Greg Dyke: Inside Story. Greg Dyke

the Governors’ meeting. Sarah was never my favourite Governor. She had been Head of the Downing Street Policy Unit in John Major’s Conservative Government and was the person who had invented ‘Back to Basics’ – one of the most disastrous policy initiatives introduced by any prime minister in the post-war years. She was recruited as a BBC Governor as a Tory, the view being that we were short of Conservative supporters on the Board. The irony was that by the end of my time at the BBC the Governors were dominated by people from the political Right. Virtually all the powerful players were Conservatives, with the exception of Gavyn, who in his capacity as Chairman bent over backwards to hold the ring by being politically neutral. It was so typical of Blair’s New Labour. They were so worried about newspaper charges of ‘Tony’s cronies’ that they allowed the BBC’s Board of Governors to be dominated by the Right. Could anyone have imagined Margaret Thatcher allowing the Board to be dominated by Labour supporters?

      While being a strong supporter of the BBC, Sarah Hogg never left her politics or prejudices at the door of Governors’ meetings, not that there was anything wrong with that. She was married to a patrician, land-owning Tory MP, Douglas Hogg, and lived in a political world. When we tried to change our political coverage to make it more appropriate for the twenty-first century it was Sarah who led the opposition on the grounds that we shouldn’t upset the politicians. She was also upset by the lack of coverage of the Countryside March in September 2002 (probably the only march she’d ever been on). She insisted that the BBC was not covering rural affairs properly and demanded a full Governors’ investigation, which she got – at the cost of many thousands of pounds. It always struck me as a classic case of special pleading from a Governor who lived on the family estate in rural Lincolnshire.

      Sarah always gave the appearance that she was superior to most other people at Governors’ meetings, sitting nodding in obvious support when she agreed with another Governor and shaking her head when she didn’t, as if her opinion was the one that mattered most. Given that some of the other Governors were not as confident as Sarah, and didn’t give the impression that they were born to rule, her opinions probably did matter a lot. Sarah and Pauline Neville-Jones were by far the most vocal Governors and I nicknamed them ‘the posh ladies’. It was always clear to me that neither liked me much and Sarah, I now know, actively disliked me. The feeling was mutual.

      Sarah’s term as a Governor was due to finish at the end of January and she didn’t want it renewed, which was just as well because neither did Gavyn or I. We both believed the right-wing bias of the Governors was unhealthy and that we needed more Governors without strong political views. So as Sarah ran past us in the corridor that night she only had a couple of days left as a Governor. It was her last chance to settle old scores. I now know that she came to the meeting determined to get rid of me.

      I had been sitting in my office for maybe an hour and a half when Simon Milner came in and said that Pauline and the Deputy Chairman wanted to see me downstairs. I’d thought their meeting was taking a long time, but it never crossed my mind that they would want me out. When I met them, Richard Ryder was pretty blunt. He said that the Governors had discussed the position and that they had decided I should go: if I stayed I’d be a lame-duck Director-General. It was a ridiculous argument: anyone who knew me well would know that there was never a chance of me being a lame-duck anything. I asked if this was the view of all the Governors. Typically, Richard told me he hadn’t expressed a view but was reporting the views of the rest. Pauline said nothing.

      Of course I should have seen it coming, but I hadn’t. I was completely shocked. I had absolutely no idea what to say. I pointed out that I had a contract that they would have to honour, but I made it clear that if they didn’t want me I wouldn’t stay. It all took about five minutes and I said I needed to talk to Stephen Dando, the Head of Human Resources.

      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