But it wasn’t only in the big centres. The staff of local radio stations had also left their offices. At BBC Radio Shropshire in Shrewsbury all the staff had walked out, including the presenter who was on air. He had gone outside to express solidarity, whilst rightly continuing to broadcast live to the people of Shropshire.

In the next few days more than six thousand staff replied to my e-mail wishing me luck, thanking me for what I had done during my time at the BBC, and telling me how much they would miss me. I have chosen two examples – one from a producer in the World Service, and one from News; but there were thousands like them. The first said:

Your greatest achievement was giving the kiss of life to a body of people who’d been systematically throttled, castrated and lobotomised. To leave us all very much alive and kicking, loving the BBC and respecting the role of Director General again, is a fantastic legacy.

And the second:

The only way I can come to terms with the extraordinary events of the last 48 hours is to pay testimony to the vision and energy you have brought to the BBC. Men and women, even journalists, cried today. People came together and talked about their emotions, their fears, their frustrations all because the man who had embodied the hope, the vision, the pride they had begun to feel about the future of the organization had gone.

They came from all parts of the BBC and at all levels, all thanking me for changing the BBC. Well, all bar one. Amongst this great pile of e-mails my staff sifted out the only negative communication. It simply said:

Fuck off Dyke, I’m glad you are going, I never liked you anyway.

That same night some of the staff in Factual Programmes and Current Affairs began collecting money to pay for an advertisement in the DailyTelegraph to express their support. In twenty-four hours they collected twice as much as they needed, with all sorts of people contributing right across the BBC, from the lowest paid to the highest. Even people in the canteen who didn’t work for the BBC, and who earned very little money, contributed. The spare money, nearly £10,000, was given to a charity of my choice. The Telegraph carried a full-page advertisement with a heading ‘The Independence of the BBC’ followed by a paragraph explaining that it had been paid for by BBC staff. It then said:

Greg Dyke stood for brave, independent and rigorous BBC journalism that was fearless in its search for the truth. We are resolute that the BBC should not step back from its determination to investigate the facts in pursuit of the truth.

Through his passion and integrity Greg inspired us to make programmes of the highest quality and creativity.

We are dismayed by Greg’s departure, but we are determined to maintain his achievements and his vision for an independent organization that serves the public above all else.

The page included just some of the thousands of names of BBC staff who had paid for the advertisement. They couldn’t get all the names on the page. When I read it, I think it was the only time during the whole saga that I broke down and cried.

As I left Broadcasting House for the final time it seemed like everyone working there had come down to cheer me off. My own office staff all came out to the car: Fiona, Emma, Magnus, Orla, and Cheryl were all there to wave me goodbye, plus virtually the whole of the marketing department. I did a couple more quick interviews and in the middle of being interviewed live on Sky News my mobile phone rang. I answered it to find David Frost on the other end, so I offered him the opportunity to speak live to the world on Sky News. I don’t think he quite understood what was happening.

And then I was gone. Four years to the very day that I had become Director-General I was driven away for the last time.

That evening Sue (who had driven back from Suffolk just for the night), Joe, and I went out for dinner. I think we were all on a strange high, laughing and joking. We ended up round the corner with our good friends John Stapleton and Lynn Faulds Wood, where I promised to do a live phone interview for John’s early morning programme on GMTV the following day. I decided then that I would only do three interviews: with John, because he’s a good friend; with the Today programme the following morning, when I could put on record what I was feeling; and with David Frost on Sunday, again repaying the support and friendship that he and his wife Carina had shown Sue and me over the years.

For the Today interview, which I fixed up at about four in the morning, I suggested they send the radio car round to my house. When they turned up a BBC News television crew was already there so I thought I’d make everyone a cup of tea. It is ironic that, after three days of avoiding journalists and news crews outside the house, the pictures of me carrying out the tea for the crews is one of the memorable shots of the whole affair. Virtually everyone I know saw it and mentions it when we meet. I also know that the pictures caused great consternation inside 10 Downing Street. Who says there’s no such thing as news management?

It was three days before I began to realize that perhaps all was not as it had seemed to be. The idea came to me when I was talking to someone from within the BBC who told me that she believed some of the Governors had been out to get me regardless of Hutton. It got me thinking: did some of the Governors have another agenda?

By then I knew that three of the eleven Governors had supported me in the crunch vote: the ballet dancer Deborah Bull, the Oxford academic Ruth Deech and voluntary sector consultant Angela Sarkis were all against my leaving. They were the three Governors who had most recently joined the Board. The ‘posh ladies’ had both been against me and Sarah Hogg, in particular, had led the charge. She had told the Board that she had never liked me.

I was surprised when I discovered that I had not received any support from the Governors representing Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the English regions. If I had achieved one thing in my time at the BBC it was to increase investment and improve morale outside of London, and yet when the crunch came the Governors with particular responsibility for the Nations and Regions had all voted against me.

Not that they were ever the strongest of Governors. Three of them – Ranjit Sondhi, Fabian Monds, and Merfyn Jones – had said very little over the years. It always seemed to me that they were intimidated by the posh ladies. In the case of Ranjit, I understand he was in real trouble when he got home. His wife, Anita Bhalla, who works for the BBC as Head of Political and Community Affairs for the English Regions, was a big Dyke supporter and, reportedly, tore him to shreds for going along with the decision. Ranjit was a really likeable, incredibly hard-working Governor, but he was never likely to rock the boat about anything.

Only Robert Smith, an accountant and business leader from Scotland, had played a significant role at Governors’ meetings in my time, and it was always difficult to judge where he was coming from. At that time we all knew he was after a big new job as chairman of a major public company, and like so many accountants he loved to look tough if the opportunity presented itself.

I began to think about the conversation Gavyn, Pauline Neville-Jones, and I had had the night before Hutton was published. Surely if Pauline had said that she thought it was impossible for Gavyn and me to leave at the same time, shouldn’t she have been arguing on my behalf, given that Gavyn had already gone? And yet she hadn’t stood up for me and had in fact voted the other way. I began to think some more.

Pauline Neville-Jones had always been a big supporter of Mark Byford. As the Governor with special responsibility for the World Service she had worked closely with him and clearly rated him highly. I suspect she also liked him because, like most of the BBC lifers, he was better at the politics of dealing with the Governors, better at playing the game of being respectful. It was a game that I refused to play. I saw no reason why I should treat the Governors any differently from the way I treated everyone else. I certainly wasn’t going to regard the earth they walked on as if it was somehow holy ground. This wasn’t a wilful decision. It was just the way I am.

After I had left the BBC one senior executive said to me that if I had been a bit more servile in my attitude to the Governors I would still be there today. I have no doubt that’s true. Certainly both chairmen in my time at the BBC, Christopher Bland and Gavyn Davies, suggested on occasions that I ought to be more respectful and make fewer jokes at Governors’ meetings, but in truth I was never going to do that. I have never been one to respect position for its own sake and I was hardly likely to start in my fifties, particularly when dealing with a group of people most of whom knew absolutely nothing about the media, and who would have struggled to get a senior job at the BBC. In my time there were some excellent Governors, people like Richard Eyre and Barbara Young who had been on the Board when I joined, but I was not a fan of the system and made that obvious at times.

Whether this attitude to life is a weakness or a strength (and I suspect it is a bit of both) is largely irrelevant. That’s the way my DNA is. I’m not particularly good at watching my back, and never have been. If you employ me you have to take me for what I am. In the commercial world that’s not a problem because you are largely judged on the numbers. In the public sector, where accountability has become an obsession, you are judged on the strangest things, including how well you get on with the great and the good.

So why hadn’t Pauline Neville-Jones supported me as I thought she would? Again I thought back a few months. One day in early December 2003, at our regular weekly meeting, Gavyn Davies told me that Pauline and Sarah Hogg had been to see him and were demanding that he call a meeting of the Governors without me being present so that they could appoint Mark Byford as my deputy and put him in charge of all the BBC’s news output. I would then be told it was a fait accompli.

I laughed and told him that if they did that, then I would resign immediately. Gavyn told me that they were serious and were demanding he call the meeting. He asked me what he should do about it. I started by telling him that it was his problem but later said I’d think about it.

I’m certain Mark Byford didn’t know anything about this move; in his time working for me Mark was always loyal and supportive. In many ways the proposal for Mark to become my deputy was a good idea. I had never had an official number two but Mark acted as my deputy, if he was around, when I was away and in fact I had suggested the move to Gavyn myself earlier that year. Mark had real strengths, many of which complemented mine. I tended to be broad brush, he was into detail. I was into big decisions and taking risks, whilst Mark, like many of the senior people who had worked their whole life at the BBC, tended to be cautious and process driven. We would have been a good fit. Gavyn was against it at that stage because it would have indicated that Mark was the Board’s chosen successor to me when the time came for me to leave in three years’ time when I reached the age of sixty.

My objection to the proposal from the posh ladies was, firstly, the way they were going about it by going behind my back; secondly, that it was nothing to do with them, that I was the DG and would suggest who my deputy should be, not them; and, thirdly, that they wanted to put Mark in charge of all the BBC’s news output, thus effectively demoting the Director of News, Richard Sambrook. I was having none of that. However, with the Hutton report pending, even someone as naturally combative as me recognized that this was not a time for a big bust-up with the Governors and I had reached the conclusion we needed a change to the organization.

As Hutton had progressed, I had come to the view that our systems of compliance prior to and post broadcast needed to be brought together under one person, so I suggested to Gavyn that, as a way of appeasing the posh ladies, we should appoint Mark as my deputy and allow him to remain in charge of Global News but also take over all our compliance systems.

Gavyn took this proposal to the Governors and they agreed. The posh ladies seemed satisfied. On 1 January 2004, Mark Byford officially became my deputy. A month later I was gone and he was acting Director-General.

In the week after leaving I also discovered more about what had happened at that private Governors’ meeting on the previous Wednesday. When I had left the meeting with Gavyn I had asked the Secretary, Simon Milner, to tell the Governors that I wanted their support if I was to stay. I later discovered he told them that I had resigned, a subtle but crucial difference. Of course Pauline Neville-Jones knew that wasn’t what we had discussed the night before, so why didn’t she question it? I also discovered that, later in the meeting, when they were discussing whether or not they should change their position on my going, Simon had intervened to say that it was a bad idea because they’d never be able to control me if that happened.

The week after my departure I discovered the Governors were having a secret meeting to review what had happened the week before. Sitting at home unemployed, I decided that there were things I wanted them to know. I phoned Simon Milner and told him I wanted to e-mail the Governors to tell them about the conversation Pauline Neville-Jones, Gavyn, and I had had the night before the crucial meeting. I suggested they might consider it odd that Pauline had neither mentioned the conversation to them nor carried out what was agreed. I told them they should consult Gavyn for corroboration. It seemed to me important that they should understand the background to Gavyn’s rapid departure and my surprise at the Governors’ lack of support. Simon asked me what I wanted. Tongue in cheek, I told him I wanted my job back. What I really wanted was to make sure they all knew exactly how Pauline Neville-Jones had behaved.

The nature of my departure hit a nerve with the public. For a few weeks I became something of a hero in many people’s eyes. They thought I had been badly treated and yet I must be a good bloke because why else would so many of the BBC’s employees come out on my side? Of course I was helped by Alastair Campbell’s performance on the day the Hutton report was published.

Standing on the stairs at the Foreign Press Association, Campbell gave about as pompous a performance as it’s possible to imagine. For a man who was known to be economical with the truth, and who had certainly deliberately misled the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee during their Iraq hearings, he said that the Government had told the truth and that the BBC, from the Chairman and Director-General down, had not. He then called for heads to roll at the BBC.

Campbell is a man who has the ability to delude himself. He didn’t realize how much he was disliked and distrusted by the British public, who saw him as Blair’s Svengali. He believed throughout that he was right, and he now believed Hutton was right. The British public didn’t. In attacking Gavyn and me he helped to put the public even further on our side. When asked about his response on the Today programme I said I thought that Campbell was ‘remarkably graceless’. What I really felt was that he was a deranged, vindictive bastard, but I couldn’t possibly say that on the radio.

The emotional response to my dismissal was not only from the staff. I received letters from all over Britain and all over the world – from people I’d never met, from people I’d met only occasionally, and from good friends. Everywhere I went people wanted to shake my hand: in the pub, in the supermarket, walking down the street, even at football matches. Sue and I went for dinner with Melvyn and his wife Cate in the House of Lords the following week and all sorts of people wanted to say hello and that they were sorry about what had happened. One Liberal Democrat peer, an eminent lawyer, offered to take up my case against Hutton, whilst a prominent Tory peer offered to help pay for me to go to law. So many peers from all parties came up that Melvyn described it as ‘a royal procession’.

I even got a message from my architect friend Chris Henderson, with whom I go riding every weekend, to say that the Hursley and Hambledon Hunt was 100 per cent behind me. I was eternally grateful – not that it will change my views about fox hunting. Even Ian, who cuts my hair, told me all his clients were on my side, with the exception of one. He also cuts the hair of the former Director-General of the BBC, John Birt.

Two weeks after I left the BBC we went with the Stapleton family to South Africa for a holiday and I met the same reaction there. Dozens of British tourists recognized me and wanted to shake my hand and say they thought I’d been treated badly and ‘well done’ for standing up to the Government. The funniest moment came when I was standing in the sea and a large tattooed man came up to me. ‘Well done, mate,’ he said. ‘They’re all fucking bastards.’ And off he wandered into the deep.

Inside the television industry the reaction was the same. At the Royal Television Society’s annual awards ceremony I was given a long standing ovation when I was presented with the annual judges’ award for my contribution to television. The same happened a month later at the annual BAFTA awards, which were televised on ITV. First Paul Abbott, the brilliant writer of Clocking Off and State of Play, attacked the BBC Governors for getting rid of me, then I was given a standing ovation when I went up to present the award for best current affairs programme. I used the opportunity to have my first public dig at the BBC Governors.

Months after I had left the BBC all sorts of people I didn’t know were still coming up to me saying they were sorry that ‘they’ had got me. So what was all this about, and who did they mean by ‘they’? I can only presume they were talking about Blair, Campbell, and those around them, combined in their minds with Lord Hutton and the BBC Governors. To all these well-wishers, I was someone prepared to stand up against ‘them’.

I even became a phenomenon amongst the business community. People from business schools all over the world were in contact. Every leader of an organization would like to think that if they were fired their people would take to the streets to support them, but most knew they wouldn’t, so they were intrigued to know what had happened and why. It was best summed up for me by a wonderful old man called Herb Schlosser, who was once President and CEO of NBC in the United States. He wrote, ‘I saw on the internet BBC employees marching in support of a CEO. This is a first in the history of the Western World.’

And that was about the end of it. From the most powerful media job in the UK to unemployed in just three days. It was a remarkable period, but what were those crazy three days all about? Why did the Governors do what they did?

When you combine the unpredicted savagery of the Hutton Report towards the BBC, the whitewashing of Number Ten, Gavyn’s early resignation, Pauline Neville-Jones’s astonishing behaviour, the posh ladies’ hostility towards me, their influence on a relatively weak Board, Richard Ryder’s ineffectiveness as a leader, and my natural assumption that the majority of the Governors would want me to stay, you can understand what happened and why. Of course I was not without blame. I had made mistakes in how we dealt with the whole affair, and in those dying days I shouldn’t have said I needed the Governors’ support to stay. I certainly shouldn’t have believed I would get it. I trusted certain people who were not to be trusted. In many ways it was a very British coup in which the Establishment figures got their opportunity to get rid of the upstart.

There are still questions to be answered. Why did Hutton write the report he wrote? Why did the British people reject Hutton out of hand, and so quickly? Why did it damage the Government instead of helping it? And why did people in the wider world sympathize so strongly with my position?

Why did my leaving create such a response inside the BBC? Why wasn’t I perceived as just another suit, as most managers are? What had we done to the culture of the BBC in such a short period of time that provoked such emotion and such loyalty?

As one letter I received from within the BBC said so profoundly, ‘How did a short, bald man with a speech impediment have such an impact?’ I hope this book will go some way towards answering that question.