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.