BBC LAUNCHES NEW LABOUR CHANNELS
SiOn Simon describes a Broadcasting House
recruitment strategy designed to keep in with the government
THE DAYS are long gone when people expect the BBC to spend our money on broadcasting; but it still comes as a shock to learn just how much of it goes on policy doc- uments and strategic reviews, and how many of these papers are being written by a bur- geoning army of specially recruited Blairites. As it is, you might well think that £500,000 is rather a lot of money for the BBC to pay Dale Winton, the light entertainment 'star' who presents Supermarket Sweep and The National Lottery Live, for a year of his time. Or you may take the view that as a Popular performer Mr Winton is bound to have a high market price, and that it is therefore appropriate for the BBC to shell out huge sums in order to com- pete in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the 'big cheques for small stars' argument, Mr Win- ton, Anthea Turner, Michael Parkinson et al. do have one crucially validating quality: they are on the telly. They are direct providers — and the most visi- ble exemplars — of the broad- cast services which we license-payers assume the BBC to be exclusively concerned with Providing. If only it were so. The Corpo- ration spends tens, probably hundreds, of millions of pounds each year on the kind of massively over-resourced corporate centre (all those head office departments that cost a fortune although nobody knows what they do) which has virtually vanished from the private sector. It is not possible to tell exactly how much money is involved, because the way the Corporation's expen- diture is broken down in its annual report takes 'corporate centre' to mean only those functions which have no connection what- soever with broadcasting (`cannot meaning- fully be charged against directorates'). This does not allow for the startling number of functions and services undertaken by the Policy and Planning, Corporate Affairs, Research and Development, Personnel and other 'central' directorates being duplicat- ed within the broadcast directorates them- selves. And it certainly does not take account of the absurd truth that Policy and Planning (about 80 staff) and Corporate Affairs (about 60) perform almost exactly the same functions, and are the most vicious of rivals for the same tiny enclosure of turf.
The BBC corporate centre, even accord- ing to its current restricted definition, cost over £55 million last year, which is more than either Radio One, Radio Two, Radio Five Live or the whole of BBC regional radio. And with the real figure for unneces- sary paper-shuffling running into several hundreds of millions, a remarkably liberal attitude to the expenditure of our money is being displayed.
But while the barons and baronesses of Portland Place may be cavalier with our money, it cannot be said that they are not clever with it. For the last two or three years, their mission has been, quite simply, to cosy up to the incoming Blairites. The BBC's future is entirely in the hands of the government of the day. There were many close shaves under the Tories, who did not like Auntie's inbuilt liberal bias. The barons were determined that the same would not happen with the Blairites. So, drunk as they are on seemingly endless supplies of cash, they set about buying in some New Labour talent.
The third likely lad was James Purnell, who had worked in Tony Blair's tiny Opposition office as his researcher when Blair was shadow employment spokes- man. After short stints at SRU and IPPR, Purnell too was gobbled up by BBC Policy and Planning on the kind of salary that pub- lic sector organisations can only dream up if they are also accustomed to paying half a million pounds per year to Dale Winton and more to Ms Turner.
Towards the end of 1996, they even came for me. Just like the others I, too, was a Blairite for hire. But fortunately Miss Hodgson took a visibly instant dislike to what she saw and the machine spat me out before the director of Policy and Planning had the chance to eat me alive.
Then the election came, and they pan- icked. Though James Purnell was now firmly ensconced in the No. 10 policy unit, where he remains to this day, the BBC magnificoes decided they had no idea what was going on. Gripped by an awful terror that someone would start making Policy that hadn't been Planned for, that Affairs were afoot that might not be Corporate ones, they started hiring the inevitable con- sultants left, right and centre, especially this being a headhunt for Blairites — cen- tre.
Enter Simon Buckby, stage left. Though he later became the sober-penned social affairs correspondent of the Financial Times, he is also a former television pro- ducer and adviser to John Prescott who worked on Labour's general election adver- tising campaign and is a close friend of Peter Mandelson. He is a perfect example of how cleverly the BBC magnificoes are spending our money. They could hardly have chosen a more astute character to fill in the blanks to a New Labour government that they do not understand. But it will come as no surprise that the likes of Mr Buckby do not perform such services on the cheap.
You might think that the BBC bosses had enough connections of their own with New Labour not to have to bother with consultants. Birt and Mandelson, for instance, are notoriously well-connected in with one another. Both part of the Week- end World/The Walden Interview old boy mafia which dominates all British current affairs television and of which Mr Buckby is another notable example, Messrs Birt and Mandelson are often pictured walking together in Tuscany or wherever. Coinci- dentally, the director-general also has a daughter, Eliza, 26, who is advertising man- ager for the Millennium scheme of which Peter Mandelson is the government impre- sario. In this capacity, of course, he recent- ly took a celebrated trip to Disneyland, where he was accompanied by among oth- ers the BBC's director of television, Alan Yentob.
But in spite of such impeccably Blairite links, Auntie is still obsessed with supple- menting fantastically overpaid staff with equally cash-laden armies of consultants. It hardly needs stating that the Corporation always has at least one of the big lobbying firms on its books. For many years, for instance, the incumbent was Lowe Bell, where the BBC account was managed by their high-flying Blairite deputy managing director, Neal Lawson.
But since the election, a succession of `freelance' consultants have nevertheless been beating a breathless path to the gold- en gateways of Portland Place; like Mr Chris Bryant — biographer, Christian socialist, Labour candidate, friend of Man- delson, etc. — who is at present a retained consultant to the BBC. Needless to say, it is not clear exactly what Mr Bryant does for Mr Birt. Such is the transcendental nature of consultancy, after all.
The least cheap of all the consultants will almost certainly have been The Spectator's own star contributor Derek Draper. In his other guise as a director of the public affairs consultancy Prima Europe, he recently pro- vided the BBC with what one of his friends (such is New Labour) described as 'a report costing many, many thousands of pounds which I personally thought was worse than useless'.
But even though Mr Draper's report may have its hostile critics, he remains an excel- lent choice to write one. Regular readers of The Spectator, and now the Express, will know that he is an inestimably knowledgable guide to the ins and outs of New Labour pol- itics. I gather that only this week Mr Draper pocketed what I am told was £150,000 (with more to come later) from his share of the sale of Prima Europe to the 'market-leading' lobbyists, Market Access. Those BBC barons may be spraying our money around like Grand Prix champagne in a desperate quest to hold on to their own jobs, but at least they always buy the best.
Sion Simon writes a weekly political column in the Daily Telegraph.
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