Why is the ‘Director BBC North’ staying down south?

On his vast salary, Peter Salmon could buy Wigan, says Rod Liddle. But he and the rest of the corporation’s managerial elite will not be abandoning their cosy London lives any time soon

Do any senior BBC executives wish to move to Salford, as is being urged upon the corporation’s exponentially less well paid staff, i.e. the ones who make the programmes you watch or hear?

Peter Salmon is the latest exec to announce that he would rather hack off his own face than move his family anywhere remotely near the north. This is a problem because Peter is ‘Director BBC North’, a post given to him presumably because he is married to a woman called Sarah Lancashire. Lancashire is in the north, isn’t it? About as close as the BBC gets, anyway. I didn’t even know the BBC had a Director BBC North; I knew it had units to deal with black people, Asian people, Roma people, homosexuals and so on — so I suppose it’s fair enough that northerners get a look in somewhere. There is also, I understand, a Director BBC White Middle-Class Very Liberal People Living in Islington — but he’s known as the ‘Director General’.

The BBC is to move 1,500 people to Salford, including the staff and presenters of its fabulously witless morning news programme, Breakfast. But very few of the execs involved in this move — whose salaries are a quite staggering cost to the licence payer — wish to follow the lead they have set. Not the former management consultant Richard Deverell, for example, who was in charge of the move to Salford and paid £232,000 of your money for his trouble. Nor Adrian Van Klaveren, the boss of Radio 5 Live (who, in fairness, is probably the least northern person I have ever met in my life.