Months after I had left the BBC all sorts of people I didn’t know were still coming up to me saying they were sorry that ‘they’ had got me. So what was all this about, and who did they mean by ‘they’? I can only presume they were talking about Blair, Campbell, and those around them, combined in their minds with Lord Hutton and the BBC Governors. To all these well-wishers, I was someone prepared to stand up against ‘them’.
I even became a phenomenon amongst the business community. People from business schools all over the world were in contact. Every leader of an organization would like to think that if they were fired their people would take to the streets to support them, but most knew they wouldn’t, so they were intrigued to know what had happened and why. It was best summed up for me by a wonderful old man called Herb Schlosser, who was once President and CEO of NBC in the United States. He wrote, ‘I saw on the internet BBC employees marching in support of a CEO. This is a first in the history of the Western World.’
And that was about the end of it. From the most powerful media job in the UK to unemployed in just three days. It was a remarkable period, but what were those crazy three days all about? Why did the Governors do what they did?
When you combine the unpredicted savagery of the Hutton Report towards the BBC, the whitewashing of Number Ten, Gavyn’s early resignation, Pauline Neville-Jones’s astonishing behaviour, the posh ladies’ hostility towards me, their influence on a relatively weak Board, Richard Ryder’s ineffectiveness as a leader, and my natural assumption that the majority of the Governors would want me to stay, you can understand what happened and why. Of course I was not without blame. I had made mistakes in how we dealt with the whole affair, and in those dying days I shouldn’t have said I needed the Governors’ support to stay. I certainly shouldn’t have believed I would get it. I trusted certain people who were not to be trusted. In many ways it was a very British coup in which the Establishment figures got their opportunity to get rid of the upstart.
There are still questions to be answered. Why did Hutton write the report he wrote? Why did the British people reject Hutton out of hand, and so quickly? Why did it damage the Government instead of helping it? And why did people in the wider world sympathize so strongly with my position?
Why did my leaving create such a response inside the BBC? Why wasn’t I perceived as just another suit, as most managers are? What had we done to the culture of the BBC in such a short period of time that provoked such emotion and such loyalty?
As one letter I received from within the BBC said so profoundly, ‘How did a short, bald man with a speech impediment have such an impact?’ I hope this book will go some way towards answering that question.
CHAPTER TWO The First Thirty Years
Every so often I try to explain to my own kids what life was like growing up in a small West London suburban street in the 1950s, but I only get mocked for my efforts. I think they laugh because I make it sound too much like the Hovis advertisement where everyone was poor but happy, and the luxuries we aspired to were very simple.
We lived, for the first nine years of my life, in a very ordinary cul-de-sac on the borders between Hayes and Southall in Middlesex. My parents Joseph and Denise bought the house, a new, small suburban semi in a street called Cerne Close, in 1946 for £650. Today it would sell for close to £250,000. They moved there with my brothers Ian, then aged five, and Howard, who was only a few months old. I was born the following year in 1947, a year when there were more births in Britain than in any other year in history. It was the peak of the post-war baby boom with a million children born compared with an average of 600,000 a year today.
The reality was that most people did live very simple lives, compared with today. It’s when I tell my kids that the milk was still delivered by horse and cart that they laugh. We walked to school in a big crowd – just kids, without any parents to escort us – and we all played football in the street with a tennis ball. No one in the street was divorced, and virtually all the children lived with two parents in a classic nuclear family, often with a grandparent in tow. Dad went out to work and Mum stayed behind to look after the children and the home. It was as simple as that.
My dad’s job was selling insurance; as a result we were one of only two families in the street with a car, owned by his company, so we were seen as quite affluent. We also had a telephone for the same reason and neighbours used regularly to knock on the door to ask if they could come in and use the phone.
We were luckier than most of the people in our street as we had at least three holidays each year. Every summer we stayed in a bungalow on the beach at Pevensey Bay in East Sussex, where the big treat of the week was a trip on a boat called the William Olchorn, which took holidaymakers out on trips around Beachy Head lighthouse. On the way back to the bungalow we would all have fish and chips, which we saw as something special. Every Easter we stayed for a week with my parents’ best friends, Uncle Frank and Auntie Vi, in Bridgend in South Wales, and at Whitsun we stayed with ‘Auntie’ Edna and ‘Uncle’ Bill in Emneth near Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where my Auntie Doreen was evacuated during the war; she was joined by my mum and my brother Ian towards the end of the war after their house in Bromley, Kent, had been bombed.
The years we lived in that little street in Hayes were happy times. No one was well off, but neither were they poor. We all had food and clothes, and life was uncomplicated by the choices that greater affluence has brought. I suspect it was also pretty dull, but as a child you didn’t know that.
The Middlesex suburbs have never had a very good press and were widely looked down upon, particularly by the English upper-middle classes, but the criticism was, and is, unfair. These areas were largely populated by the aspiring English working class; most of the people who lived in this area of West London had moved there from pretty awful conditions in inner London. They wanted something better for themselves and, in particular, they wanted something better for their children. In most cases they achieved it.
My parents were typical. They had both been brought up in Hackney in East London. On my mother’s side her father had been a soldier who had fought in the Boer War. He fell in love with South Africa and wanted to stay but his fiancee, my grandmother, refused to leave London and join him. Instead he came back to England, got married, and went to live on the Isle of Dogs, where he became a docker like the rest of his family. He was later injured in an accident at the docks and, after a long battle, won some compensation from the dock owners. With it he bought a small newsagent’s and tobacconist’s shop in Morning Lane, Hackney. My grandmother ran the shop while my grandfather spent the takings at the local dog track. Whenever he had a big win he would come home in a taxi with his bike on the top.
My mum’s mother, my gran, was one of six children who had been brought up by their grandparents in Farnham, Surrey, after both their parents had died when they were young. She always told how the local villagers were supposed to doff their caps to the gentry as they went by, but her grandfather wouldn’t let them. He used to tell them ‘You’re as good as they are.’ My grandmother went into ‘service’ at a young age and worked her way up from the scullery to become a ladies’ maid at a big house in Sloane Square in London. Her life was tinged with tragedy. She never really got over the loss of all three of her brothers in the First World War. All were much younger than her, and she had helped to bring them up. During the war they lived with her in the shop in Hackney when they were home on leave. One by one they all died. Their loss was enormous. Right up until she died, in 1973, you could call in to see her and find her in tears thinking of her brothers and the waste of their lives.
My paternal grandfather came from a family of publicans in North