Greg Dyke: Inside Story

I went back to my office and sat there stunned. I had worked flat out for four years to try and turn round a deeply unhappy and troubled organization and was now being thrown out by the people I respected least in the whole place, the BBC Governors. I sat there in disbelief. Fancy being fired by a bunch of the great and the good, people whose contribution to the BBC was minimal to say the least, and who, in recent months, had become more and more obsessed about the survival of the Governors as an institution.

I asked Fiona to come into my room. We’d been together a long time at LWT, Pearson, and now the BBC. She’d arrived later than me at the BBC because Christopher Bland believed that her friendship with the Blairs would be a political liability for me and the BBC. That night I got up and gave her a hug and told her it was over, that the Governors wanted me out, and that I was going to resign.

Over the next hour or so I talked to Stephen Dando at some length. When he learnt what was happening he told the Governors that they were making a disastrous decision and warned them how the staff would react. Pat Loughrey, the Director of Nations and Regions, came in and told me not to go. He too went downstairs to demand to see the Governors, but they wouldn’t let him in. Several members of my immediate team also came in and urged me not to resign.

Around 9 p.m. I changed my mind. I decided I wouldn’t give the Governors the satisfaction of getting rid of me without a fight. I asked Simon Milner to come and see me. He looked horrified when I told him that I didn’t intend to resign and that they would have to sack me.

Ten minutes later I was back in a meeting with Ryder and Neville-Jones. I told them I wasn’t going willingly and that I had never intended to resign, a veiled reference to the discussion Gavyn, Pauline, and I had had the night before. Richard Ryder got angry and slightly threatening, the sort of approach he must have adopted almost daily as a Chief Whip. I stayed firm and told them they must inform the other Governors that I wasn’t resigning. I then went back to my office.

During that evening I talked on the phone with the three people who probably have more influence over me than anyone else. Firstly I reached Sue and told her what was happening. Her response was predictable: ‘Fight the bastards, and if it means you get sacked, get sacked. Who cares?’ That’s my girl. She summed up the very reason why we’ve been together for twenty years. Sue was never very fond of my being at the BBC anyway. She thought the job was too time consuming, and she didn’t like some of the senior people she met there. She thought they were lacking in fun, highly political, and falsely sycophantic.

I also phoned Christopher Bland, my former Chairman at LWT who’d gone on to become Chairman of the BBC and who, in turn, had persuaded me to join the organization in the first place. He had given up being Chairman two years earlier after he became the Chairman of BT, but before he did so he put his future in my hands. He told me: ‘I brought you here so if you want me to stay I’ll turn down BT and stay.’ I thought he was right to take the BT job: he was in his sixties and he obviously fancied one last big challenge, so I advised him to go.

Christopher and I had been in battles together before. Some we’d won and some we’d lost, but he was great to have on your side. He never lost his nerve and I’ve known times when he supported me even though it was not in his personal interests to do so. I’d like to think I’d do the same for him. I loved working for him over the years, and he was always one of my two mentors. When I rang him and told him what was happening he couldn’t believe that the Governors were trying to get me out and promised to do all he could. He appeared on Newsnight later in the evening. He also agreed with Sue and told me that I should tell them to ‘fuck off’.

The third person I rang that evening was Melvyn Bragg, a close friend and my other mentor. Melvyn is probably the cleverest person I know; he knows so much about so many subjects. I first met him many years earlier when I was a young researcher at LWT and he was the famous Melvyn Bragg, editor and presenter of the South Bank Show. I remember being very flattered when he even remembered my name, but as a boy from a working-class background Melvyn had never lost the ability to relate to all around him, no matter what job they did. Much later, when I was Director of Programmes at LWT, I elevated the Arts Department into full departmental status just so that I could have Melvyn on my immediate team.

Melvyn was also one of the people who had encouraged me to join the BBC and had supported what I was trying to do there, although not uncritically. During those last three days at the BBC, he gave me all the support you could ask for from a friend, including writing a wonderful appraisal of what I had achieved in four years in that weekend’s Observer. I got hold of him late on the Wednesday night, by which time I had had a further meeting with Ryder and Neville-Jones. They told me that the Board was adamant: I either resigned or was fired that night. Melvyn recognized that I was terribly upset and asked me how would I want it to be seen in six months’ time: would I rather be seen to have resigned or to have been sacked? I answered ‘Resigned’.

Normally when top executives leave or lose their posts these sorts of decisions are about pay-offs. But money was largely irrelevant in this case. The BBC would have had to pay up on my contract either way.

While all this was happening, Emma Scott – a feisty project manager who had worked with me from the first day I joined the BBC – decided she was going to rally my supporters by ringing around members of the executive team to get them to come in and support me. She persuaded Caroline Thomson to come back and talk to the Governors, Pat Loughrey stayed around for the whole evening, Andy Duncan, the BBC’s outstanding Director of Marketing and now Chief Executive of Channel Four, turned up to support me, and Peter Salmon, the Director of Sport, phoned in to tell me to hang on in there.

Meanwhile Mark Byford, my recently appointed deputy, had been sitting outside the Governors’ meeting for several hours, like the schoolboy summoned to the headmaster’s study. Mark and I have always got on well and I’ve always liked and respected him as a professional broadcaster, but I still wonder why he didn’t just wander up one flight of stairs for a chat that evening. Instead, he just sat there on his own for hour after hour. I suspect he was under instructions from the Governors not to talk to me, which would explain it.

I always saw Mark as a possible successor to me within the BBC, but that evening, and in the days that followed, his chances of becoming Director-General were wiped out. It was clear to me that, with Gavyn and me both gone, any new Chairman would want his or her own Director-General, not someone tainted by the events of that night and the weeks that followed. To be fair to Mark, he was put in a terrible position by the Governors, a position that wasn’t of his own making. I have no doubt he did what he thought was his duty: he is that sort of man.

The pressures of that day finally told and I succumbed. I abandoned both the Atkins diet and abstinence from alcohol and ate a whole pizza and drank at least half a bottle of wine while all sorts of people were coming in and out of my office. I’m not sure I can ever forgive a combination of Lord Hutton and the Governors for forcing me to break my diet.

Gavyn Davies, who had been out of the loop since we left the Governors’ meeting together earlier that evening, decided at about 11 p.m. to go home. I had already told him that the Governors wanted me out, but we’d agreed there was little he could do about it. Before he left, he decided to say a final goodbye to his former colleagues, but when he walked into the room he found the atmosphere had changed completely in five hours. It was a very hostile environment, with the aggression mainly coming from Sarah Hogg, who, according to him, was ‘seething’.

I’ve since discovered that Sarah had told Gavyn the day before that he shouldn’t resign but that I should go. Gavyn had told her then that there were no circumstances in which he’d let me go while he stayed, and I genuinely think that that was one of the reasons Gavyn resigned. Gavyn and I had worked very closely together, particularly on Hutton, and we both believed we were right. I think his view was that if one of us should go it should be him and that way he would protect me. According to others at that meeting, when Gavyn walked in Sarah launched a ferocious attack on him, accusing him of ‘cowardice under fire’.

In the end I announced at about one in the morning that I wasn’t negotiating or discussing any more. I was going home. The Governors were still downstairs, but by then I’d had enough. I would decide whether to resign or be fired in the morning. Either way I knew I’d be leaving the BBC.

Outside there was thick snow everywhere and I remember thinking how sad that I’d hardly noticed it falling. I got into the car and told my driver Bill that I was leaving. He, too, got upset. He told me later that neither he nor his wife Ann slept a wink all night.

The following morning I took the usual precautions to avoid the journalists and the camera crews outside my house. In the car I got a call from John Smith, the BBC’s Finance Director, wanting to know what was happening. I told him and he decided to set about working on some of the Governors. He was confident he could get them to change their minds. But I knew it was too late. Overnight I hadn’t slept a lot, but I had taken a decision. I would resign, but over the next few days I would make it very clear I had been given little option by a bunch of intransigent Governors.

So why did I choose that path? Looking back now I am not sure I know. With the benefit of hindsight, I think I should have stayed and dared them to fire me. But at the time I felt isolated. I also felt hurt and had a deep sense of injustice. I didn’t believe that I had done anything to justify resignation, nor did I believe the BBC had done anything seriously wrong. I wasn’t to know then that the staff would react in the way they did and that Hutton would be dismissed so quickly and comprehensively. What I do remember thinking was that if I was to go, I wanted to do so with some dignity.

If the Governors had only waited another day or two there would have been no need for me to leave: by then, it was Blair’s people who were on the run. By the weekend Number Ten couldn’t understand what had happened. The report had exonerated them and yet the public hadn’t. They had no concept then, and still don’t have, of how fast Blair had lost the trust of the people in Britain, of how quickly he’d gone from being seen as an honest and open man to being regarded as a public relations manipulator, a man without real principles. Iraq and spin had destroyed his reputation.

I got into the office about ten past eight on that Thursday morning and immediately started rewriting a couple of draft statements I’d prepared the night before. The first was the public announcement I would make. The second, much more important to me, was the e-mail I would send to all the staff telling them I was going. I was determined that the staff would learn the news from me and that the e-mail would go out before any press or public announcement.

That morning all feels a blur now. I remember lots of people coming in and out, and lots of people crying. Most of my immediate support staff were either crying or trying to stop. I remember Carolyn Fairbairn, the BBC’s Head of Strategy with whom I’d worked so closely over four years, turning up looking as if she’d been crying all the way from Winchester, where she lived. Melvyn Bragg had been presenting his Radio Four programme In Our Time that morning and he too came up to my office and was there for at least an hour, talking to me, advising me, and reassuring my staff. They loved him for showing so much care. In the end even he got upset.

All morning the e-mails had been pouring in from staff urging me not to resign, but at around 1.30 p.m. I sent out my e-mail statement to the staff. It was typical of my all-staff e-mails. I had started sending them almost as soon as I joined the BBC and found it an incredibly effective way for a Chief Executive to communicate with every member of staff. During my four years I refused to send out long, boring e-mails; I wanted people to read them, so they had to be short, to the point, and interesting. This one would certainly have an impact. It was only a few paragraphs long, free of jargon, and in a language everyone could understand. It said:

This is the hardest e mail I’ve ever written. In a few moments I’ll be announcing to the outside world that I’m leaving after four years as Director General. I don’t want to go and I’ll miss everyone here hugely. However the management of the BBC was heavily criticised in the Hutton Report and as the Director General I am responsible for the management.

I accept that the BBC made errors of judgement and I’ve sadly come to the conclusion that it will be hard to draw a line under this whole affair while I am still here. We need closure. We need closure to protect the future of the BBC, not for you or me but for the benefit of everyone out there. It might sound pompous but I believe the BBC really matters. Throughout this affair my sole aim as Director General of the BBC has been to defend our editorial independence and to act in the public interest.

In four years we’ve achieved a lot between us. I believe we’ve changed the place fundamentally and I hope those changes will last beyond me. The BBC has always been a great organization but I hope that, over the last four years, I’ve helped to make it a more human place where everyone who works here feels appreciated. If that’s anywhere near true I leave contented if sad.

Thank you all for the help and support you’ve given me. This might sound schmaltzy but I really will miss you all.

Greg

As soon as the e-mail had gone I went downstairs to the entrance of Broadcasting House in Langham Place, where there was a massive, totally disorganized media scrum right on the BBC’s own doorstep. I walked out through the revolving door, realized I was in danger of being crushed, stepped back into the drum, and revolved back into the building. After a couple of minutes there was enough room for me to move outside and, live on BBC News 24, Sky News, and the ITV News Channel, I announced I was leaving. The irony was that BBC News 24 almost missed the whole event because their crew was stuck at the back of the scrum and couldn’t get a decent shot of me making the statement.

Then it was back upstairs and lots of drink and food with friends and colleagues. By then all thoughts of Atkins and abstinence had totally disappeared. Mark Damazer, whom I first worked with at TV-am twenty years earlier, made a short but funny speech talking about my strengths and weaknesses. I replied by telling everyone that this was not a day for bandstanding. I was going and they should protect their careers. I also told them to support Mark Byford, who was to be acting Director-General; he was a good bloke and had played no part in my demise.

Oddly, it was about that time that Mark was making a terrible mistake. He had agreed to stand with Lord Ryder while the acting Chairman recorded a statement. When asked to do this, Mark should have declined. Instead, he stood by while Ryder made the most grovelling of apologies in which he said sorry for any mistake the BBC might have made, without actually defining what the mistakes were. He apologized ‘unreservedly’. It was as if he had apologized for anything anyone in Government could accuse the BBC of. It was the style of delivery that made the apology seem so grovelling. The two of them looked like the leaders of an old Eastern European government: grey, boring, and frightened.

The statement was on the news bulletins all day and was seen throughout the world. Without realizing it, Lord Ryder had done enormous damage to the reputation of the BBC, and to himself.

When, that afternoon, Lord Ryder was asked at a special meeting of the BBC’s executive committee whether his statement would be enough to satisfy the Government, he replied that he had been assured it would, leaving a number of members of the committee with the clear impression that he had discussed and cleared the statement with Downing Street before delivering it.

I have since had it confirmed by the BBC that, before he made his statement, Lord Ryder had been in contact with Number Ten telling them both of the content of the statement he planned to make and that I was going. The BBC now say this was only a matter of ‘courtesy’, but it has serious implications. The whole independence of the BBC is based on its separation from Government, and yet here was its acting Chairman effectively clearing a statement before he made it. We don’t know if they asked for changes. What would he have done if they had?

It also brings into question whether or not Downing Street wanted my head. Gavyn had reached an agreement with Blair, in one of the many phone calls they had between June and December, that no matter what Hutton said the Government would not call for either of us to go. When he watched Blair in the House of Commons immediately after Hutton’s press conference Gavyn realized the Prime Minister had gone back on his word. He told me: ‘Blair skilfully piled the pressure on, and did nothing to discharge his promise that there should be no resignations at the BBC. I assumed he had reneged. Then I saw Campbell calling us liars, and demanding that heads should roll. I assumed that Blair had deliberately unleashed the dogs against us, and that there would be no peace with the Government until we either resigned or apologized.’

I, too, had been assured in advance, in discussions between myself and Campbell’s successor, Dave Hill – a more rational and reasonable man than Campbell – that when the Hutton report was published Number Ten would not criticize the BBC if we agreed not to criticize them. Hill had also assured me that they would be able to control Campbell, that he would be back inside Number Ten for the publication of the Hutton Report and would take orders. So on that Wednesday Blair could have stopped Campbell from calling for heads. He chose not to. And on the Thursday morning Downing Street was told what was happening at the BBC but Blair did nothing to prevent my ‘resignation’. Since then, he has let it be known through friends that he didn’t want either Gavyn or me to go and has even invited me to meet with him informally. I refused. I no longer regard Tony Blair as someone to be trusted.

Ryder’s ‘unreserved’ apology had other repercussions. From that moment onwards the BBC stopped publicly arguing the case it had argued throughout the Hutton inquiry: that while it had made some mistakes, it had been right to broadcast Dr Kelly’s claims that Downing Street had ‘sexed up’ the dossier to make a more convincing case for war. From that moment onwards no one from within the BBC was allowed to make that argument, and yet it is what I still believe happened and I will argue the case passionately in this book.

The real irony came several weeks later when The Guardian ran a story that said that Lord Hutton was ‘shocked’ by the reaction to his report and hadn’t expected any heads to roll at the BBC. If this is true, he is a remarkably naive man.

My day and my time at the BBC were rapidly coming to an end. I was preparing to leave my office for the last time when I got a phone call from Peter Salmon at Television Centre. He told me that there were remarkable scenes happening and that I ought to come over. He said that hundreds of members of staff had taken to the streets with ‘Bring Back Greg’ posters and that the demonstration was getting bigger by the minute. I turned to Magnus and Emma and said we ought to go. Andrew Harvey, a friend and talented journalist whom I had brought in to edit Ariel, the BBC’s in-house magazine, was with me at the time, so he came along too.

In all there were five of us in the car. It was a fifteen-minute drive and no one said anything. When we got to White City and drove down towards Television Centre we found the roads outside the BBC buildings thronged with chanting staff holding up placards. The scenes were amazing. As I got out of the car people were applauding and trying to shake my hand. There were news crews everywhere trying to interview me. For a brief period of my life I suddenly found out what it was like to be an American presidential candidate or Madonna. It was frightening.

Someone thrust a megaphone into my hand and I made an impromptu speech. We were all a bit scared for our safety and Magnus and Emma tried to guide me through the crowd. We lost Andrew Harvey somewhere and didn’t see him again that day. At one stage Emma even thumped a news cameraman who was getting a bit rough; but, inch by inch, we gradually moved towards the entrance to Stage Six, the home of BBC News.

Inside the building there were people everywhere shouting and applauding. I stopped for a quick but hassled interview with Kirsty Wark, the Newsnight presenter, whom I admired a lot. I then decided to go up to the BBC News room. As I walked in people started applauding and eventually I climbed onto a desk and spoke to them all. I told them that our journalism had to be fair but not to lose their nerve, unaware that it was being broadcast live to the nation on BBC News 24. I told the staff in the newsroom, and the rest of the world live on television, that all we had been trying to do was to defend the ‘integrity and independence of the BBC’. I later discovered that this really upset Downing Street, but in truth it was exactly what the whole thing had been about. We were defending the BBC from a wholesale attack on its journalism by Alastair Campbell, a man whom some in the Labour Government are only now beginning to understand was a complete maverick and who had been given unprecedented power by Tony Blair.

I also went to visit the staff of the Today programme, on which Andrew Gilligan had worked. There was a more sombre mood amongst the Today staff.

We went quickly to others parts of the building and the response was overwhelming. I then decided it was time to go. We went outside and were surrounded yet again. Someone had written ‘We love you Greg’ on my car windscreen in lipstick, and if my driver Bill and a policeman hadn’t stopped them they would have written all over the car. We drove out with hundreds of people still cheering and waving their placards.

Eventually I got back to my office at Broadcasting House to discover that what had happened at Television Centre was not a one-off. All over the country the staff had taken to the streets to protest that their boss was leaving. In Cardiff, Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester, Newcastle, and Birmingham hundreds had walked out to protest. But it wasn’t only in the big centres. The staff of local radio stations had also left their offices. At BBC Radio Shropshire in Shrewsbury all the staff had walked out, including the presenter who was on air. He had gone outside to express solidarity, whilst rightly continuing to broadcast live to the people of Shropshire.

In the next few days more than six thousand staff replied to my e-mail wishing me luck, thanking me for what I had done during my time at the BBC, and telling me how much they would miss me. I have chosen two examples – one from a producer in the World Service, and one from News; but there were thousands like them. The first said:

Your greatest achievement was giving the kiss of life to a body of people who’d been systematically throttled, castrated and lobotomised. To leave us all very much alive and kicking, loving the BBC and respecting the role of Director General again, is a fantastic legacy.

And the second: