At the beginning of the year, Peter Hitchens wrote an article for The
Spectator in which he likened Tony Blair’s Government to that which
pertained in the German Democratic Republic in the years leading up to
1989. I thought, at the time, reading this stuff, that Peter had become
entirely unhinged and, even worse, was now spinning away, out of reach to
the rest of humanity, down a wormhole or, perhaps, a black hole. It was easy
to see how it had happened, I thought to myself. If you spend your life
attacking the government, the fugue of evisceration must become louder
and louder in order to maintain its impact. Eventually it becomes an
inarticulate barking and howling at the moon – or so I thought to myself, a
little smugly, maybe.
But now I’m not so sure. OK, the shops are full and there is no Stasi and, indeed, we have no Wall. And even now, even after the last few weeks, I find Tony Blair a rather more agreeable figure than Erich Honecker. But Hitchens’s thesis – that this Government was becoming more and more authoritarian as the years drifted by and was prepared to stoop to almost any lengths to destroy those which it saw as in any way oppositional – now seems a little more credible, does it not? Or, indeed, blindingly bloody obvious. So: sorry, Peter.
The Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has been haranguing the BBC with threats about its future existence and, at the least, its independence. She has hinted that the system of regulation via government-appointed governors, which has served the Corporation well for more than eighty years, might be swept away. There have been hints about the charter and the licence fee and whether or not they might continue in their current form. And the reason for this is not that the BBC is letting down the nation by performing poorly either aesthetically or economically – it’s actually doing fairly well at the moment on both counts – but that one of its journalists had the temerity to report a story which was extremely damaging to the Government.
There is no longer even any attempt to disguise such flagrant authoritarianism. The BBC’s chairman Gavyn Davies has described the Government’s behaviour as serious and sinister. Gav is not a man given to hyperbole, believe me. And, remember, he’s a Labour supporter. Or was.
When I first accused Ms Jowell of making these threats, she wrote an angry letter to The Guardian, indignantly denying outright that she had done any such thing. And then, a week or so later, in one of those bouts of ministerial schizophrenia which have, in the last couple of years, become more and more common, she made those threats quite explicit. I find it bizarre that there has not been a greater and more anguished outcry about this assault on the corporation. But then, the BBC has plenty of enemies outside the Government as well as within it.
And of course there are those within the Corporation who think it is not the BBC’s job to break original news stories, “the Pathé News tendency” as Andrew Gilligan once described them to me. I suspect there was a delightful sensation of schadenfreude among this lot when Gilligan first felt the heat of Alastair Campbell’s wrath. “Aaah, yes, Gilligan – there you are, you see,” they will have whispered to one another, those people who had been too often embarrassed by Gilligan’s perspicacity and nous as an investigative journalist and made to look inept by comparison.
I suspect, too, that had it been anybody other than Campbell, who is disliked by BBC journalists almost as much as he is disliked by the rest of the country, then the BBC would have found it more difficult to present a united front to the world while the accusations and vituperations flew thick and fast.
But the BBC needed to change its approach – and only partly for commercial reasons. These days, the opinion-formers who appear on our television and radio programmes – government ministers, heads of industry or their PR spokespeople, charity bosses, trades unionists and so on – are so well trained in the art of saying nothing at all that the interviews have become either meaningless or, in the case of Gordon Brown, for example, quite surreal. They will not answer the questions put to them, if those questions are difficult or potentially damaging. They will spin and weave and obfuscate and dissemble or, at best, offer platitudes. The audience, at the end of three minutes, or ten minutes, or half an hour, ends up none the wiser. So you have to find out what’s really going on by other methods: hence Gilligan, among a limited cast of others.
Greg Dyke, I think, recognised this. And the BBC’s Head of News Richard Sambrook most certainly did. Which is why, shortly before I left the Today programme, Sambrook made £1million available to all news and current affairs programmes across the BBC to fund original, investigative journalism. Sambrook, who I admired and liked enormously, would occasionally pop his head around my office door to find out why Today was not being more challenging in its journalism, rather than summoning me to his office to put a stop to one or other piece of investigative work, as happened in the old days under now-departed executives. I cannot tell you how much better that was for the morale of the programme staff, nor indeed, for the quality of the programme.
Today – and Newsnight and Panorama – became much better programmes because Dyke and Sambrook encouraged clever, thoughtful, but undeniably risky journalism. Reporters such as Gilligan, Angus Stickler, Zubeida Malik, Raphael Rowe, John Sweeney, John Ware were able to produce stories, painstakingly researched and dynamic in their impact, which challenged established truths and establishment figures. As a result, those reporters won award after award, and the listening figures – on a gentle downhill gradient for the best part of a decade – perked up.
The quid pro quo, of course, for encouraging such work, is to stand by your reporters when the going gets a bit rough. And here – in another break with tradition – the BBC has done so quite magnificently, from Sambrook all the way up to Dyke and Davies. The real danger to the BBC is that it will now feel constrained to curb those brave and adventurous instincts under a welter of criticism from politicians and indeed its most voracious competitors. And, indeed, under threats from the likes of Jowell and other, unnamed, ministers who have been briefing the press. There will be those within the BBC – a dwindling number, mercifully, thanks to the Director General’s culling of various layers of superannuated middle management – who will urge the Corporation to do precisely that. Please let the Corporation resist.
Wrapped up in this horrible imbroglio are a number of ironies. The first is the behaviour of the Conservative Party, which continues to hold to the notion that the BBC is biased against it root and branch despite compelling evidence, these days, to the contrary. Oh, sure, there are occasions when the BBC becomes gripped by spasms of what Lenin called Infantile Leftism, such as its dreadful local election night programme on 1 May for which, I understand, it has privately apologised to the Conservative Party. But these are becoming increasingly few and far between.
But the Tories remain silent about threats to the BBC’s independence and licence fee – because there are plenty of people in that party who wish to see the BBC privatised, of course. And also, having complained about the appointment of Dyke and Davies (and Marr, for that matter) – “political appointees,” they insisted – they now find it difficult to praise their fortitude in facing down an authoritarian government. At times, they attempt to have their cake and eat it: Campbell is infuriated by the BBC because it is usually so pro-Labour, they argue. What deluded, self-serving rot.
The attack on the BBC’s independence and journalistic standards is becoming as big an issue as the Government’s dissembling over the threat posed by Iraq to the west. The Tories should put aside their free-market inclination towards a privatised BBC for a moment and insist that the BBC’s governance and impartiality be uncompromised by this Government. A BBC shorn of its ability to investigate and hold to account government ministers is far more injurious to the chances of a Conservative revival than the appointment of a Director General who once bunged a bit of dosh to the Labour Party. But don’t hold your breath. He is not called the Quiet Man for nothing, IDS.
The central point – the thing you have to hang on to through all the attacks and counter-attacks and the sudden arrival, tapping on your window pane, begging to be let in and avoiding the mirrors, of Peter Mandelson – is that this furore has been whipped up to divert attention from the Government’s deceit over the extent of Iraq’s threat to the west. Yes, I know, this point has been made repeatedly. And everybody knows it to be true. But, that notwithstanding, it should be made again and again, every time the subject crops up, every time a government minister appears on the airwaves or in print to alter slightly the direction of the Government’s complaint against Gilligan (at the time of writing, this has happened six times), and whenever Tessa Jowell ruminates about the reform of the Corporation.
Gilligan broke an important story. The words he used differed only minutely from those used by other reporters who had access to the same source and not at all from newspaper reporters who spoke to other, equally dismayed, knowledgeable sources. It is a fact that Alastair Campbell chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee meetings and it is a fact that he was instrumental in drawing up those dossiers, which presented the case for war against Iraq. And regardless or not of whether you think that war was justified for other reasons, the Government was dishonest in its presentation of the evidence to the public and to Parliament.
It is not right that the BBC should have been pilloried and threatened for doing what the very best of us would wish to do: report an important story and stand by it through thick and thin. It is bad enough that this confected mess should have claimed one life. It should not claim the soul of the BBC too.
Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator and a former editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.