Getting Out Alive: News, Sport and Politics at the BBC Read online

  For George himself, the dagger at his heart was the disclosure that Helen had told him, briefly, that Newsnight was investigating Savile. To me, the crucial thing here was always that there is a difference between ‘we are investigating something’ – which happens with dozens of stories at any one time, few of which make it to air – and ‘we have discovered that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile’. For any broadcasting executive, there are hundreds of programme ideas floating around and lines from news stories in their heads, and spotting which one is the most toxic is not possible in a systematic way. I used to think as editor of the Today programme that it was almost never the 8 a.m. lead that ‘got’ you. It is the sweet little 6.50 a.m. filler, to which you pay little attention, that lands you in the dock of public opinion. However, George’s personality – atypically in television – was the introspective type that induced him to rack his brains for ways in which he might be responsible even in situations where he patently wasn’t, and I am certain that hobbled him through the whole of that dreadful autumn. Dealing with the crisis if he had not been personally dragged in might have been possible, but his own role made it a battle he was never going to win. He had some extraordinarily tough days.

  We did try, though. The management board set up two inquiries into what had happened: the Pollard Review into the decisions around Newsnight, and the Dame Janet Smith investigation into past sexual misconduct in the BBC. As George said to me at the time, the Pollard Review was effectively set up by the DG to look at what the DG had done. What we did not realise in doing this was that we were creating processes that would preoccupy the BBC for literally years. Our aim with Pollard was to do something thorough and honest but on the lines of Will Wyatt’s report into ‘Queengate’ – an exemplary review of the row about the editing of a trailer featuring the Queen. This was not, after all, the most complex of issues. Pollard needed to answer one main question: why had the Newsnight investigation into Savile been discontinued? This might have been because of a flawed editorial decision, or it could have been because of inappropriate corporate pressure. We thought that this approach had been agreed by the management board, but somewhere along the route through the lawyers and on to the BBC Trust, it became something very different. A trustee described what we actually got as ‘quasi-judicial’. We never envisaged the courtroom-style interrogations, the indefensible strain put on individuals, or the fact that transcripts would be published. I and others were particularly upset by the treatment of the admirable Steve Mitchell. By contrast, Dame Janet’s report was always intended to be much more thorough, and it was right that there should be an accounting for the misconduct of previous decades. It was expected in early 2013, but in May 2015 it was announced that its publication had been delayed again – this time at the request of the Metropolitan Police.

  The inflation of the Pollard Inquiry was accompanied behind the scenes by a bureaucracy that was, on occasion, agonisingly slow. There were battles between the management and the Trust about who owned the investigations, and every time we wanted to move forward we found ourselves wading through the treacle of having the executive board and the Trust both trying to second-guess the DG. One Friday when George wanted to update the media on what was happening, we had everything ready by lunchtime and a press conference about to be called; but we had to wait hours longer for sign-off of his key messages by the non-executive directors and by the trustees. We never knew what position Chris Patten was taking on a given day. George was, of course, his appointed man and there were times when Patten was reassuring. Other times we held our heads in our hands as his comments intensified the crisis while we were still battling to discover the facts and the true sense of its scale. It was ironic that, a year later, Patten criticised newspapers for their overwrought headlines about the BBC when the single most lurid one of the Savile affair – ‘a tsunami of filth’ – was contributed to the nation by Patten himself.

  It was also apparent how thin we were at the senior level, which was something of an irony given that over-heavy management was an article of faith among our critics. The organisation still keenly missed its former deputy director-general Mark Byford, and Caroline Thomson had just departed. Helen Boaden was wounded like George. It had been announced that the finance director Zarin Patel was planning to leave. I was only acting as director of television, which was a huge job in itself, and made more difficult by ambitious underlings positioning themselves for the substantive role. Graham Ellis was in a similar position, acting as director of radio, because Tim Davie had gone off to Worldwide and was out of the public service mainstream. It felt very lonely indeed, and I had the sense that we were tiptoeing along a plank with shoals of sharks in the waters below.

  The lack of clarity about who was in charge of the corporation was exemplified by a disagreement about the hiring of an external crisis management company. The BBC press office was under immense strain because of the volume of enquiries they were receiving, the shifting information they were getting from internal sources, and often the uncertainty of the corporate line. Paul Mylrea, the head of communications, therefore discussed with me whether we needed some extra help. He proposed that we bring in Brunswick, the communications specialist, who, crucially, would be able to add a more strategic view of how we were to get out of the mess we were in – and ease the pressure on the internal teams who were being crushed into the ground. It was likely that David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun and now a Brunswick partner, would be involved, and he had experience of supporting people at the centre of a storm. George and I and the senior team thought we should give it a go. It was an extra resource at a time when we sensed we were in an existential crisis. The preparations were made and we were about to invite Brunswick on board when the idea was vetoed by Chris Patten. He later told the Pollard Inquiry:

  I thought to have David Yelland … being trooped through the newsroom at the BBC to brief the director-general … that seemed to me to be a seriously lousy story … While we were pressing him [George] to get a rather stronger team around him, the one thing we did suggest was that hiring Brunswick was not a very good idea.

  Patten’s concern, we gathered, was specifically around the appearance George was about to make before a Commons committee. As someone experienced in the ways of Westminster, Patten believed that MPs would immediately ask whether he had been prepared for the hearing by an external firm; and they would jump on him if he admitted that we had brought in help. This was doubtless true, though we did not exactly avoid an even more ‘seriously lousy’ story throughout the autumn, and George’s appearance at the committee was a weak one, which might have been improved if he had had better coaching. But the wider point was about who was calling the shots. George was the chief executive, and in the view of the management team it was an operational decision, one that a CEO should have been able to take, if he wanted to bring in some communications advice. It was not, we believed, a function of the chairman of the Trust. He should have been allowed to castigate later if he felt a decision had been inappropriate, but he was not supposed immediately to overrule a decision taken in good faith.

  Without the instant mechanism to create a stronger team around the DG, we failed to lift our heads from the daily struggle. During those dreadful weeks we were not able to reassert the values and the longer-term strategy of the BBC. Worse, we could not take on some of the more lurid media narratives because the detail of what had happened with the aborted Newsnight investigation was being dealt with by Nick Pollard’s review. The kind of question the Today programme wanted to ask any BBC executive was ‘What did Helen Boaden say to Peter Rippon, the editor of Newsnight?’, and that was a question we had assigned to Pollard to answer. Those who did venture onto the media, like the estimable David Jordan, the director of editorial policy, found themselves dragged into the crisis by the lack of agreement inside BBC News about the basic facts; and those facts were so hard to discern because the people who might have established them were all about to be interrogat
ed by Pollard.

  A little way into the furore, George asked me to be ‘Gold Commander’ of the BBC crisis management team with my long-standing colleague Dominic Coles as my deputy. This was an industry standard model introduced to the BBC by Mark Thompson, but understandably parodied as a title when the news emerged externally. It was not about second-guessing Pollard and trying to find out what had happened in the past. Rather, it was an attempt to keep the business of the corporation running. In this we were partly successful and partly not. The news about Savile had unleashed speculation about there possibly being a huge number of serious sex offenders within the BBC. The biggest nightmare was the one that did not happen: that we would discover paedophile activity from people currently working for the BBC in areas that gave them access to children. Every day, though, we received more and more allegations – some credible, some wildly implausible – that we had to review and decide how to process. All the serious ones went straight to the police, but we also had to navigate our way through potentially malicious accusations that would have destroyed the careers of innocent people. On the current evidence, I believe we got this right. However, any hope that launching the Pollard and Smith Inquiries would calm the crisis was misplaced. Every day something else went wrong: the wobbly performance by George at Westminster in front of a Commons select committee; discovering that the Newsnight editor’s blog aimed at setting the story straight had inaccuracies; and the internal strains caused by Panorama investigating the behaviour of its own bosses. It was right for Panorama to do that, but the madness of that autumn was encapsulated by a subsequent call from Newsnight to television HQ saying they were minded to do something about why we had scheduled Panorama so late at 10.35 p.m. – presumably, they said, because we wanted to bury bad news. As it often does in the worst of times, the BBC was in danger of eating itself alive.

  We also knew, because it is the first rule of crisis management, that the biggest problem would be if something else happened. The focus on Savile meant that management was over-stretched, stressed and dog-tired. Every day the press office dealt with dozens of hostile enquiries, and barely an hour went past without an MP firing in another long letter full of allegations – all of which the BBC was constitutionally obliged to take seriously. People like me were dealing with the day job, too: how to handle a drama with a violent episode that resembled a current news story, or pay negotiations with star presenters, or whatever the day threw at us. In BBC News, the elastic was most obviously at risk of snapping: the people running the division were being undermined daily by events, and the BBC was also having to create complex referral lines to avoid any conflict of interest between a manager and the reporting of their role in the Savile affair. This stemmed from a good instinct: fastidious respect for journalistic independence. But it had the result that the people in news who would have spotted something nasty looming were shut out of the room when it really mattered. I still can’t quite believe that we somehow ended up with the directors in the nations – who were by definition hundreds of miles away from London – taking the editor-in-chief role on some days because everybody else was thought to be compromised.

  I was on a brief holiday when Newsnight landed a second and fatal blow to the short career of George Entwistle as director-general. I had taken four days in Nice at the end of October as my first proper break since before the Olympics, in what seemed like a week’s lull. It is worth noting that as director of television I would not, in any case, have been consulted about Newsnight because it sat managerially within the news division. Instead, I arrived back home on Friday 2 November to find emails from the BBC requesting that all my Savile-related correspondence be handed in; telling me that I might be required as a witness at the Pollard Inquiry; and, with a lack of finesse that is characteristic of Human Resources, warning me that any testimony might be regarded as part of a disciplinary process. The infuriating thing here, of course, was that my only involvement with the Savile affair had been in trying to help sort it out once the story had broken – which meant that the BBC had created a double jeopardy. Not only was it seeking to investigate the people who had allegedly botched the Newsnight Savile story in 2011; it was now threatening to investigate the people investigating the matters that had arisen.

  So that day passed in a mix of unpacking, shopping for food – and increasing grumpiness. I was now leaning strongly towards leaving the BBC as quickly as possible, and all I could see before me was more weeks of corporate paranoia and hell for individuals. I wrote, but didn’t send, a resignation letter. A colleague advised me, rightly, that this was not the time to abandon George. But I was simmering at the principle that trying to get stuck into the management of a crisis in itself made you vulnerable; and I had a night of lying awake until four in the morning with my mind trying to remember every email I had written in the past few weeks on the subject of Savile and also concocting unusual tortures for the folk in Legal and Personnel who were fuelling the investigation.

  It turned out to be the wrong reason for a sleepless night. I was never called as a witness by Pollard, but just before bed I had seen the Newsnight report on a senior Conservative who had allegedly been associated with child abuse. I remember thinking it was a bit thin as a report, plus there was the obvious risk of jigsaw identification – where information in different places, in this case TV and the internet, can be added together in a way that identifies an individual. But after what the BBC had gone through, and after Newsnight’s particularly searing experiences, I never imagined that the story itself would be wrong – or that it would be so easy to unravel it.

  The following week back at work was a false calm between two storms. At the senior management level, none of us heard the time bomb ticking underneath Broadcasting House. Only later did we find out that awareness was spreading in BBC News that Newsnight had dropped an almighty clanger. George himself was feeling more chipper, and a lot of the focus of his week was giving a speech at an international broadcasting conference on Friday 9 November. That was also the day I was in London hosting a board meeting of the European Broadcasting Union. And it was the day The Guardian published as its front-page splash the news that Newsnight’s big investigation was actually based on a case of mistaken identity: it simply wasn’t true. Lord McAlpine, the senior Conservative who was the intended target of the report, was blameless.

  The initial fire-fighting – and the depressingly short quest to find out whether The Guardian was right or not – was being tackled by the DG’s office and BBC News, with an increasingly agitated BBC Trust demanding answers. I was deep in soporific EBU discussions about the future of public service media in Europe with a series of directors-general, so I was unable to join in any meetings or receive any calls; but as the day wore on my mobile throbbed with messages from friends and colleagues saying this looked very bad indeed and the BBC needed to take immediate and drastic action.

  I extricated myself from the EBU and spoke to George around teatime. He was under no illusions about the gravity of what had happened, and he already had a list of actions he intended to take; but the Trust’s fury had grown to the level that some of its members were demanding the management remove Newsnight from the airwaves – in an echo of the move News International had made against the News of the World. As we talked, George and I could see a small advantage in this. It was certainly shock and awe: what Murdoch does is one thing, but for a BBC director-general to shut a flagship programme would be a big play. It would also be the best thing for George to do in keeping the Trust on side. However, as we talked we also realised it would be barmy. The News of the World was riddled with systemic breaches of ethics and the law, whereas Newsnight had had one aborted investigation in December 2011 and one dreadful piece of reporting in November 2012. More to the point, as director of television I couldn’t contemplate BBC Two not having a nightly news and current affairs programme – especially not at a time when Newsnight was itself a story. What would we have put on air on Monday at 10.30 p.m. wher
e Newsnight had been?

  George and I agreed that the best thing was to summon a meeting of the executive board. By this stage it was 7 p.m. on a Friday evening and people were scattered all over the place, which meant it had to be by phone. I myself had a commitment to a leaving dinner for my long-serving PA, Elaine Gold. In the event, Elaine and I had about twenty minutes of intermittent conversation while for the best part of two hours she was left on her own as I took part in conference calls in a courtyard just off Oxford Street. My pan-seared cod died in vain.

  On the conference call, some of the board were attracted to the drama of axing Newsnight, but there was a trio of George, myself and David Jordan who argued it would be a short-term gain for long-term pain. That view won the day, but we still came up with a robust set of measures. Newsnight that night would apologise unreservedly. There would be a swift investigation of what had happened by a senior director. We would take disciplinary action against the people who had let down the BBC, and, if need be, heads would roll. We would suspend all further programmes involving the independent investigative journalism outfit who had worked on the McAlpine story – and overall this would be, in desperate circumstances, a chance for George to underline that he was in charge and was a fully functioning chief executive.

  But we also knew that we were making his position with the Trust even more precarious. George called me after the board discussion in a calm and thoughtful mood but his conclusion was clear: ‘Keeping Newsnight could cost me my job.’ Given that he was uncertain of Lord Patten’s support as the Savile crisis intensified, George was right that going against a number of trustees on Newsnight seemed unlikely to be a good career move. And that was probably why he chose to ‘front up’ the management response to the McAlpine catastrophe, and told the board that he would go on the Today programme the following morning to set out the actions he was taking.