Tim Luckhurst reports in the Independent on Sunday today on an "electric confrontation" between the chairman of the BBC Trust, Sir Michael Lyons, and Andrew Neil at the BBC's news festival last week.
Supposedly a private gathering for BBC staff, Luckhurst appears to have obtained a detailed account of what he calls an "unusually aggressive interrogation" of Lyons by Neil, who was clearly speaking as champion of unnamed BBC journalists and news editors who had briefed him about their problems.
Examples: "We are at the mercy of a bunch of amateur regulators throwing their weight around to prove they are as good as Ofcom"... the BBC is being "regulated to death" and "buried in an avalanche of pedantry"... "If this sort of top-down regulation worked, don't you think the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War?"
If Lyons was shocked by that, worse was to come. Neil, in a reference to Lyons's past role conducting reviews for Gordon Brown in his days as chancellor, asked him if he was now micro-managing the BBC in the way his mentor once ruled the treasury.
According to an editor quoted by Luckhurst, Neil also suggested that Lyons was "guilty of imposing a lot of pain on BBC journalists when news coverage should really be the corporation's crown jewels." Another staffer quoted by Luckhurst said: "At a time when we are being knocked very hard by our competitors, do we really need the trust to do it too?"
Luckhurst observes that the confrontation "might be dismissed as nothing more than the traditional misunderstanding between a senior journalist and a professional administrator. The trust's problem is that it has not won the confidence of BBC managers."
He also points rightly to the trust's contradictory role. It is part-regulator and part-champion. How can it it do both successfully? I don't doubt that trust members are doing their best. Lyons was flanked through the Neil questioning by two trust members for whom I have a high regard: Richard Tait and Alison Hastings. They certainly don't believe it right to interfere in journalistic freedom.
The central problem, however, stems from the way the trust came about in the wake of the Hutton report. The board of governors it replaced was felt to be flawed because it had acted as a staunch defender of the BBC over the Today-Gilligan affair. Undoubtedly, the board - well, its chairman at the time - made a mistake in speaking out before holding an inquiry. That reflected that the board itself was caught in just the cleft stick that the trust now finds itself in. What should it have done in the circumstances? Defended the BBC or acted as a regulator?
The trust, having entered the stage when all manner of problems haunt the BBC - not least its right to the licence fee - has clearly taken upon itself a policing role in order to head off the supposed peril of external regulation.
There needs to be a rethink by the trust, a radical rethink. Most importantly, should it consider abandoning its regulation role altogether? I know it is heresy to suggest that Ofcom should assume total responsibility for regulating the BBC - as it does all commercial stations - but doesn't that make sense in the end?
I understand that the trust has a role to play in trying to protect the BBC. But it appears from Neil's questions and the views expressed to Luckhurst by other BBC staff that the armour is doing them more harm than the arrows fired by outsiders. The Neil confrontation should start a proper debate.
