GREG DYKE is obviously an able man, and made a personal contribution of energy and commercial shrewdness to the BBC. He has flair as a tabloid broadcaster. But he should never have been made its Director-General. He lacked objectivity about his own role; he was too close to the Blairs and had given too much money to the Labour Party. He has an inadequate understanding of public service broadcasting and no understanding at all of the relationship under the Charter between the Director-General and the governors of the BBC.
His memoirs also betray a social chip on his shoulder approximately the size of the Tay Bridge. He is a self-made multimillionaire who still resents “posh” accents, particularly in women.
The BBC governors, led by Sir Christopher Bland who was the chairman at the time, were therefore mistaken to have made the appointment; unfortunately the subsequent governors were equally wrong to fire him. They should have realised that the issue had changed. It was no longer a question of whether Mr Dyke was the right person to be Director-General. It had become an issue of defending the BBC’s independence under attack from the Prime Minister.
The attack had been launched by Alastair Campbell, partly to divert attention from the Prime Minister’s own misuse of intelligence to justify the Iraq war. It was continued by Tony Blair himself. Gavyn Davies was Chairman of the BBC at the time. He is a more cautious and more reflective man than Mr Dyke. He came back from one of the debates in the House of Commons, and commented that Mr Blair had gone back on his word.
According to Mr Dyke’s memoirs, Mr Davies said to him that “Blair skilfully piled the pressure on and did nothing to discharge his promise that there should be no resignations at the BBC. I assumed that he had reneged. Then I saw Campbell calling us liars and demanding that heads should roll. I assumed that Blair had unleashed the dogs against us and that there would be no peace with the Government until we either resigned or apologised”. That, I believe, was the truth. The Hutton report, one of the most one-sided public documents of my lifetime, had created a difficulty for the BBC. The truth is that Mr Blair, Mr Campbell and John Scarlett combined to “sex up” the intelligence which was presented to the House of Commons; they seriously exaggerated the intelligence assessment of the risks that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The search conducted by the Allies after the invasion failed to find these weapons.
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The “sexing up” was widely criticised inside the intelligence community. David Kelly had said as much to Andrew Gilligan who, apart from one significant error, reported correctly what Dr Kelly had told him. Whether the Prime Minister lied to the House of Commons is a semantic question: he made a misleading political case, leaving out necessary qualifications, in the way an experienced, but not over-scrupulous, barrister might have done. The Hutton report exonerated the Prime Minister, in the teeth of the evidence, and put the blame entirely on the BBC.
Mr Dyke’s memoirs put the BBC side of the case, which would be accepted by the vast majority of the BBC’s own staff, but also by most of the voters. He comments that: “Number 10 couldn’t understand what had happened. 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.”
Mr Dyke’s view is supported by the latest YouGov poll in The Daily Telegraph on Friday. No less than 63 per cent of respondents replied that the Government is “not honest and trustworthy”. The Labour Party takes some comfort from the fact that 57 per cent think that a future Conservative government would also be “not honest and trustworthy”. I doubt whether that does quite as much damage. There is a difference between believing that the Government, as a matter of current fact, is dishonest, and hypothesising that a future government, which does not yet exist, might prove to be dishonest.
For the last 12 years, opinion polls have tended to give the Labour Party a much wider lead than the actual result in the subsequent general elections. For instance, the Gallup poll in August 1996 gave Labour a lead of 26.4 per cent; the 1997 general election which followed was indeed a Labour landslide, but its lead was only 13 per cent, less than half the previous August’s poll. A significant difference is now normal, when comparing polls and eventual outcomes.
Perhaps the 1991 figure is even more relevant. In August 1991 the two parties were level, at 39 per cent each, in the Gallup poll. In August 2004, they are level, on 34 per cent, in the YouGov poll, which uses a different methodology. In 1992 at the general election, the Conservatives won, with a majority of 7.5 per cent of the votes; they had an overall majority of 20 seats and of 75 seats over Labour. Obviously one cannot forecast a similar Conservative victory in 2005 but there is nothing in last week’s poll which makes it impossible. The Conservatives did, after all, win both the European and the local government elections in June of this year.
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One problem for the Labour Party is that Mr Dyke is one of their own. He is not a crypto-Tory or even a crypto-Liberal Democrat. He is deeply rooted in the attitudes of new Labour; indeed he is more new Labour than Mr Blair himself, though perhaps no more so than Cherie. There are passages in his memoirs that makes one’s blood run cold.
“On the day of Campbell’s attack, the BBC Executive was at a strategy conference in Surrey. As usual we had some bonding activity, and we were halfway through an “It’s a Knockout” competition when (Richard) Sambrook took a call on his mobile phone.” They all went on to do compulsory country dancing.
I can remember BBC strategy conferences myself, from my years as a governor; ghastly events they were, in which we took bad decisions in an atmosphere of mutual flattery qualified by mistrust. The thought of having to “bond” by taking part in an “It’s a Knockout” competition would have added a new level to our insincerity. Yet what could be more new Labour than an impromptu game of five-a-side soccer in which rough play by Mr Blair himself supportively landed the Italian Prime Minister in hospital?
Did not Mr Dyke realise that he was using his position as Director-General to make middle-aged executives, whom he could promote or dismiss, play childish games which would make them feel — if not look — foolish? Did he not understand that embarrassment is a technique of the bully, just like the obsessive complaints of Mr Campbell? But it is very new Labour; I imagine that the cronies are expected to bond all the time.
As a professional problem of electioneering, the Labour Party must be obsessed by turnout. In 1997, Labour voters went to the polls with huge enthusiasm. In 2001, the mood was still the same, if much more subdued. Voters still trusted Mr Blair, at least to be given a second chance.
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Now the argument is not about the war, which many voters, particularly Conservatives, believed necessary; it is about the truth. By and large the Lib Dems will turn out, and so, I expect, will most Tory voters. But the Labour voters may have been alienated. They feel conned.
There must be millions of Labour voters from 1997 and 2001 who feel that they have been manipulated, bullied and lied to. They feel just like Mr Dyke. One hears people say: “I did not vote Labour to invade Iraq.” What Mr Dyke is really saying is that the Prime Minister is so untrustworthy that he ought to be turned out. Who has more reason to say that than Mr Dyke? He knows of which he speaks.
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