What should happen now?

If you work for the BBC, you dislike seeing the outfit’s name in the headlines. It usually means the BBC is in trouble. No good complaining that much of the British press (to the bewilderment of people outside the country) have it in for the BBC, big time. Nor is it any good pointing out that there are a few politicians with an intense longing to dismantle the BBC altogether. These are facts of corporation life, and always have been.

Its top executives have to ensure it doesn’t provide its existential critics, tiny in number but always noisy and weirdly angry, with ammunition. This time the BBC has handed them a veritable ammunition dump. Having worked for the organisation for 46 years, and watched a number of crises at close range, I’m certain we haven’t endured a storm as bad as this during that time.

Harold Wilson forced out Sir Hugh Greene on the grounds that his programmes were undermining British society. Margaret Thatcher came close to accusing the BBC of treason over the Falklands and the IRA, but was canny enough to go no further. Norman Tebbit claimed it had lied about the American bombing of Libya in 1986, and came badly short. Alastair Campbell went berserk at 6.07 one morning as he listened to the Today programme, and forced Tony Blair to set up a judicial inquiry. It did huge damage to their reputations, and to that of Lord Hutton, who carried it out. In every case, public opinion rallied solidly around the BBC.

This crisis is different. No government is attacking the BBC; the problem is our own behaviour, past and present, and paedophilia, of all the crimes in modern society, regarded as the evil of evils. For the BBC to have employed one of the worst sleazebags of modern times and not protected children from him is, with hindsight, disgraceful.