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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.
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