The current BBC-Downing Street imbroglio can be understood only as part of a long-running deterioration of relations between politicians and the media. All the politicians and all the media. So readers must be patient, and endure a version of history that may appear irrelevant to immediate events. I will have plenty to say about current matters by and by. But one warning: this article will not reheat the cold embers of WMD, Hutton and all that. Mistakes were made on both sides of that quarrel, and few useful lessons have been learned. What I will discuss is the vexed question of how politics are reported by radio and television, and the interviewing style of both politicians and their interlocutors, all the way from Gordon Brown to John Humphrys.

But before embarking on history, let us contemplate the increasing arrogance of Tony Blair towards the BBC, and his servility towards Rupert Murdoch. As it happens, I thought some television coverage of the New Orleans floods was simplistically critical of Bush, when it should have recognised a longer-standing social imbalance in the American South. Or, to put it brutally, that the American Establishment has never cared much about the poor and the black. Television criticism of the President reflected a wider British public contempt for Bush which neither BBC nor Prime Minister can apparently alter, and which, perhaps inevitably, infects reporters. But how typical that Blair relayed his criticism of the BBC to Murdoch just when the tycoon’s Fox News channel in America was being even more critical of Bush! How nice to see the Prime Minister with egg on his face!

The incident illustrates a wider problem. Everybody feels proprietorial about the BBC in a way they do not about other broadcasters. Do I have to endure one more Daily Telegraph letter, or indeed editorial, blaming the Corporation for everything from the bad weather to football hooliganism? Do none of them watch ITV or Sky? If I were a Barclay brother, I would expect more hits at my commercial rival, Mr Murdoch. (Incidentally, a Telegraph reader recently complained that he could not get digital reception at his previous address, with a KT10 postcode, and now he had moved home, and still could not receive it. Why was he paying the licence fee etc? Now I happen to live in KT10 and get excellent digital reception. Could this Telegraph reader conceivably be infected by anti-BBC prejudice?)

Now for the history. The debate about government-media relations goes back, at least, to when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister. He thought, rightly, that the Labour Party got a bad deal from predominantly Conservative newspapers, and his way of fighting back was (usually) not confrontation, but subtlety. Wilson was a news editor-manqué. As a graduate, he had been talked to by my old paper, The Manchester Guardian, but his career path led elsewhere. Yet Wilson cast at journalism more than Gray’s one “longing, lingering look behind”. He once said to me: “If I’d taken up the Guardian offer, John, I might have been doing your job today.” There was an implication, probably true, that he could have done it better. I was news editor at the time. I forbore to reply that being Prime Minister wasn’t a bad job either.

Spinning has come a long way

The debate is basically about whom sets the public agenda. There can be no definitive answer to that question, but the struggle goes on. That struggle has produced unforeseen results that often run against logic. For example, the only advantage that broadcasters have over newspapers in this field is that they can quickly bring the politician live into their audience’s homes. Yet because the Today programme long ago evolved a policy of never reporting what had already happened, but of setting an agenda for the day ahead, shrewd political advisers learned to plant stories. The newspapers weren’t conceding that advantage to broadcasters, so the politicos found themselves obliged to leak stories in Fleet Street also, inevitably using patronage to buy favours. So what once was a scoop became a plant, and nobody could tell the difference. Except, of course, the occasional poor, perspiring reporter who had done the groundwork to get information that the politician would not want published. His work, as William Randolph Hearst would have acknowledged, was a scoop; “all the rest is ads”.

More confusingly for the media’s audiences and for the political process, broadcasters constantly find themselves reporting what a minister “is expected” to say, rather than using the actual words. More ludicrous still, as I was writing this I heard Education Secretary Ruth Kelly on Today pathetically trying to avoid pre-empting her own White Paper, to be published the same afternoon. Jim Naughtie rightly reminded her that Tony Blair had revealed its contents in a speech the previous day. Side effect: what began as an enterprising journalistic idea for agenda-setting ended up with the politicians having multiple bites of their cherry. Deuce — Humphrys to serve.

This brings us to a central aspect of this quarrel. Politicians and broadcasters/journalists have different jobs to do. Each group contains perhaps a disproportionate quota of bright men and women. But they are not nearly as clever as they think at handling each other. In my years at the BBC, I was often oppressed by the naiveté about politics among those who ran the outfit. And among the politicians, I rarely met an individual who could get his or her head around how journalists ticked. They do not serve a cause — they just want to get interesting news which will serve their own long-term career prospects, rather than anybody else’s agenda.

After working for 35 years in newspapers, the BBC came as a shock to me. Two examples illustrate this. Soon after my arrival, the Assistant Director-General asked me to sign the Official Secrets Act. I did so, but observing that I did not have to sign the Road Traffic Acts to enable a policeman to pinch me for speeding. I added, to the embarrassment of the ADG, that I thought the BBC had employed me on the assumption that an old Fleet Street political hand would have more chance of persuading ministers to bend their Privy Counsellor’s oath than one trained within the Corporation.

The other example illustrates the atmosphere in 1981, but concerns the same point: how political reporting for a public service corporation can work. In my early days I had broadcast an account of a Thatcher Cabinet meeting, garnered from whichever dissident minister felt like talking that day, and balanced by a Thatcherite account of proceedings. But the next week, at one of the few editorial meetings I could not avoid attending, a senior executive — an old friend of mine, as it happened — said the BBC should not purport to report a meeting it had not attended, unless we gave sources. I thought of some of the subversive views on Margaret Thatcher that had been dropped in my ear, over lunch tables or on the telephone, and the fading chance of ever hearing them if I revealed my sources. I then decided that BBC guidelines were of limited practical relevance to me and that I must proceed until stopped. Nobody tried to stop me after that.

My robust view

To be truthful, I did not suffer from political pressure while working for 11 years as political editor of the BBC. That may have been thanks to the Boys in the Backroom, to whom I give insufficient credit. Perhaps it was also because, coming from newspapers, I took a robust view of my independence and complainers went elsewhere. During the Falklands war, I was in the Members’ Lobby one evening when half-a-dozen Conservative MPs gathered round me. They were angry about a Panorama broadcast, which I had not seen, and had no knowledge of. After enduring their abuse for several minutes, I said rather stuffily that I had not been introduced to several of them, suggested they write to the Director-General, and bade them goodnight. Two had the grace to apologise.

Once, I arrived at a Labour conference to be told by every BBC staffer I met that Peter Mandelson, then Party press officer, was furious at the running order of the two Labour items in our bulletins. Eventually he approached me. As it happened, I thought my colleagues’ judgment was wrong and Mandelson’s right. So did the senior editor who would be in charge when the conference got under way. I explained this to Mandelson, but said because of his bullying behaviour there was nothing I could do to change things: it would look to our staff that we were giving way under pressure. Mandelson wrote to the Chairman of the Board of Governors to complain that I had ticked him off like a fourth-former. The Chairman, to his credit, never told me about this complaint – I learned of it only because Peter was so pleased with his witticism that he recited it to me.

Now to current problems of Government-BBC relations. I write from my own experience. Let me confess that, having spent 16 years of my life as a Fleet Street executive – helping to save The Guardian from being merged with The Times (seems ludicrous nowadays, but it was seriously suggested); and preserving The Observer from the clutches of Rupert Murdoch (only to see it going to Tiny Rowland) – I did not give any time to BBC politicking. I thought Mrs Thatcher and her enemies were a more interesting study for my autumn years. But even from that limited BBC perspective, I can see why Robin Day, having fought a long battle to get television cameras into the Commons, at his death was disappointed with the results. The broadcasters quickly discovered that the Speaker was oblivious of their schedules, that the meatier bits of Budget or censure debate were delayed by obscure points of order. So they did what they have always done: controlled their output by organising yet another studio-based programme of interviews with politicians and journalists about the story of the day. Count the number of seconds of actual proceedings of Parliament on television and you will see why Day wondered why he had created such a fuss.

I do not have an answer to this problem, except a parliamentary channel with the miniscule audience. Collectively, we have debased the public taste for serious information. To be fair to broadcasters, the newspapers simultaneously were sacking their Press Gallery staffs, and abandoning their parliamentary reports in favour of “analysis”. The end result is that a citizen has great difficulty finding out what his MP has said in Parliament, unless that assiduous fellow trails a hand-out round to his local weekly. Another diminution of democracy. But in what proportions do you blame broadcasters/journalists for contempt of Parliament, or the Government for neglecting it? The public are thought to be interested only, it seems, when politics become personal, when Tory MPs are ousting Margaret Thatcher or elevating David Cameron.

But I personally am interested in policies that affect schoolchildren, hospital patients, criminals and victims of crime, taxpayers — in fact, people other than broadcasters and politicians. I think the public could be interested also. When you listen to Yesterday in Parliament, you realise that Conservative and Liberal Democrat front-benchers, all specialising in their allotted subjects, put ministers under more effective pressure than most broadcast interviewers. No prizes for guessing why. While Humphrys, Paxman et al have to know or be briefed on every subject under the sun, at home and abroad, the frontbencher can concentrate on Iraq, taxation, or schools; whatever is his or her brief. So why not report more politics from Parliament?

Secondly, the BBC and others are right to emphasise rigour in their questioning of politicians. But in their proper wish to avoid being thought of as any kind of patsies for the Government or Opposition, they must avoid sliding from proper scepticism into corrosive cynicism. My friend the late Brian Redhead, the towering eminence of the Today programme, once said to me that if they invited anyone, politician or not, into the studio, it should be because they thought he or she was not a fool, and must have something worthwhile to say. He should be allowed to get his point across. After all, if the politicians are a bunch of lying rascals, why do we persist with democracy? Turn to a Man on a White Horse? But didn’t some countries try that dictatorial route, disastrously, in the last century?

Throw caution to the wind

I think the problems of public service broadcasting are not soluble, except through mutual self-restraint by politicians, and the BBC. Charter renewal and licence-fee negotiations are the complicating factors. These need to be kept as separate as possible from complaints about editorial matters. I wonder whether, in Michael Grade’s proliferation of boards, there could be one special stipulation: that the Chairman and governors conduct all financial negotiations with the Government, without the direct participation of the Director-General, while all editorial complaints by politicians would be addressed only to the Director-General, aka editor-in-chief of the BBC. It may never be possible to keep the thought of paymasters wholly out of anybody’s mind, but there is surely value in creating as many Chinese walls as possible. If they mix up the financing of the BBC with pressure for broadcasters to please the Government, they are playing with fire.

The Prime Minister is much concerned with his legacy. Surely it would be a poor one for either him or the current generation of broadcasting bosses to leave the BBC either destroyed or emasculated, and to earn for the Government the reputation of a bully. Tony Blair ought to remember that one Chairman and one Director-General have already been lost on his watch. Faults on both sides, true, but anything more would count not as mere carelessness but a flaw of character.