He dared speak the truth about the BBC

There were only two radio reviewers who ever ruffled the feathers of senior management within the BBC. In terms of ratings, the BBC has radio pretty much its own way; neither the competition, which is negligible, nor critical comment is liable to sway a BBC radio mandarin if he firmly believes that (to take an example) You and Yours is groundbreaking investigative journalism in the Reithian tradition. The hard economics of television does not apply — and, you have to say, that with some exceptions, including the one quoted above, BBC Radio is not noticeably worse off for this lack of externally imposed rigour. All the better for it, in fact.

So, while criticism could always be shrugged off, there were a couple of pundits who were able to raise the temperature within Broadcasting House (and later White City). These were Michael Vestey of The Spectator and Gillian Reynolds of the Daily Telegraph. In both cases, I suspect, the BBC executives got hot under the collar because they thought the acute observations of these two journalists were, more often than not, dead right. Gillian Reynolds clearly knows her subject and loves the medium and, what’s more, writes very well indeed; she is passionate about radio and its refusal to pander to the lowest common denominator.

Michael Vestey had all that, too, but something more besides — he had worked for the corporation for more than a quarter of a century and had come, in an almost affectionate way, to utterly and completely loathe it. I don’t mean that he loathed everything the BBC produced, or everybody who worked for the institution; he had untrammelled respect for the reporter out in the field, the producer crafting a programme and so on. No, he loathed what he saw as its corporate stupidity, its inverted pyramid of talentless middle managers and ever expanding legion of deathly accountants, its flaccid, thoughtless, self-flagellating, institutionalised left-liberalism, its craven attitude towards political authority and concomitant arrogance towards the people who paid the licence fee, i.e.