Diary – 14 February 2004

It is hard to define qualifications for the new chairman and director-general of the BBC. Now that I am past being even a joke candidate, I will confess that I once told my old friend Christopher Bland I regretted not having been D-G. He remarked tersely, ‘You would have hated it, and you would have been rotten at it.’ The more we talked, the more I believed him. My own ideal of the D-G was formed as a teenage BBC researcher during Hugh Carleton Greene’s reign in the early Sixties. The function was then plainly understood to be editorial. This has long ceased to be the case. In recent years we have had Checkland, an accountant; the boundlessly creepy Birt, the tone of whose autobiography reminded some of us irresistibly of the 1924 apologia of a German politician whose name momentarily escapes me; and Greg Dyke, who always seemed uncomfortable with responsibility for the journalism, whatever his staff may have said since his emotional departure. The BBC is now so big, diverse and bureaucratic that the director-general’s burden has become almost intolerable. It looks no fun any more, certainly not in the way that editing the Telegraph and Evening Standard was fun for me. Running the Beeb involves endless meetings about technical, administrative and financial issues which would cause most of us to fall asleep in five minutes. It is necessary to be politically correct beyond sanity. It has been suggested that the function of editor-in-chief might be separated from that of D-G. This is implausible, for it would give the editor-in-chief responsibility without power.

The Corp also, of course, needs a new chairman. I recall Christopher Bland’s observations on that job, too, when he was chastised for failing to watch some BBC soap: ‘God save us from chairmen of the BBC who watch television!’ Davies’s successor will have to be somebody who can meet Mr Blair and his colleagues without visible revulsion — an increasingly tall order.