To avoid another Bashir scandal, the BBC must be less woke – and more awake

BBC does wrong, politicians rush to condemn, and demand reorganisation, financial cuts and a police investigation. 

It’s a predictable narrative. It’s also mistaken.

Let’s deal with the last first. How does Scotland Yard seriously begin to probe something that occurred 26 years ago, when the two most vital witnesses – the Princess of Wales and Martin Bashir’s boss, Steve Hewlett, are dead? Bashir himself is suffering from ill health and almost certainly would not be fit to stand trial, even if the Crown Prosecution Service gave the go-ahead. 

Let’s go to the next one, BBC funding. It was not money that caused any of the events laid bare in the Dyson report. Nothing Bashir did in the run up to the Panorama, nor the subsequent management cover-up, had anything to do with how the Corporation is financed. 

Of course, it rankles with some that the BBC is paid for via a tax by another name, the annual TV licence fee. “Defunding” the BBC may fulfil a wish for revenge against all manner of perceived sins, many of them historic, but it does not go to the heart of the issues here. 

The Princess Diana interview and subsequent BBC actions, the subjects of Dyson, were caused by a failure of editorial judgment at the outset, followed by senior management manoeuvring. 

In 1995, I was an investigative reporter on The Independent. When news broke that an unknown Panorama reporter had landed a world scoop we were jealous. We all wanted that story. Then, as often occurs when someone produces a major exclusive, we started to ask, how?

I was tipped off that Bashir had persuaded the Princess and her brother, Earl Spencer, that he was looking into MI5’s activities in relation to them, and that he had produced documents to support his claims. This, in turn led to access to Diana and the granting of the interview. 

Really? What papers? The notion that MI5 would commit something to record, involving such a sensitive matter, seemed fanciful. 

I put the calls into the BBC and was knocked back. There were no documents. 

Then subsequently, when the bank statements purporting to show payments to Spencer’s former head of security, were disclosed, I was on to the BBC again. Yes, they were fakes and they had been looked into a few months previously – when I had made the first calls – but they played no part in securing the interview. Now, 26 years later, thanks to Dyson’s forensic inquiries, we know that not to be the case. 

I later ran newspapers, as deputy editor and editor, and on occasion, when a colleague came in with a terrific tale, I would usher others out of the room, close the door and ask them, confidentially, where had they got it from? No ifs and buts, tell me how? Newspaper editors I worked for did exactly the same.

We’ve no means of ascertaining if that happened, whether Hewlett asked the right questions, if Bashir was honest with his answers and if so, what was the Panorama chief’s response. 

But seemingly, when others above Hewlett in news management were informed ahead of broadcast, of Bashir’s coup, there is no evidence of them being remotely suspicious. 

It’s that lack of worldliness that explains how the interview came to be aired in the first place. BBC news managers are not the same as their peers elsewhere. Indeed, for decades they’ve looked down on those at other news organisations.

For a start, at the BBC they rarely do exclusive news stories as such. For those in the more competitive, fierce knockabout of Fleet Street, scoops are the stock in trade. At the public service BBC, they like to remain superior, above the fray. 

BBC news managers view themselves as serious in a manner that the roughhouse, commercial bosses of newspapers are not. They’re following a higher calling; we’re chasing pound signs. 

Once the Panorama was aired, it was too late. It was out; the Corporation’s senior executives, the very ones who should have been questioning its origins, had showered Bashir with written congratulations; ironically, the not-for-profit BBC had earned a substantial sum from selling it round the world. 

There was also the difficulty of Marmaduke Hussey, the BBC chairman, to contend with. His wife, Susan Hussey, was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. The “Duke” was almost certainly pro-royal. 

The obtaining of the interview was kept from Hussey until shortly before transmission, for fear of alerting Buckingham Palace. The executives’ lack of communication extended towards the rest of the BBC board of governors and continued after Hussey had retired. Sir Richard Eyre, who was a governor at the time, said that John Birt, the director-general, and Tony Hall, head of news and current affairs, shared the view the board “were a bunch of wallies basically: ineffectual, ignorant fools.” 

Birt had been brought in on a mission, to reform newsgathering. Said Eyre: “Birt was literally not talking to Marmaduke Hussey, the chairman of the governing board. There was total contempt for us from the management.” 

It meant that meetings and probing that would have taken place in any other news organisation, never did. Eyre accused the BBC management, led by Birt and Hall, of having had “an instinctive defence mechanism that was very, very strong.” 

We like to laugh at W1A, but the comedy about the BBC is searingly accurate. I was once involved in a project with a senior BBC news executive. He said when we met, “shall we do this the BBC way?” He explained that every time one of us made a point that was worth following up he would put it on a Post-It Note and stick the note on the wall. After three hours, the entire wall was covered in Post-Its. I guess he meant the BBC way as opposed to what he thought would be my way, the down-at-heel, profits-driven, newspaper way. I know which one would have got us somewhere and avoided the need for numerous further meetings.

Tim Davie, the new director-general, should purge the organisation of the daft management job titles, the bureaucracy and the policy wonks. Less woke, more awake. 

There needs to be a renewed focus on the journalists and journalism. It’s the culture of institutional superiority that must change.