How will the BBC save £2 billion? Axe the journalists, of course

A short while after becoming director-general of the BBC, Greg Dyke gathered a whole bunch of staff together at some warehouse near the City Airport to thrash things out and to deliver unto them his vision for the corporation. There was an air of trepidation among those gathered; Greg had very recently flexed his muscles at Television Centre by banning biscuits. These biscuits were the sort you have at meetings and which, incidentally, I have never seen anywhere except in meetings — three or four different kinds of biscuit waiting balefully on a white plate alongside a screw-top jar of stewed, rubbery coffee, telling you that you were in for an hour or two’s concerted misery, probably with a PowerPoint presentation on an overhead projector and maybe even a professional facilitator. There was an oatmeal-type biscuit and one resembling an Abbey Crunch and a pale circular thing which, if it could talk, would have explained indignantly and probably in a Midlands accent that it was ‘a type of shortbread, actually’.