‘Yes there is a problem. Yes we are correcting it’

In an exclusive interview, Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC chairman, talks to Matthew d’Ancona about the licence fee, the Ross-Brand affair — and hints at flexibility over funding

If there is a stereotype of the BBC chairman, Sir Michael Lyons does not match it. Marmaduke Hussey, for instance, was the archetypal establishment patrician, while Gavyn Davies was one of the original New Labour cronies (felled by the Hutton Inquiry). Sir Michael, in contrast, has a beaming, technocratic countenance, the look of a brand manager at Sunshine Desserts who has good news for C.J. about tapioca sales. Which is probably a good thing, given the scale and the nature of the task that faces him, and the range of adversaries he confronts.

Squirrelled away in a modest office in Marylebone High Street, Sir Michael heads the BBC Trust that was formally established by Royal Charter in January 2007 and is quite distinct from the BBC’s Executive Board — the two bodies replacing the now defunct board of governors. In theory, the trust’s role is quite clear: to oversee the BBC, set its overall strategy and review its performance.

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In practice, its precise function is, as they say in Whitehall, ‘evolving’. And as much as its 59-year-old chair vehemently resists the charge that he is ‘micro-managing’ the BBC, he is certainly having to roll up his shirt-sleeves and get his hands mucky. He says that the Trust is honour-bound to deliver ‘findings of detail’ and that the idea of declaring a contentious broadcast to be ‘broadly correct, broadly true — that fills me with horror’.

Consistent with that, he meets Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director-general, ‘about once a week, sometimes more often’. Though emphatic that his primary job is not to be ‘a flag waver… constantly defending’ the BBC, he became precisely that in January when Thompson was attacked for refusing to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Gaza aid film.