Whether this attitude to life is a weakness or a strength (and I suspect it is a bit of both) is largely irrelevant. That’s the way my DNA is. I’m not particularly good at watching my back, and never have been. If you employ me you have to take me for what I am. In the commercial world that’s not a problem because you are largely judged on the numbers. In the public sector, where accountability has become an obsession, you are judged on the strangest things, including how well you get on with the great and the good.
So why hadn’t Pauline Neville-Jones supported me as I thought she would? Again I thought back a few months. One day in early December 2003, at our regular weekly meeting, Gavyn Davies told me that Pauline and Sarah Hogg had been to see him and were demanding that he call a meeting of the Governors without me being present so that they could appoint Mark Byford as my deputy and put him in charge of all the BBC’s news output. I would then be told it was a fait accompli.
I laughed and told him that if they did that, then I would resign immediately. Gavyn told me that they were serious and were demanding he call the meeting. He asked me what he should do about it. I started by telling him that it was his problem but later said I’d think about it.
I’m certain Mark Byford didn’t know anything about this move; in his time working for me Mark was always loyal and supportive. In many ways the proposal for Mark to become my deputy was a good idea. I had never had an official number two but Mark acted as my deputy, if he was around, when I was away and in fact I had suggested the move to Gavyn myself earlier that year. Mark had real strengths, many of which complemented mine. I tended to be broad brush, he was into detail. I was into big decisions and taking risks, whilst Mark, like many of the senior people who had worked their whole life at the BBC, tended to be cautious and process driven. We would have been a good fit. Gavyn was against it at that stage because it would have indicated that Mark was the Board’s chosen successor to me when the time came for me to leave in three years’ time when I reached the age of sixty.
My objection to the proposal from the posh ladies was, firstly, the way they were going about it by going behind my back; secondly, that it was nothing to do with them, that I was the DG and would suggest who my deputy should be, not them; and, thirdly, that they wanted to put Mark in charge of all the BBC’s news output, thus effectively demoting the Director of News, Richard Sambrook. I was having none of that. However, with the Hutton report pending, even someone as naturally combative as me recognized that this was not a time for a big bust-up with the Governors and I had reached the conclusion we needed a change to the organization.
As Hutton had progressed, I had come to the view that our systems of compliance prior to and post broadcast needed to be brought together under one person, so I suggested to Gavyn that, as a way of appeasing the posh ladies, we should appoint Mark as my deputy and allow him to remain in charge of Global News but also take over all our compliance systems.
Gavyn took this proposal to the Governors and they agreed. The posh ladies seemed satisfied. On 1 January 2004, Mark Byford officially became my deputy. A month later I was gone and he was acting Director-General.
In the week after leaving I also discovered more about what had happened at that private Governors’ meeting on the previous Wednesday. When I had left the meeting with Gavyn I had asked the Secretary, Simon Milner, to tell the Governors that I wanted their support if I was to stay. I later discovered he told them that I had resigned, a subtle but crucial difference. Of course Pauline Neville-Jones knew that wasn’t what we had discussed the night before, so why didn’t she question it? I also discovered that, later in the meeting, when they were discussing whether or not they should change their position on my going, Simon had intervened to say that it was a bad idea because they’d never be able to control me if that happened.
The week after my departure I discovered the Governors were having a secret meeting to review what had happened the week before. Sitting at home unemployed, I decided that there were things I wanted them to know. I phoned Simon Milner and told him I wanted to e-mail the Governors to tell them about the conversation Pauline Neville-Jones, Gavyn, and I had had the night before the crucial meeting. I suggested they might consider it odd that Pauline had neither mentioned the conversation to them nor carried out what was agreed. I told them they should consult Gavyn for corroboration. It seemed to me important that they should understand the background to Gavyn’s rapid departure and my surprise at the Governors’ lack of support. Simon asked me what I wanted. Tongue in cheek, I told him I wanted my job back. What I really wanted was to make sure they all knew exactly how Pauline Neville-Jones had behaved.
The nature of my departure hit a nerve with the public. For a few weeks I became something of a hero in many people’s eyes. They thought I had been badly treated and yet I must be a good bloke because why else would so many of the BBC’s employees come out on my side? Of course I was helped by Alastair Campbell’s performance on the day the Hutton report was published.
Standing on the stairs at the Foreign Press Association, Campbell gave about as pompous a performance as it’s possible to imagine. For a man who was known to be economical with the truth, and who had certainly deliberately misled the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee during their Iraq hearings, he said that the Government had told the truth and that the BBC, from the Chairman and Director-General down, had not. He then called for heads to roll at the BBC.
Campbell is a man who has the ability to delude himself. He didn’t realize how much he was disliked and distrusted by the British public, who saw him as Blair’s Svengali. He believed throughout that he was right, and he now believed Hutton was right. The British public didn’t. In attacking Gavyn and me he helped to put the public even further on our side. When asked about his response on the Today programme I said I thought that Campbell was ‘remarkably graceless’. What I really felt was that he was a deranged, vindictive bastard, but I couldn’t possibly say that on the radio.
The emotional response to my dismissal was not only from the staff. I received letters from all over Britain and all over the world – from people I’d never met, from people I’d met only occasionally, and from good friends. Everywhere I went people wanted to shake my hand: in the pub, in the supermarket, walking down the street, even at football matches. Sue and I went for dinner with Melvyn and his wife Cate in the House of Lords the following week and all sorts of people wanted to say hello and that they were sorry about what had happened. One Liberal Democrat peer, an eminent lawyer, offered to take up my case against Hutton, whilst a prominent Tory peer offered to help pay for me to go to law. So many peers from all parties came up that Melvyn described it as ‘a royal procession’.
I even got a message from my architect friend Chris Henderson, with whom I go riding every weekend, to say that the Hursley and Hambledon Hunt was 100 per cent behind me. I was eternally grateful – not that it will change my views about fox hunting. Even Ian, who cuts my hair, told me all his clients were on my side, with the exception of one. He also cuts the hair of the former Director-General of the BBC, John Birt.
Two weeks after I left the BBC we went with the Stapleton family to South Africa for a holiday and I met the same reaction there. Dozens of British tourists recognized me and wanted to shake my hand and say they thought I’d been treated badly and ‘well done’ for standing up to the Government. The funniest moment came when I was standing in the sea and a large tattooed man came up to me. ‘Well done, mate,’ he said. ‘They’re all fucking bastards.’ And off he wandered into the deep.
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