This New Noise (12 page)

For his part, Grade said, ‘The whole governance debate from beginning to end is crap, because governance is no substitute for judgement. I can cite you endless examples of plcs that had perfect governance and are no longer in existence.' In March 2015, though, Rona Fairhead indicated that a radical overhaul of BBC governance ought to be considered, suggesting a unitary board and an external regulator.

Lord Patten himself agreed that there have been difficulties of perception about the Trust's role, but he defended the principle – in public, at least. We met in his offices on Great Portland Street, five minutes' walk from New Broadcasting House, not long before he announced his resignation. ‘One of our functions is of course to protect the independence of the BBC, and to stand up for the integrity of the BBC, and to expect the BBC to constantly surprise us by the way in which it meets its national obligation as part of this country's notion of civic humanism.
And to the extent that the BBC does that, I think we should cheer,' he said. ‘But when it falls short of that I think we should say so. And that's partly about regulating, it's partly about openly challenging, and what we're trying to do after the last few years is to make the separation between the Trust and the executive more clear, which will sometimes mean that we step back from things that previously we might have got drawn into.' I asked him: do you think of the BBC as ‘us' or ‘them'? ‘I don't want to be accused of heresy,' said Patten, ‘but it's two in one.' He emphasised his points by tapping the desk in front of him with a plastic teaspoon.

I asked him whether he felt a closer relationship with Entwistle could have helped; did he know, for example, about the tweets on the morning of the
Newsnight
broadcast that contributed towards misidentifying McAlpine as a paedophile? Patten said he did know.

So why didn't he warn Entwistle?

And he didn't mention the tweets? ‘No, because it seemed to me improbable that the director general of the BBC didn't know about something that everyone else was talking about.' Was Entwistle the right appointment? ‘There was no reason for supposing that he would find the heat of Savile led to a sort of meltdown.'

Had he ever felt direct pressure from the government? Almost none, he said. ‘But nothing had prepared me for the ubiquity of hostility in the press. When you have a newspaper saying that the latest script for
Sherlock
showed that the BBC is a left-wing conspiracy, you clutch at the air in desperation. When you see newspapers which have reported the infamy of the BBC five or six times as much as they've reported what President Assad is getting up to in Syria, then it makes you scream.'

How hard was it to run the BBC? ‘Ten times more difficult than I thought it would be,' he said. ‘I agreed to do it because I think it's a great national institution, it's an important part of our culture, because I have a romantic attachment to the things that the BBC has done at its best.'

I couldn't help wondering – especially in retrospect, after his heart problems became a matter of public record – just how far the difficulties of chairing the BBC Trust had worn him down. He had taken on the role through a romantic attachment to the societal virtues of the BBC, not, I felt, through any desire to take up arms in a cultural war zone. He was genial and gung-ho when we met, and occupied his large leather swivel chair with the full-bodied confidence of a tycoon. But all the while we spoke I could not stop summoning up his face as he stood next to the
resigning Entwistle. In the film – mercilessly viewable on the BBC website – he chewed his lip distractedly. He looked haggard, forlorn, and very much alone.

‘There is a brown fog; nobody is building; it is drizzling,’ Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary of 6 May 1926.

Woolf was writing on the third day of the General Strike, observing events from her house in Bloomsbury. There were no newspapers but the hastily put-together government propaganda sheet, the
British Gazette
, edited from 11 Downing Street, and the TUC’s the
British Worker.
Nearly 2 million workers, organised by the Trades Union Congress, had walked out in support of Britain’s
colliers, whose pay and conditions had been threatened by the mine owners. Leonard Woolf was running around organising a petition in favour of the strike; Virginia was worrying about frocks amid the mayhem; their well-connected friends were popping in and out, trading rumour and opinion. There was an atmosphere of national precariousness, the fomenters of the strike demonised by the establishment as Bolsheviks and revolutionaries, out to topple Britain. The previous autumn frightening rumours of fantastical plots (the guards at Buckingham Palace to be chloroformed, a soviet to be set up in the Palace of Westminster) were not discouraged by MI5 and Special Branch. There prevailed what we would now call a climate of fear. Woolf’s dentist, whom she visited on 7 May, neatly articulated this sense of us against them: ‘It is red rag versus Union Jack, Mrs Woolf.’

In 1926 the BBC was locked into agreements with the newspaper proprietors that there should be no news broadcast before 6 p.m., so as not to scoop the morning papers. Its bulletins were provided by wire services; the young company had no newsgathering operation of its own. But left as the main form of mass communication, the BBC assumed new importance. Immense pressure was placed on Reith to make BBC news ‘a kind of offshoot to [the
British Gazette
] … I was not going to have that at all,’ he remembered in his diary. The following day, 5 May, he recalled, ‘Churchill wants to commandeer the BBC.’ The next morning, while Woolf was staring out of the window in Bloomsbury, he was rowing again in Whitehall: ‘Winston … said it was monstrous not to use
such an instrument [as broadcasting] to the best possible advantage.’

For the first time, the BBC carried news bulletins throughout the day. According to Woolf’s account they were not especially earth-shattering. On 7 May she described the morning broadcast: ‘“London calling the British Isles. Good morning everyone.” That is how it begins at 10. The only news is that the archbishops are conferring, & ask our prayers that they may be guided right. Whether this means action, we know not. We know nothing.’

The prime minister, the reassuring, tweed-clad Stanley Baldwin, adopted a subtler position than Churchill, his chancellor. A Cabinet meeting of 11 May, according to Reith’s diary, took the view that the government should be able to say ‘that they did not commandeer [the BBC], but they know that they can trust us not to be really impartial’. In other words, the government saw there were advantages in retaining at least the appearance of an independent BBC. By this time, Baldwin had broadcast to the nation from Reith’s own home, heavily coached by him – Reith persuaded him to include the words: ‘I am a man of peace. I am longing and working and praying for peace, but I will not surrender the safety and the security of the British Constitution.’ When Ramsay MacDonald made a request to put an alternative point of view, as leader of the opposition, Reith consulted Baldwin, ‘strongly recommending that they should allow it to be done’. The message came back that the government was ‘quite against MacDonald broadcasting’ – leaving Reith in, as he saw it, ‘a very
awkward and unfair position’. MacDonald did not broadcast. Reith had successfully fended off a takeover, and, insisting on broadcasting statements from the TUC, had prevented the BBC’s becoming a mere propaganda tool. He had held on to the BBC’s independence, just – but he had tactically sacrificed impartiality.

Later, Reith spoke of his stand on the General Strike as a triumph. Others were less certain. Hilda Matheson put it this way: ‘The Government did not commandeer the BBC … It is no secret that it was owing to BBC insistence that the bulletins of the Trades Union Council, as well as the communiqués of the Government, were both broadcast. It is not suggested that the weight of the BBC was not thrown preponderatingly on the side of authority; the important point, for the social historian, is that a degree of independence and impartiality could be preserved at all.’ Richard Lambert was rather more blunt: ‘I have heard Sir John Reith many times express his pride in the part played by the BBC in supplying the public with “unbiased” news during the strike. But Labour circles received these boasts with scepticism; the only point of general agreement being that the cessation of newspapers during the strike had given broadcasting its first big opportunity of showing what it could do to influence a steady public opinion in a crisis.’

Reith had laid out the importance, and the difficulties, of impartiality for the young BBC in
Broadcast Over Britain
: ‘So far controversial matters have rarely been handled by us, and if dealt with at all, usually in an innocuous manner. It has been considered wise policy up to the
present to refrain from controversies as a general principle … the tendency is, however, in the direction of giving greater freedom in this respect … It will not be easy to persuade the public of an absolute impartiality but impartiality is essential.’ The General Strike, the first great testing ground for the BBC, showed how fragile its two great founding principles of impartiality and independence were in times of crisis or conflict with the government.

Nearly ninety years on, the same principles lie at the heart of BBC news. Director general Tony Hall, who was director of BBC news in the 1990s, put it like this: ‘I think the reason that the vast majority of people in this country support the BBC is because we are independent, we are impartial. That means we should be brave, we should stand for good, honest journalism, brave journalism.’ But the question for BBC news is now, as it always has been, how far those great principles – independence and impartiality – can withstand the pressures brought to bear upon them. Moreover, what does impartiality actually mean in practice?

BBC news and current affairs as it is in the twenty-first century would be unimaginable to Reith, Matheson or Lambert. In their day, news was a relatively unimportant part of the BBC; now it dominates both the institution itself and the UK news media. It is an empire within an empire. It employs 8,000 of the corporation’s 21,000 workforce, 5,500 of whom are journalists. Via the World Service it has a tentacular reach to 191 million people across the globe, and its presence on the domestic scene is overwhelming, with its TV and radio bulletins both national
and local, its website, its heavyweight current affairs shows such as
Newsnight
and
Panorama
. Eighty per cent of Britons receive their news from the BBC, and it is more trusted than any other news provider.

In this context of dominance, the relative attention the BBC gives to a story, or a point of view, matters enormously. By casting its powerful beam of attention on to a matter, it causes that story to become important, an issue of national moment; and other news organisations follow its lead. If it turns its gaze away, the issue can etiolate and fade from the public consciousness. How much time to devote to reflecting public anxiety about immigration? How much time to accommodate the views of those who deny climate change? In politics, this question of weighting is especially fraught and contested. How much time to devote to covering a colourful but marginal political party? What about airing the views of racists or terrorists? In February 1965, the then DG Hugh Carleton Greene, speaking by candlelight in a snowy Rome beset by power cuts, laid down what he believed were the limits on impartiality: ‘Although in the day-to-day issues of public life the BBC tries to attain the highest standards of impartiality, there are some respects in which it is not neutral, unbiased or impartial. That is, where there are clashes for and against the basic moral values – truthfulness, justice, freedom, compassion, tolerance, for example. Nor do I believe that we should be impartial about certain things like racialism or extreme forms of political belief.’ One BBC journalist put the problem of impartiality to me this way: ‘You’re in a pub and two men are having an
argument. One is claiming that two and two are four. Another is claiming, with equal passion and conviction, that two and two are five. What do you say? That the truth lies somewhere between?’

Impartiality, then, is something of a moving target. And the stakes are high: if the BBC slips to the left or the right, it can take the whole nation with it. Politicians themselves care about BBC news and current affairs in a deeply personal way: it is a reflex of politicians (and indeed of newspaper executives) to calibrate their notion of the day’s mood by the choice of items on the
Today
programme. In the hermetic world of the British establishment, a news programme’s power may be judged by not how many are in its audience, but by who they are.

Free from commercial interests, lacking the baser instincts of newspapers or independent broadcasters who must satisfy the whims of proprietors and shift copies or sell advertising space; lacking, even, the kind of principle that animates the
Guardian
, which was founded explicitly as a progressive, justice-seeking voice in the wake of the Peterloo massacre, BBC news, theoretically at least, just
is
: ineffable, truth-telling, a kind of God the Father of journalism. Mark Damazer, the master of St Peter’s College, Oxford, once the deputy director of BBC news, told me he believed that one of the BBC’s functions was to ‘hold the ring in the middle of a national debate’. Without the BBC performing that function, in the centre of news and current affairs, giving it an existence beyond the world of ulterior motives and the market, debate would become ‘atomised’, and ‘I have an absolutely fundamental view that
Britain would not be the better for it, we’d be the worse for it,’ he said.

Just as the nation’s sense of itself can shift according to the BBC’s news agenda, so the corporation can shake and founder because of decisions taken in its news and current-affairs division. The immense power that the BBC wields in reporting and reflecting the matters of the day is counterpointed by immense vulnerability. The BBC in turn knows that though it is free from the vagaries of funding by direct taxation, its charter and the level of the licence fee are set by the government of the day. Thus it is that the government and the BBC will always dance a curious dance together – a delicate waltz that might slide into a sparring match, a grapple or, occasionally, a death grip. The corporation’s moments of greatest existential struggle with governments have tended to flow from arguments about news and current affairs, especially at times of conflict: first, the General Strike. Later, the Suez crisis, the Falklands, Northern Ireland, the Iraq war. It is no coincidence that every director general since the early 1980s (except for the accountant Michael Checkland in the late 1980s and the outsider Greg Dyke in the early 2000s) has passed through BBC news and current affairs, for it is the corporation’s intellectual powerbase and producer of its most ambitious officer class. Tony Hall was director of news; George Entwistle edited
Newsnight
; Mark Thompson edited the
Nine o’Clock News
and
Panorama
; John Birt was deputy director general in charge of news and current affairs; Alasdair Milne was in at the birth of current-affairs programmes such as
Tonight
.

The last of these moments of great vulnerability came in 2003–4, as Britain went to war with Iraq. But the seeds of the story of the BBC’s falling out with New Labour went back to the party’s years in the wilderness, and resentment at what was regarded as the unfair treatment of former leader Neil Kinnock in the press. Under Blair, things would be different. They would not allow control of the narrative to drift away from them. ‘There was a tremendous activist sense that they needed to be “on it” the whole time, with every weapon at their disposal – rhetorical, technological, persuasion, off-the-record chat – and they were probably as intense a set of media managers as we’ve had before or since,’ remembered Damazer.

According to Richard Sambrook, who was the BBC’s director of news from 2001, trouble between the BBC and New Labour was already brewing when Britain intervened in Kosovo in 1999: Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press secretary, accused the media of being too much in thrall to Milošević’s ‘lie machine’. After 9/11, the stakes became much, much higher. Sambrook recalled:

Damazer – who spoke with the calming, judicious air of a diplomat – often had the job of responding to complaints: in a tone of relentless, public-service politeness, such that ‘politeness became an
aesthetic
’. He added: ‘I think what Campbell would say – there may be some truth in this – is that low-level attempts periodically to resolve difficulties with the BBC always met a maximalist response, even though I would say it was polite. The BBC is institutionally not merely not rude but almost painfully, almost aggressively polite … he may well have simply got irritated by hitting his hand into the blancmange and it just being a blancmange.’ Damazer said that he became personally anaesthetised to the battering from Campbell and Co.: the New Labour commentary on impartiality was so obviously self-interested ‘that you could only see it as at least in part an attempt at persuasion or coercion’.