It really was a knockout

On 25 June 2003, the day on which Alastair Campbell declar- ed all-out war against the BBC in his evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC), the BBC’s Director-General, Greg Dyke, was engaged in country dancing in Surrey. He and other top BBC executives were attending one of their regular strategy conferences at which ‘as usual, we had some bonding activity, in which members of the Executive did silly things to make them feel more of a team’.

Their very silly thing on this occasion was an It’s a Knockout competition, which was interrupted by a telephone call reporting that Mr Campbell had ‘gone ballistic’ before the FAC. ‘We decided to carry on the game, probably because my team was winning,’ writes Mr Dyke. ‘We were still ahead until the last round when we all had to do country dancing. At that moment Alan Yentob came into his own and his team won on “artistic merit”.’ The mind boggles.

This was a bit like Sir Francis Drake playing bowls as the Spanish armada approached, for it was the beginning of the greatest ever conflict between the BBC and a British government, one that eventually claimed the heads of both Mr Campbell and Mr Dyke, as well as that of the BBC Chairman, Gavyn Davies.

But it was also a typical manifestation of Mr Dyke’s ‘leadership’ style, about which he boasts throughout most of this book. When he took over the job of Director-General from John Birt, he was resolved to replace the grim, bureaucratic managerial practices which had made Mr Birt so widely loathed with an ‘inclusive culture’ that would make all 30,000 employees of the BBC work together as a team.

His father, an insurance salesman from Hayes, Middlesex, had never doffed his cap to anyone, had treated everybody as worthy of respect, and had regularly stopped to talk to the local street-sweeper.