Former BBC producer and now culture secretary Ben Bradshaw criticised the BBC in an interview with the Financial Times for losing the plot over salaries and resisting the so-called top-slicing of a modest 3.5 per cent of the BBC’s £3.3bn licence fee to pay for other regional news services.
BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons has tacitly agreed that Bradshaw is right by cutting bonuses for the BBC’s overpaid top managers but dear old Downing Street (you can see why Gordon Brown gets someone else to write his books about courage) promptly undermined Bradshaw by refusing to endorse his criticisms.
GB doesn’t want a fight with the BBC before an election. He’s such a visionary that guy.
But Bradshaw is right; no-one in the commercial sector would pay BBC director general Mark Thompson anywhere approaching his more than generous £834,000 a year. As for deputy D-G Mark Byford no-one would pay him anything approaching his current £459,000 on the very good grounds that they don’t know what he does.
The upshot of Bradshaw’s words, to the effect that the BBC is lacking leadership, is that Thompson should quit.
But that would mean that the Brownies would have another problem on their plate, along with Afghanistan, swine flu and the recession.
So the useless herbert will be safe in his job for another couple of years.