A prime minister’s pay – £143,462 – is not a particularly memorable sum. It doesn’t include lodgings at No 10, weekends at Chequers, or the rich pickings (from memoirs, boardrooms and consultancies) that fill a leader’s afterlife. And, of course, it bears no resemblance to the cash worth of TV presenters, quiz show hosts, sports commentators or indefatigable foreign correspondents.
The benchmark has also swiftly become so ancien regime, so Cameronian, as to have lost any resonance. Cold potatoes when the culture, media and sport select committee opens its sack and dumps them on the forecourt of Broadcasting House. Under longstanding pressure, the BBC already reveals the salaries of executives earning more than £150,000 a year and “talent” on £450,000-plus. Why seek to set that net much wider?
Committee members – honouring the past glories of Whittingdale chairmanship – bang on about public servants and transparency. The BBC worries about ITV/Sky poachers waving chequebooks. But the real difficulty, one guesses, is more deeply human than that. Simply, talent does mean talent. Your place in the non-executive sun lasts as long as people laugh at your jokes, care about your reporting, or don’t grow bored by your ageing face. There are no rigid demarcation lines. This is a flexible cash game that develops inflationary tendencies the moment one commentator knows what the man in the next booth gets.
In short, the BBC isn’t like the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Nor is it like Camden council. And MPs who can’t see the difference –or the wider picture – do public service broadcasting no service, because that service depends on talented broadcasters, not clones behind desks.
