It was a tale of two atriums on a landmark day for Britain’s two biggest broadcasters. At Norman Foster’s cavernous 200 Gray’s Inn Road — the home of ITV and ITN — staff rushed spontaneously to get a glimpse of Michael Grade arriving for his first day in his new job. Outside he told reporters his main role was as a “mentor”. Inside staff were waiting to clap, cheer and in a few cases scream their delight. Nobody could remember so many people looking out over the balconies since the Queen opened the building and the day Diana, Princess of Wales, came to visit. All hail to the million pound a year mentor.
It seemed like the latest stop in Mr Grade’s career tour of broadcasters where he is received as the saviour before moving on to the next destination. The scenes at ITV were reminiscent of his arrival at the BBC two and a half years ago. But yesterday at the BBC Media Centre’s atrium, there was no remnant of that day. Instead a resolutely “business as usual” attitude prevailed in the corporate offices. This is firmly BBC management turf, the BBC governors having moved to other offices in Central London.
Once the pleasant shock at events has sunk in at ITV, and the unpleasant shock at the BBC, executives in both buildings may look back on yesterday as positive landmarks for very different reasons
But it leaves unresolved a big public policy issue. If the top man at the BBC no longer wants to be the public’s guardian at the BBC what does it say about the governance system that he and the Government devised? And who will be the guardian now?
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ITV has got what the industry regards as the man most likely to provide its best shot, some would say its last shot, at stabilising audiences and revenue enough to allow the network to keep charging advertisers a premium for reaching a mass audience. Mr Grade offers creative leadership, a self-proclaimed pride in being a “showman” and real emotional ties with the heritage of what has been Britain’s most popular channel for most of the past 51 years. Add to that a genuine love of television, a fine track record as a Whitehall warrior and what amounts to a master’s degree in perception management.
For him it is also a chance to make the kind of serious money he has sought but never achieved before. To earn that he will have to inspire his creative team and convince the regulatory and competition authorities to relax the controls on ITV’s pricing policy for commercials. And he will have to learn to be patient with the City analysts who will question his every move once his honeymoon period is over.
But he will leave undone what was meant to be his new BBC job next month. Chairing the BBC Trust, the more hands-off successor to the BBC governors, has been described by Sir Christopher Bland, a former BBC chairman, as a “foreshortened, boring job”. Mr Grade put it only slightly more tactfully in his resignation statement as “governing the BBC from a distance”.
But before we feel too much sympathy let’s remember that this system was worked out by Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, in detailed negotiations with Mr Grade. Those of us who questioned some of the detail before the trust’s birth were told firmly by her men at the ministry that some points couldn’t be changed. A deal had been done and was not about to be undone.
In recent weeks we have seen the appointment of a group of trustees notable either for their connections with the BBC or their distinctly low profile in public life. Cynics like me concluded that Mr Grade wanted trustees with a proper sense of respect for the chairman’s authority.
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Meanwhile, in the other half of the new governance double act, something very interesting was quietly going on. The BBC’s new executive board will have outside non-executive directors for the first time but there will be an in-house chairman — Mark Thompson, the Director-General. Those of us who questioned the logic of that concluded that there had been another deal. There would not be a non-executive chairman first time round because that would create another chairman of the BBC, something Mr Grade would not be happy with. But the legislation leaves open that option in the future.
The first of the non-executives has now been appointed. Marcus Agius is chairman of Lazards and chairman-designate of Barclays. He is a big-hitter who dwarfs anybody in the trust board and it looks like a smart move by Mr Thompson to bulk up his board as he carries on the battle for the licence fee increase without his departed chairman.
Conventional wisdom says the Treasury was not impressed with the BBC’s maths in their opening bid, that Gordon Brown thinks the level of BBC senior management pay is too high and that Mr Thompson’s threat not to move departments to Manchester may have backfired. But we still do not know the price that the BBC will pay for these transgressions. Maybe Mr Grade does.
His departure leaves space for the Director-General to grow in his role, stature and power. Mr Thompson’s comment about the “surprising” timing of his chairman’s departure sounds like a dig at his old boss. But maybe the farewell will turn out to have been a happy surprise for him and the BBC management.
If, to adapt Sir Christopher Bland’s words, only “foreshortened, boring” people need apply to be chairman of the BBC Trust, Mr Thompson and his heavyweight executive board will be a formidable entity for a lighter-weight trust to oversee.
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Which will be regarded as the “real BBC”? Undoubtedly the management. Not necessarily a bad thing but will the trust have enough credibility to tame the occasionally overambitious beast? I doubt it.
And I doubt, too, that the trust would necessarily do any better in a crisis than the old-style governors did during the Iraq WMD row with the Government that led to the Hutton report. And wasn’t trying to prevent another debacle like that why we’ve been through this whole governance debate in the first place?
Stewart Purvis was chief executive of ITN from 1995-2003. He is now Professor of Television Journalism at City University and has served on some BBC governance committees