The new BBC boss cannot be one of the boys again, says Fleet Street Fox. History shows they keep cocking it up
If there’s one thing the BBC can make a better meal of than a Royal wedding, it’s a nervous breakdown.
Not only have the director general and the head of news resigned at the same time, for something they probably didn’t do; not only are BBC journalists reporting on their own tails even as they consume each other; but when someone had to book a guest to discuss ethical standards on the breakfast sofa, they rang Kelvin Mackenzie.
Satan, clearly, couldn’t make it to Salford. Busy looking for his mittens and oiling the snowplough, I expect.
If asking the author of the most notorious false headline and ensuing 36-year reputational and regional sales collapse in Fleet Street history where he thought it had gone wrong were not bad enough, Auntie is now quivering in a corner, waiting for a politician to appoint another stuffed shirt in box-fresh trainers to preside over its continuing identity crisis. And the last thing the country needs, right now, is another overpaid, over-indulged, managerial male.
Donald Trump – the actual Donald Trump – has accused the BBC of running fake news because of misleading editing of his speech to the January 6 rioters in a documentary that aired a week before his re-election. Clearly, the new D-G needs to be someone who has the journalistic chops to be beyond such criticism, charm the Great Tangerine Tyrant into a sit-down interview, and/or tell him to get bent.
Tory-leaning newspapers are crowing about the BBC’s “downfall”, as though a resignation or two is the same as retreating to a bunker beneath Berlin with a revolver and a cyanide cocktail. The average life span of a D-G is about 6 years, so at just over 5 the outgoing incumbent has done a bang average job. He’s also beaten his previous record of 141 days in the role in 2012, so end times this is not.
It is beyond dispute that the BBC has had some appalling scandals. Its chief news presenter and voice of the nation being a sex offender, gender rows, rape allegations, accusations of being both anti-Palestinian and anti-Semitic, of being pro-Reform with Tories on its board, and being a moribund institution filled with woke Lefty graduates of exactly the sort who think asking a disgraced tabloid editor how to do journalism is the sort of irony people want with their cornflakes.
All that teeth-gnashing fails to note what any journalist could tell you: that it is impossible to accurately report the war in Gaza because your reporters aren’t allowed in by one side, and would in any case be murdered or kidnapped by the other. The only way around that is to tread carefully, and cover your back with heavy caveats on all reporting. Often the Beeb has managed it – but noticeably, not always. It undermines trust, support, and funding, and more importantly makes us all equally ill-informed. That’s the antithesis of what the BBC is for, and only a journalist will see the route out of it.
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That said, running a huge institution is a bureaucratic nightmare. Someone experienced at dealing with employment law, equal pay disputes, union wrangling and tiptoeing through awkwardness on-air would be a good idea. And on all these points, newsreader Martine Croxall seems to be the perfect fit. A former local radio reporter, with decades of juggling difficult issues live when the gallery lets you down, mother of the union chapel, someone who knows that “pregnant people” and “women” are the same thing…. and a woman of experience who long ago stopped taking a bucketload from any over-cooked male, orange or otherwise.
Martine, who I vaguely know and greatly admire, would probably be first to say she wouldn’t have the management skills. Which, to my mind, makes her a better fit than someone who confidently claims they do. The BBC can’t be “fixed”, but it does need to be steered, and preferably by someone who can smell a scandal when it begins festering in the sewers beneath the make-up department, not after it’s got in the lift and started wandering around the canteen.
She would of course need help, and Auntie has a lot of talent to call on. It could, for example, start getting its money’s worth out of Graham Norton, and post him on the reception desk to answer phones, run the security checks, and probably anchor a new reality show while he’s at it. Seeing him deal with J-Lo when she refuses to put her bag through the scanner would be a prime-time delight.
It’s a highly-political job, of course, and Martine would have more knives in her back than a hedgehog has prickles. So new BBC wunderkind Alan Carr should be her No2, deftly picking off enemies, strategising, and deflecting criticism with a mince and a roll of his eyes. Tess Daly is looking for work, so send her to the Culture Select Committee and No10 to charm the politicians with meaningless shoulder pats and a big smile.
Some might think I’m joking – but not really. The BBC has never had a woman in charge. It’s had repeated sex scandals, pay scandals, reporting scandals, yet never felt that a female journalist might be the solution – or at the very least a better image – than institutionalised men who, history shows, have been more inclined to cover up than to come clean quickly.
Martine is – like thousands of her colleagues – balanced, fair, kind, sane, and fully aware of the responsibilities the BBC has to the nation and its audience. And the fact that anyone who has those values would be considered a “joke” candidate is the root of the BBC’s real problem. It’s so important a role, so vital an organisation, that it simply must be given to someone who couldn’t cut it in a cat salon.
Or at least, that’s what all the other couldn’t-do-a-proper-job people who appoint each other seem to think. It’s why D-Gs get knighthoods and a monthly pay packet that most BBC staff don’t see in a year. Only when the BBC stops giving top jobs to ‘one of the boys’ will it be able to stop writing headlines about its own failures.