It seems that at long last the Pollard report into the BBC’s handling of the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile will arrive at the corporation today (Tuesday 18 December).Once that is confirmed  we can assume that any challenges from those to be criticised in the report have been resolved one way or another.Until then there must still be the chance of a procedural hitch and a further delay.

The report will be considered alongside the findings of the internal disciplinary procedure chaired by Roger Mosey into Newsnight’s handling of the allegations against a ‘former senior Conservative’.That assumes there have been no last minute appeals.Today the BBC is also expected to apologise in court to Lord McAlpine.

Some of the key people in today’s decision-making are:

Tuesday morning meeting of BBC executives

Acting Director-General Tim Davie is being heavily lobbied inside the BBC by both executives and some key presenters to avoid sackings over ‘McAlpine’.

Dame Fiona Reynolds,the senior independent non-executive on the BBC Executive Board, was in the chair when the Board commissioned the Pollard report.George Entwistle had been ‘recused’ from that decision-making because of a potential conflict of interest.She only took up the post this year and is unknown to most people at the BBC

Tuesday afternoon meeting of the Trust

Lord Patten chairs the BBC Trust meeting  when they consider the recommendations from the executive.He will have an eye on both the internal and external perceptions of the decisions which have been made after the two separate processes.

Alison Hastings is one of the most experienced Trustees and the Chairman of the Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee.

Richard Ayre,like Alison Hastings, is a trustee with considerable journalistic experience,in his case inside BBC News. When he was on the Ofcom Content Board he was a consistently independent voice.

The decisions made at these meetings should be announced on Wednesday morning unless there is some procedural hitch.The Pollard report,the Mosey findings and the original McQuarrie report into ‘McAlpine’ will also be published.But the ‘defendants’ are still not expected to be allowed to speak publicly.

At the moment my money is on no sackings over McAlpine but that doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be a story in it.On ‘Savile’ there continues to be internal concern over the fate of Deputy Director of News,Steve Mitchell,who-the Sunday Times reported -may retire.Those who report to Mitchell have written to Tim Davie to support him.No news of any lobbying on behalf of Peter Rippon and his mistaken blog.People seem more confident about the future of Director of News,Helen Boaden.

It appears that the Newsnight sagas (the non-coverage of the guilty Savile and the coverage of the innocent McAlpine) are coming to a climax and a conclusion.

Here’s a ten point Q and A to help bring you up to speed and prepare you for what’s next.I should stress that it is all done without having seen or heard a word of what’s going to be published.

1.What exactly is going on at the moment?

The Pollard inquiry into the BBC’s handling of the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile is being conducted under the ‘Inquiry Rules 2006’. Rule 13  obliges an inquiry to give those it intends to criticise a right to reply before publication.Letters have been sent out to the people in that category and they have been replying.

Separately the BBC’s internal disciplinary procedure into what, for simplicity, we will call ‘McAlpine’ (not forgetting that the man himself was entirely innocent) has been completed subject to any appeals. The McQuarrie report into the events that led up to that transmission is expected to be released in full for the first time.

2.What is the timescale?

The BBC would like to publish everything at the same time and it would prefer to do that on Wednesday 19th December. To achieve that two things have to happen.

First of all the Pollard Inquiry,which is a separate entity from the BBC,has to complete the processes required by Rule 13 and that means exhausting the legal options open to anybody who is criticised. The time it is taking to do this suggests that at least one person is not happy and is challenging the draft criticisms. If you are interested in what happens in a Rule 13 process it is worth a quick look at what the BBC itself did when it saw drafts of what lord Hutton was going to say about it back in 2004. The paperwork is here.

Secondly the BBC will have to decide what to do to follow up the conclusions of the Pollard Review and specifically what to do with anybody criticised by Pollard who still works there. They will have to do this in the context of whatever their internal disciplinary procedure has decided should happen to those it cross-examined. This won’t be easy and may also take time.

My conclusion is that it is not safe to predict with confidence when we will know the outcome.

3.What exactly are Nick Pollard’s terms of reference?

Here’s what the BBC has said about the review:

‘The Pollard Review will seek to establish whether there were any failings in the BBC’s management of the Newsnight investigation relating to allegations of sexual abuse of children by Jimmy Savile, including the broadcast of tribute programmes on the BBC. The review will also look at the BBC’s handling of material that might have been of interest to the police or relevant authorities’.

4.What does the BBC most want to come out of the review?

The BBC will hope that Pollard will say that there is no evidence that corporate pressure was applied to the Editor of Newsnight,Peter Rippon, to drop the programme’s investigation into Jimmy Savile. In fact nobody has ever said there was evidence of this although people have undoubtedly wondered  if Pollard would find any in the internal emails which have disclosed to him or during the cross-examination of BBC witnesses by his QC. Of course it could have been that Rippon felt under pressure even if nobody overtly applied it .

The case for the editorial purity of Rippon’s decision is best put in an article in the British Journalism Review by the former Editor of the Today programme,Kevin Marsh. Intriguingly he says ‘Rippon recalls’ such internal tensions  as producer Meirion Jones seeming ‘much less confident about the strength and reliability of Karin Ward’s testimony than (reporter Lis) MacKean’ and  ‘he recalls’, too, that ‘he was unhappy that the corroborating witnesses and victims had been in contact with one another for many years previously; nor was he happy about the way they’d been questioned. And there was, as yet, no third-party evidence’.

Although George Entwistle gave MPs his hindsight view that Peter Rippon should have run an item about Savile I would be surprised if Nick Pollard ,although an experienced former editor,wants to be seen second-guessing Rippon’s editorial decision. But that’s not to say that he won’t comment on what the BBC did and didn’t do next,such as when exactly did they tell the police.

5.Who looks most at risk of criticism?

The most clear cut issue looks like being Peter Rippon’s blog and how it was so wrong for so long. Rippon must obviously take primary responsibility as the author but it looks as if responsibility for the delay in correcting it is to be shared.Last week the Times ran a story which said that the day after the blog was published Rippon told his bosses there were mistakes in it. In the Savile timeline on this blog we had already reported that the day after publication  Liz McKean and Meirion Jones emailed Rippon and Steve Mitchell (Deputy Director of BBC News) pointing out the blog was wrong. Now ‘a  source close to Mr Rippon’ is quoted in the Times saying that he told Steve Mitchell and the BBC press office that Mr Jones and Ms McKean had informed him of errors in his blog. The source is quoted as saying that: “There was no urgency about correcting it. There seems to have been a feeling that if they corrected it they might have to go back and correct it again.”

This approach will surprise those at the top of the BBC and the BBC Trust because they relied on Rippon’s blog as the definitive,in fact the only, BBC statement on the matter at the time.This may explain why inside the BBC there is a feeling that on the available evidence Rippon and Mitchell have most to fear from the inquiry.

In the Sunday Times Miles Goslett reports that Mitchell ‘one of the BBC’s most senior news executives is set to bear some of the heaviest criticism from the inquiry’. He also says ‘there is speculation at the BBC that Mitchell, 63, deputy director of news, will leave the corporation’.

Inside BBC News there is considerable sympathy for Mitchell who is regarded as a decent, hard-working, long-serving (38 years) stalwart of BBC News. His supporters are hoping for some elegant solution,especially given that Mitchell is already past the BBC retirement age.

6.What about the decision to go ahead with the tributes to Savile?

If the Pollard review decides that this issue is within its terms of reference then it seems an open and shut case that that tributes were broadcast despite the BBC having prima facie evidence from its own journalists that Savile abused under-age girls on its premises. The Newsnight team’s findings may not have satisfied their editor’s criteria of revealing an institutional failure but they were surely enough to have given executives cause to think again about transmission.Thats if they knew. Those who might have made that link can probably be divided between the inactives (those who should have done the telling) and the incurious (those who should have done the asking).George Entwistle cannot be immune from criticism even though he’s left. The BBC still has the opportunity to claw back some of the payoff.

7.Will anybody be sacked?

There will inevitably be a read-across of any convictions and sentences from the two separate processes. The legally-based independent review into the non-coverage of the guilty Savile and the more informal internal procedure into the coverage of the innocent McAlpine  are very different beasts. But that won’t stop people comparing their conclusions and what the BBC decided to do about the people. Inevitably the talk inside the BBC is whether those people decisions will be taken by the DG (either solely by the acting one,Tim Davie,or with a little help from the next one,Tony Hall) or by the Chairman, Lord Patten,and the Trustees.The internal betting is that if it were left to Davie he would prefer no sackings and that time-honoured solutions such as moves sideways could be deployed. But those with an eye on public opinion may be pressing for more. Remember the BBC Trust minutes record that the Trustees ‘urged the Director-General to take decisive, radical and rapid action in the light of the MacQuarrie report’ over McAlpine.The minutes also hint that the Trustees were asking for more than George Entwistle was willing to give.So this is a big moment for the Chairman.

8. Any other issues we should look out for?

Nick Pollard will have had to decide whether anybody in the management should be blamed for any misleading statements about the nature of the Newsnight investigation into Savile. Readers of our timeline will already have noticed the changing BBC position on what the investigation ‘was about’ and ‘what it started as’.

9. What about Mark Thompson and what he knew when?

This issue may not be within the terms of reference but as he was interviewed by the Pollard team it would be interesting to know if what Mark Thompson told Pollard  is  the same as what he originally told MP Rob Wilson. Last week the London Evening Standard reported that Mr Wilson had recently written to Mark Thompson’s new employer, the New York Times, but the paper had not replied.

10 Any complete surprises?

So far we have used Donald Rumsfeld’s invaluable analytical tool of ‘known knowns’ and ‘known unknowns’, but I wouldn’t rule out some ‘unknown unknowns’ coming to light amidst that thicket of internal emails,statements and cross-examinations.

A week ago when Sir Brian Leveson published his report I offered  a summary of his 2,000 pages in 70 words:

Leveson: “The press – but not politicians or the police – have been very naughty boys. Your ‘independent regulation’ plan is useless – adopt mine. I can help you cut your libel bills via an arbitration arm but we need a law to make this happen.

Cameron: “I like the ‘Leveson principles’ but not a Leveson law.”

Clegg: “I like them both.”

Cameron: “Let’s have another debate to get me off this hook.”

Now I can provide an update in just 5 words:

Cameron: “I’m off that hook”.

Downing Street’s plan is becoming clearer.

Step One –call in the editors and tell them to throw away that useless Hunt-Black plan and adopt Leveson’s model of an ‘independent self-regulator. Threaten them with full statutory regulation if they don’t do it quickly.

Step Two –implement the Leveson idea of an arbitration service to cut the press’s libel case costs by using any legalistic process that doesn’t have the word ‘statutory’ in it. Think of it as a ‘dab of legal gobbledygook’ rather than Hugh Grant’s ‘dab of statute’. Or if you like a David Cameron equivalent of Gordon Brown’s ‘stealth taxes’(revenue-raising without the dreaded word tax) called ‘stealth statute’ (regulatory rule-writing without the dreaded word ‘statutory”).

How do you make arbitration an attractive carrot to encourage papers to sign up with the new regulator? You change something that most people have never heard of called ’civil procedures’ instead of passing a new statute.

How do you keep an expert eye on whether the new regulator is working?Use a ‘verification body’ not a statutory committee.

Then, while DCMS lawyers prepare a red herring of a bill to prove statutory under-pinning won’t work and Lib-Lab lawyers spend hours producing one that prove it will, you package it all up in time for Christmas and declare victory. Then call in the Coalition doubters and ask them if they dare go into the division lobbies against the Government over legal hair-splitting.

The pieces in this seasonal jigsaw fell into place yesterday at a City University London ‘speed-debate’ –a seminar format that brought journalists, regulators, academics, lawyers and politicians together in a fast-track half-day debate.

Are there any downsides to this alongside the extraordinary irony that it is being negotiated in the kind of deal between press and politicians that Leveson spent months inquiring into?

Will victims of press intrusion ever get a say before the deal is done?

Won’t politicians be just as involved in appointing judges to ‘verification bodies’ as they would in appointing the chairmen of regulators?

There aren’t many days left in the post Leveson advent calendar to sort out what the regulator will actually do. Is it a good or bad idea to have mediation, adjudication, arbitration and standards enforcement all in the same body? That sounds like boring stuff that can be left to the regulatory anoraks further down the line.

Will the money raised by fines be enough to help pay for the extra cost of the free arbitration service? Will this free offer release a flood of complainants prepared to fill in a few forms for the chance of some cash?

Don’t suppose anybody has yet done a business plan and cash-flow forecast for the regulator or a risk analysis.

Be careful that we are not all back here in time for Christmas a few years out.

Sir Brian deserves the credit for getting so many things right but he also has to take his share of the blame for an overlong report that was sometimes confusing and occasionally contradictory.

Compare what he says about making ‘no recommendation’ on Ofcom as a backstop regulator in Executive Summary Paragraph 75 with what he says on page 1,788 (that’s right page 1,788) about Ofcom being ‘an obvious answer’.

And how the good advice he got from two of his advisory panel that he didn’t need to say this anyway got relegated to a footnote in Volume Four -not much return for their many days spent attending the hearings. Leveson created an ‘Ofcom problem’ that was a stick to beat him with.As one expert observer put it to me before our‘speed-debate’: ‘If only someone had told him to avoid any mention of the words ‘Ofcom’ and ‘backstop’.’

As the content regulator who spent two and a half years trying, against the odds, to persuade the deeply suspicious press that Ofcom didn’t want to regulate them, perhaps I should.

The story in The Sunday Times (2.12.12) headlined ‘New evidence links BBC chief to Savile warnings’  is a major development in the saga of who at the BBC knew what about Jimmy Savile when.

The New York Post is running the story under the headline  A ‘smoking gun‘. Unlike the Sunday Times article the New York Post story is not behind a pay wall.

Emails released by the BBC under Freedom of Information laws to freelance Miles Goslett show for the first time that an email which should have alerted the then Director-General, Mark Thompson, to the allegations against Savile was forwarded directly to him not just once but twice and this happened seven months before he left the corporation on his way to The New York Times.

In The Sunday Times story I am quoted as saying that ‘It is clear from the evidence released by the BBC that two of Mark Thompson’s closest staff forwarded to him an important email about an article which appeared in The Oldie magazine in February. If he read the email properly, and read The Oldie article, his statement to an MP on October 23 in which he said he never heard any allegation about Savile during his director- generalship is untrue. And if he never read it this has turned out to be a serious oversight’.

Here’s why I believe that.

The email trail released by the BBC has been posted on The Sunday Times website. The first released email comes from a journalist in The Telegraph Group – his or her name has been deleted or ‘redacted’ by the BBC – and was sent on 8 February 2012 to ‘Mark Thompson-and-PA’. This is the kind of email address used by companies to allow those working with executives to read incoming emails sent to the executives. Depending on how exactly the email account is set up the executive may or may not see the emails as they arrive.

The journalist sending the email writes: ‘Dear Mark. Sorry to bother you again, but is there any truth in the story in The Oldie that you were aware of the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile and Duncroft School? Best, thanks.’

The significance of The Oldie story was that it was about allegations against Savile of offences against under-age girls from Duncroft school on BBC premises.

Nine minutes later somebody at the BBC – again the names have been redacted by the BBC in the released version – sends somebody else in the BBC an email saying ‘This should be forwarded to Paul and press office which you’ve probably already done’.

Paul Mylrea was Mark Thompson’s Director of  Communications.

We don’t know the identity of the sender or the receiver but from other information sent to Miles Goslett by the BBC and from the circumstances it is reasonable to assume this is between two people working in Mark Thompson’s office.

Ten minutes later the receiver replies to the sender:

‘Hi-yes. I’ve sent it to Paul and Mark. Will send to press office if Paul doesn’t get back to me within the next hour’. It is signed R.

We assume that the ‘Mark’ is Mark Thompson but the BBC, for some reason, has not released the email which R sent to ‘Mark’ so we don’t know what R said in his or her covering note to Mark.

We do know that R said something because the BBC have taken the trouble to redact it from Paul Mylrea’s reply. In that email Mylrea simply writes: ‘passing this on to Press Office’.

The most important thing about this particular email is that Paul Mylrea copies in an email account ‘zzMarkzzThompson-DG’ which I know to have been used by Mark Thompson personally while he was at the BBC. It is also important to confirm that the email contains the original inquiry from the journalist: ‘Dear Mark. Sorry to bother you again, but is there any truth in the story in The Oldie that you were aware of the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile and Duncroft School?

The bottom line in this email chain is that we can see one of Mark Thompson’s staff saying ‘I’ve sent it to Mark’ an email about Savile and we can see another actually sending it to him.

The Sunday Times has obtained a second chain of BBC emails between April and June of this year, showing that Thompson’s office was also warned about an FoI request about Savile made by freelance journalist Miles Goslett. There is no evidence to suggest this second email trail was copied to Thompson personally.

Mark Thompson’s spokesman has issued a statement to The Sunday Times:

“The director-general’s [DG] office routinely passed queries from journalists to the BBC press office, and queries about freedom of information requests to the FoI team without alerting or involving the DG. That is what happened in these cases.He was not made aware of the allegations involving Jimmy Savile while he was in office at the BBC.”

This misses the point. Undoubtedly Mark Thompson’s office routinely passed queries from journalists to the BBC press office, But what happened on this occasion is that they also took the trouble to make sure he knew of what amounted to an alert about a story he may have missed.

This is an appropriate moment to remind ourselves what Mark Thompson said in his letter written to Rob Wilson MP on 23 October 2012:

‘You quote me as saying: “During my time as director general of the BBC, I never heard any allegations or received any complaints about Jimmy Savile.” Both of these statements are true to the very best of my knowledge’.

There are bound to be those who are surprised by the release of these new emails at this particular time. The BBC have sent Miles Goslett a long letter explaining why this information was initially not released but  has now been sent to him. Having read the letter,  it raises as many questions as it answers.

The BBC policy on releasing material under FOI is set out in a section of its website . The ‘Excluded’ section includes:

‘The Act recognises the different position of the BBC….by providing that it covers information “held for purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature”. This means that the Act does not apply to material held for the purposes of creating the BBC’s output (TV, radio, online etc), or material which supports and is closely associated with these creative activities’.

The BBC’s FOI experts have to decide whether applications fall within this exception, but their decision can be challenged by applicants. The internal email chain shows that the BBC originally rejected Goslett’s FOI application as ‘OOS’ (out of scope) because it involved a piece of BBC journalism, Newsnight. However at least one member of the FOI team is seen to suggest internally that this may not apply to all his list of questions and that there may be  a case for revealing some of what he asked for. Nothing seems to have come of it at this point.

When Goslett attempted to engage the BBC FOI team in a dialogue about the principle of what could be released  under FOI, a released internal BBC email shows one member of their FOI team telling another: ‘Of course I am not going to talk to him on the phone. We only clarified that we were talking about BBC News to try to stop him making mischief’.

That was then (20 May 2012) and this is now, and the emails, or at least most of them, have finally been released.

Looking back a week, those who read my post after Lord Patten’s appearance at the Commons Culture Committee may remember that I highlighted his reluctance to support Mark Thompson’s position. I also wondered if he had seen emails which, we assume, the BBC had sent to the Pollard inquiry but had not yet been released.

Which brings us to the Pollard inquiry itself. We still don’t know if the issues raised by the released emails fall within Nick Pollard’s terms of reference.

If it is judged that they don’t then an intriguing situation will arise.

Effectively there will have been an expensive inquiry into what happened before the tributes to Savile went out, and it is  possible that this will find there was not undue pressure on the Editor of Newsnight.

But there will not have been an inquiry into what exactly senior BBC executives did after the tributes went out as the allegations continued to grow that they had lauded a paedophile.

There is also growing unhappiness in BBC News about the difference between the approach of the Pollard Inquiry into ‘Savile’ and that of the internal disciplinary procedures for those involved in the ‘McAlpine’ report on Newsnight. Of course the two are inevitably different. One is being conducted under formal Inquiry Rules, the other under an internal disciplinary code. The Pollard inquiry therefore has a more adversarial style of questioning by the QC –think Robert Jay QC at Leveson on one of his more sceptical days. Depending on the individual QC such a style can appear as ‘bullying’ to witnesses.

At the ‘Savile’ inquiry interviews can take days, but at the ‘McAlpine’ hearing they normally last under an hour.

Among the News folk this had added to a growing belief that the Pollard inquiry has ended up being out of proportion to the original issue-what they see a decision by one Editor. Why, they wonder, is a good story (Savile) missed so much more significant than a bad story (McAlpine) transmitted.Now they will be interested to see if decisions made by much more senior executives than the Editor of Newsnight are subject to the same scrutiny.

Meanwhile The New York Observer reports that Mark Thompson has postponed two open meetings he was scheduled to hold with his staff at The New York Times. The Observer publishes an email  in which Thompson says that the ‘Town Hall’ meetings that were to have happened on December 17 and 18 will now be held  sometime in January. These meetings were to have been, ‘a chance for as many people as possible to see me face to face and for us to begin a conversation about the future direction of this great news organization’.

Thompson says he chose December 17 and 18 ‘because I expected them to come after the publication of Nick Pollard’s enquiry into the BBC’s handling of the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile.  I know that there’s been considerable – and quite understandable – interest in this topic inside as well as outside The Times.  I wanted to address questions about it at the Town Halls once the enquiry was out and all the facts were known.

‘It now turns out that Nick Pollard will not submit his report at the end of November as originally planned but some weeks later.  As a result, I believe it makes sense to move the Town Halls to early in the new year.  By then, anyone who is interested can look at the report and I can address their questions on the basis of the facts’.

The New York Observer reporter comments: ‘Looks like 2013 will be off to an interesting start.’

Leveson: The press – but not politicians or the police – have been very naughty boys.Your ‘independent regulation’ plan is useless, adopt mine. I can help you cut your libel bills via an arbitration arm but we need a law to make this happen.

Cameron: I like the ‘Leveson principles’ but not a Leveson law.

Clegg: I like them both.

Cameron: Let’s have another debate to get me off this hook.

The media reports on Lord Patten’s appearance at the Culture Select Committee on 27^th November understandably focus on his encounter with Philip Davies MP, his revelations about the financial negotiations with George Entwistle and the cost to licence-payers of the various inquiries.

But there were other things that were said, or to be more precise things that were partly said and things that were hinted at.  You might want to read this blog post in conjunction with watching some of the video of the session which is here. In the text I give the approximate timings from the video.

1. What Lord Patten said about Mark Thompson and when Thompson knew about the allegations against Jimmy Savile.

Rarely can a Chairman of the BBC have been so cautious and so restrained in what he said about a man who only ten weeks ago he praised in these terms:

‘His creativity, vision and leadership have made him an outstanding Director-General of the BBC and he will be sorely missed.’

Philip Davies MP put to Lord Patten various dates which appeared in this blog’s list of the ten days when Thompson’s office received information about Savile and the BBC while he was still DG of the BBC (See blogpost ‘A new timeline from the death of Savile to the appointment of Hall’)

Lord Patten did not dispute any of the dates. Nor did he seek to defend Thompson in advance of the Pollard report.

The key part of the exchange between Lord Patten and Philip Davies MP is in this transcript, including the dates from this blog.

What should we conclude from this? At one level Lord Patten is quite properly observing caution in commenting on material which is currently being considered by the Pollard inquiry. (I can confirm The Sunday Times story – followed up by The Daily Star! – that the inquiry have seen all the material I have published).But it is also possible , and I put it no higher than this, that he may be aware of other material from email searches which the BBC has submitted to the inquiry.

What happens next? We may be assuming that this sort of issue will be covered by Nick Pollard. But a report by Ben Webster in The Times today (28 Nov) says that ‘the inquiry will not consider in detail what happened in the 10 months after the Newsnight investigation was cancelled, when BBC executives received multiple warnings that the corporation’s reputation was at risk over a suspected cover-up’ and that Pollard will only publish ‘excerpts of evidence he deems relevant to his conclusions’. If both these forecasts turn out to be correct, emails which only relate to an alleged ‘cover-up’ may not be published.

In contrast to this Lord Patten – who once said he wouldn’t be surprised if there were resignations after Pollard publishes- continues to build expectations of dramatic events. In a speech earlier this week, he said: ‘Once we get the Pollard report, it will,I hope ,be much clearer to the Trust what went wrong and how.  There may well be consequences for some of the individuals involved.  And we will want to make a clear statement about where we think there were management failings – both within the news division itself and, later, in the corporate handling of the crisis’.

Such statements get a very cool even hostile reaction within BBC News which is looking for what they would probably call a ‘properly calibrated’ response to Pollard not one aimed at alleviating outside pressure.

 2. Why did Lord Patten say ‘no’ when he meant ‘yes’?

One of the most cryptic exchanges of the session concerned conversations between the Trust and George Entwistle on the Saturday when he resigned.

Lord Patten was asked whether Entwistle had first offered to resign in the conference call that followed his Today appearance, rather than after it.

Lord Patten said (12.24pm on the video time code):  

“No…except when I say no, I mean yes…The Trust had made it clear that we expected very decisive action to be taken about the Newsnight programme. The sort of action which Tim Davie is taking at the moment, or considering taking.George Entwistle then said he wasn’t sure he would be able to satisfy the Trust and he said something like ‘so there are implications. I may have to talk to the Chairman of the Trust about that if I can’t do it’ – so that I took to be the suggestion he might want to resign.”

Deconstructing this, I take this to mean that members of the Trust wanted Entwistle as DG to sack the people involved in the decision to transmit the Newsnight story which led to the identification of Lord McAlpine. Patten talked of ’the sort of action which Tim Davie is taking at the moment’  which would appear to be the disciplinary proceedings which are underway but he then added an important rider ‘or considering taking’. That rider cannot apply to the disciplinary proceedings themselves because they are already underway .It sounds to me to be a reference to sackings which may follow the proceedings.If that’s right ,and I have had it confirmed by a senior BBC source, then the Trust wanted sackings but Entwistle said ‘ he wasn’t sure he would be able to satisfy them’  and  that contributed to his resignation.

All this would fit with what BBC Trustee Anthony Fry told the Commons Public Accounts Committee on the 22  November: ‘It would be fair to say that the view of the Trust when the director-general left the meeting was that there were serious concerns that the gravity of the situation had been grasped by the director-general and some of his colleagues. The director-general had suggested to some of us that the danger would be over reacting whereas it seemed to me the danger for the BBC would be under reacting’.

We know that the day after Entwistle’s departure, the new acting DG, Tim Davie, did not sack anybody but started a disciplinary process. As another part of what begins to look like a package to show he had ‘got a grip’ he decided that the Director of BBC News, Helen Boaden and her deputy, Steve Mitchell, should ‘step aside’ because of the  confusion about who was in charge of ‘Savile-related’ stories .It was reported that BBC Scotland controller Ken MacQuarrie  had cited as a factor  in  his report on the ‘McAlpine affair’.

We have not yet seen the MacQuarrie report, the Select Committee were told it would be published   soon. When the report is published it will be very interesting to see if MacQuarrie actually recommended the ‘step-aside’ step. There are those in the BBC who believe that he specifically did not and that he also may not have said confusion about managerial responsibility was one of the causes of the Newsnight error.

It is quite noticeable that the BBC press statement about the MacQuarrie report says that he has ‘reported his findings’ and, a sentence later, that ‘the following actions have been announced’. It doesn’t say that as a result of his findings the following actions have been announced.

At the time BBC Business Editor, Robert Peston, wrote in his blog: ‘I have learned that lawyers acting for Ms Boaden and Mr Mitchell have informed Mr Davie that they are quite capable of running BBC News, even with the uncertainty created by the Pollard inquiry. Peston said that he had consulted BBC colleagues and ‘ many said they believed Ms Boaden and Mr Mitchell ought to be put firmly back in charge of news, because of the perception that they would never have permitted the latest child abuse story to have run on Newsnight’

So whether MacQuarrie recommended the ‘step-aside’ or not, this would have been a tough call for the new acting DG Tim Davie and may even have affected whether he got the interim job at all. Effectively he was having to choose between the Trustees who were looking for decisive action and the many supporters of Boaden and Mitchell inside the Corporation who thought such a step would not only be unfair on them but the wrong thing to do for the BBC.

What happens next? We await the full MacQuarrie report and more importantly the decisions at the end of the disciplinary proceedings. Inevitably people at the BBC are wondering who will make the decision about any sanctions against individuals. Presumably that is a matter for management in the form of the acting DG, Tim Davie, rather than the Trust and Lord Patten. And what role,if any, will the new DG, Tony Hall, have in advance of taking up the post in March?

3. Lord Patten and his ‘cuttings’.

Lord Patten was asked about the number of newspaper reports earlier this year which should have alerted him and Mark Thompson to the allegations about Savile’s assaults on under-age girls on BBC premises. He repeated rather wearily that he had not seen them.

For those who may think that every morning Lord Patten,and his former Director-General Mark Thompson , had to wade through pages and pages of photocopied articles in a bundle of press cuttings, I bring news. I have seen the daily press cuttings service which is emailed to BBC executives and Trustees each morning and it is very similar to the format which was used by Ofcom when I worked there and, I suspect, by many organisations.

The daily BBC email has ten headings :

BBC National Press | BBC CORPORATE & KEY PROGRAMMES | MEDIA INDUSTRY | TV & RADIO REVIEWS | TV PUBLICITY | TV PREVIEWS | RADIO PUBLICITY | RADIO PREVIEWS | BBC FILMS |

When you click on each section BBC executives and Trustees are offered one or two sentence summaries of each news story in that section.

The BBC cuttings service for 8January this year contained this summary of a Sunday Mirror story in the ‘BBC Corporate and Key programmes’ section:

‘Newsnight reportedly launched an investigation into Sir Jimmy Savile’s private life in the days after his death in October but were ordered to scrap the report by senior BBC executives. BBC1, BBC2, BBC News
Source:
Newsnight probe into sex claims against national treasure Sir Jimmy axed by BBC bosses,Sunday Mirror,8-Jan-2012, page 9

Anybody receiving the email could click on the underlined section and be taken through to the story.

So this was not a story hidden away at the bottom of a pile of cuttings, it was just one of eleven stories in a key section of the electronic cuttings. Summaries of other stories about Savile and the BBC were similarly distributed to BBC executives and Trustees on other dates.

What happens next? We wait to see if the Pollard Inquiry is able to say anything about the events which followed the decision not to transmit the Savile story on Newsnight.

Whether the Pollard report does or doesn’t it is clear to me that there is more to come out about those events.

James Harding,Editor of the Times, has,in my opinion,consistently shown himself as the editor who best understands how a new independent regulator can help get the press out of the problems it has got itself into.So I attach particular significance to his Opinion piece in the paper this morning which adds an extra element to the proposal which the newspapers have put on the table. He calls it a ‘judicial but not a statutory backstop’. Harding suggests that the Lord Chief Justice should appoint an ‘Oversight Panel’  to ensure ‘no return to the “smoke-filled rooms” of the past’ in press regulation.

In my view this doesn’t solve the other shortcomings in the ‘Hunt-Black’  plan but crucially it puts something new on the table which David Cameron can latch onto and give himself more time to see if the newspapers can come up with something better than their last offer.

So expect another round before Downing Street makes any decisions.

Speaking at a ‘Voice of the Listener and Viewer’ conference In London this morning I had the luxury of expanding the 70 word Leveson update I posted yesterday into a three minute version:

‘We have never had press regulation in the UK before. What we have had is a body set up by the newspaper industry –the Press Complaints Commission is the latest version- which has tried to mediate between complainants and newspapers. That is a useful function but it is not regulation.

It was the current Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission,Lord Hunt, who surprised his predecessors ,who had always said that the PCC was a regulator, by declaring that it had never been.

At the start of this debate there was a range of options;

At one end –you might call that the libertarian end- just keep an industry-run complaints handling body,remembering that in the U.S. they don’t even have that. If you’ve got a complaint against a newspaper there you take it up with them directly  or go to court. There is nothing in between.No regulator.

At the other end of the range, the Ofcom model, regulating newspaper content in the same way as broadcasting.

Both those options have effectively been rejected,hardly anybody spoke up for them.

And we are left with two in the middle of that scale and they represent a consensus that regulation is needed, and by a regulator I think there is also a consensus that by this we mean a body which will decide if the Editor’s Code has been broken and impose sanctions of some kind on those responsible for serious breaches of the code.

The choice on the table now is between:

On the one hand a system of regulation where membership would be voluntary, where decisions would be enforced by the law of contract –specifically a five year contract signed by newspapers -and where the  backstop would be a body called Pressbof run by the newspaper industry (this is known as the Hunt-Black plan). Critics of this plan say-among other things-that it is not truly independent of the newspaper industry and that newspapers can effectively buy themselves out of the contract they have signed if they don’t like the way the regulator has turned out.

On the other hand,  regulation which would not be voluntary for large media groups because it would be required by law, where decisions would be enforced by the members and the backstop would be a body called an ‘independent backstop auditor’, created by parliament (that’s the plan from the Media Standards Trust which I helped to prepare,there are other similar versions from other organisations).Critics of this plan say that this system  would not be independent enough of government because if you give parliament a say in even creating  a backstop auditor that will be the thin end of the wedge towards more political involvement in press regulation.

Lord Justice Leveson has seen both plans and cross-examined their supporters and their critics . Now he we await his version. Perhaps we should see what he says.

I know it is a revolutionary thought to  read something before we attack it or defend it but I commend this course of action to you.’

With publication of  Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations set for Thursday 29th  November and the pre-publication rhetoric reaching new levels ,here’s my take on the real bottom line  in 70 words:

The choice so far is between regulation where membership is voluntary,where decisions are enforced by the law of contract and where the  backstop is a body run by the newspaper industry (the Hunt-Black plan) and regulation which is not voluntary for large media groups, where decisions are enforced by the members and the backstop body is created by parliament (e.g  the MST plan). Let’s see what Leveson’s version looks like.