Failing the Old Grey (Ent)wistle Test

What an utter bag of tripe George Entwistle is in his whole approach to management and as a man in general.  Not content with a disastrous handling of the Royal Jubilee where much of the presentation was clueless and/or crass (though maybe republican proclivities at the Guardian-reading BBC saw this as just reason for giving him the keys to the castle), Entwistle seemed overwhelmed by ‘events’ even before he became Director-General.

As the Pollard Review found (and, as a former head of Sky News, Nick Pollard could be replied upon to be aggressively independent), though being warned by email a couple of years ago of Jimmy Saville’s ‘darker side’ while the posthumously disgraced presenter was still alive, Entwistle had no recollection of this – astounding because even to move to the email ‘bin’ unread requires an act of conscious agency.  It is inconceivable that he did not read the email.  Maybe, like many senior personnel in organisations revealed to have paedophiles in their midst, he just hoped it would all go away (which, if true, showed a cavalier disrespect for any victims as surmised at the time) and so filed it away in his mind to the extent that he forgot about the warning.  When Helen Boaden (head of BBC News), albeit informally, reiterated fears of Saville’s character in a Newsnight investigation (which was subsequently shelved through incompetence and then intransigence), this did not seem to jog Entwistle’s memory or maybe it did, given his allegedly cautious response.

When it was revealed, following an ITV investigation, that Newsnight had buried its own exposé, it reeked of internal cover-up and Peter Rippon, then Newsnight’s editor, came out with a blustering defence in a blog.  This posting was riddled with unintentional untruths and inaccuracies, yet it was not taken down for several days because Entwistle insisted on going through layers of BBC bureaucracy, rather than taking a firm hand due to the urgency of the matter.  We know he does have a spine from his extortionate pay-off and that he wanted more (the feint of an opening bargaining position), though had he stayed, Entwistle may have been an excellent negotiator on the BBC licence fee renewal.

So that he was skewered repeatedly by John Humphrys on the Today programme (one of those unexpected and therefore seminal moments that it is a privilege to hear or see live, such as Jeremy Paxman humiliating Michael Howard or Paxman engulfed in his own uncontrollable coughing at the start of a show), displaying complete complacency by being unaware of a front-page headline when the McAlpine affair broke, was the tip of his failings.  Thankfully, Entwistle’s reign of error was brought to an end after 54 days.  The BBC may not have been able to take much more.  Entwistle will have to emigrate to find an employer prepared to offer him a job that pays half as well.