How the BBC can save itself

All those esteemed generals of hindsight screeching ‘more governance’ as the cure to BBC’s cover-up of the Martin Bashir’s dishonesty 25 years ago share with Lord Dyson a misunderstanding about the essential cause of the Panorama catastrophe and all the ensuing BBC scandals including those involving Jimmy Savile, Cliff Richard and Alistair McAlpine. Namely, ‘Birtism’.

Under John Birt, the BBC’s director general from 1992 to 1999, an ever-increasing number of new structures, controls and governance were imposed upon the BBC’s creative talents to suppress and remove risk. In the wake of Panorama’s humiliating defeat in a libel action by Neil Hamilton, a Tory MP, about a programme in 1984 called ‘Maggie’s Militant Tendency’, Panorama producers were put under the cosh to prevent further embarrassments. Those new, top heavy controls were in place in 1996 when the cover-up of Bashir’s deceit was executed.

Birt’s system was described by his critics as Stalinism. Experienced gumshoe journalists were controlled by ambitious bureaucratic desk-journalists like Tony Hall and Anne Sloman, united in their contempt for ‘troublemakers’.