Here are two pieces I’ve done recently which are pegged to the death of Baroness Thatcher. First an article for the ITN 55 Club magazine which is read by former ITN staff:

If you had to sum up the relationship between Margaret Thatcher and ITN in one episode it would be the night in 1987 that she came to visit the Superchannel News portacabin. Perched proudly on the roof at Wells Street it seemed to symbolize to her a cost-effective, enterprising, commercially-funded international news service in contrast to the BBC’s plan for a publicly-funded BBC World channel. The fact that the BBC never did get that public funding for their channel is testimony to the impact the visit made on government policy. (Pity that the ITV companies couldn’t agree on the future of Superchannel and later sold it to an Italian family that didn’t want a news service). Mostly the Thatcher-ITN relationship was based on people. Gordon Reece was a television producer who’d worked at ITN and other ITV companies and became her adviser on all things television. Apart from his advice on how she should look and sound, it was his idea that during election campaigns she should focus as much on photo-opportunities as she should on the speeches which until then had been the staple diet of TV news at election time. I remember the day he came to ITN and told us his plan. From that meeting grew our idea of so-called ‘target teams’, three or four person units who would each follow a party leader and provide not just the pictures that Reece and his counterparts laid on but also insider analysis. Michael Brunson was to be our target team reporter on that famous 1979 photo-op as Margaret Thatcher cuddled a calf. But it wasn’t just an ex-ITN man that provided a link between Downing Street and Wells Street. Alastair Burnet had always been close to her predecessor as Conservative Party leader, Ted Heath. Despite that, rather than because of that, he had good contacts with the next Tory at Number Ten. Sue Tinson also had contacts there and received a damehood in the Thatcher resignation honours list. She remained a close friend for many years and ensured that when Lady Thatcher gave her first interview after leaving power it was to Michael Brunson. To those who wondered if ITN and the Thatcher Government were too close at times my view, as somebody who was never that close, was that the relationship never strayed into pro-Tory bias. But undoubtedly that’s how it looked to the up and coming New Labour spin doctors like Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell. Or how they chose to see it.

It was called ‘A Service of Thanksgiving Celebrating the Lives of Terry Lloyd,Frederic Nerac,Hussein Osman and Gaby Rado’. The organisers,ITN, didn’t call it a memorial service,probably because Fred Nerac’s body has never been found therefore officially he is ‘missing’. There was thanksgiving for their lives but so emotional was the event that at times it felt like a delayed funeral. Ten years may have passed but for many of those at the journalists’ church,St Bride’s in Fleet Street, those sad days in Iraq felt more recent,much more recent, than that.

I have attended many sad services at St Bride’s,at one the then rector invited me to come back ‘for the events we do other than memorial services’ .But undoubtedly this was the most moving. That’s partly because four men were lost ,three in one incident and one in another,partly because Fred is still missing,but mostly because six children of the men were there and,ten years after their father’s deaths or disappearance ,were old enough to take a full part  in the service.

Fred Nerac’s daughter Camille and his son Alexandre (himself a news cameraman) read letters to their father they had written for the service and Terry Lloyd’s daughter Chelsey gave a reading.At the end of the service they were joined by Chelsey’s brother Oliver, and by Gaby Rado’s sons, Tom and Louis, to light candles in the heart of the church. A  clip of Hussein Osman with his son was included in a video tribute.

The four men’s former colleagues also took part in the service. ITV News’s Bill Neely,who had hired Fred as a video editor/cameraman for the Brussels bureau,gave an address as did Martin Geissler who remembered his ‘mentor’,Terry Lloyd. From Channel Four News Lindsey Hilsum  read a Shakespeare sonnet in memory of Gaby Rado and Lindsay Taylor imagined a phone call to his old friend recalling memories and recapping the missed events of the last ten years.

The Editor of ITV News ,Deborah Turness,sat next to Fred’s wife Fabienne who she had helped through the trauma ten years ago,and read ‘Memorial’ by James Fenton. The wonderful St Bride’s Choir ended the service with  their own interpretation of ‘I know him so well’.

The congregation who comprised all facets of the ‘ITN family’ past and present and  included some of the ITN diaspora now working at the BBC and Sky News went round the corner for a drink and talked about a special night and some very special fallen colleagues.

On the 22^nd March 2003 ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd died on the outskirts of Basra as coalition troops advanced on Iraq’s second city. The post-mortem showed he was killed by ammunition fired by  American troops and Iraqi forces. It was the first time an ITN reporter had been killed in a combat zone and remains the heaviest loss of life among any British television team. One of Terry’s crew, Frederic Nerac, and his translator, Hussein Osman, were also killed .

The tenth anniversary is a reflective moment for those of us who worked with them and specifically those of us  who commissioned their journey to the front line. I was the Chief Executive and Editor-in-Chief of ITN. Primarily we remember the men and their families. ITV has shown a documentary made by ITN Productions in which ITV News anchor Mark Austin accompanied Terry’s daughter Chelsey to Iraq and America to make ‘Who Killed My Dad –the Death of Terry Lloyd’. Some of us will gather with Chelsey at Terry’s local to remember his bravery and his humour.ITN correspondent Bill Neely wrote movingly in the Observer of Fred Nerac who was one of his crew in the Brussels bureau at that time. ITN has organized an event at the journalists’ church, St Bride’s in Fleet Street, to mark the death of not just Terry, Fred and Hussein but also Gaby Rado of Channel Four News who died in Northern Iraq just one week later. In that church there is a list of the media who died in that war that includes Richard Wild a young journalist who worked at ITN during that war and afterwards went to Baghdad as a freelance and was shot dead in the street.

Therefore it might seem odd in these circumstances to add a further special mention for the man who gave the first order for American troops to open fire at Terry and his team.

Back on that Saturday morning in March 2013 those of us at ITN headquarters feared Terry and his team had died when we got the first reports back from the only survivor among the crew, cameraman Daniel Demoustier.

We knew that night that Terry was dead when we saw Al Jazeera footage of his body being taken into a mortuary in Basra. But we didn’t know what had caused his death and we had no idea what had happened to Fred and Hussein. Were they dead too? Perhaps they were still alive in the hands of the Iraqis. The American authorities initially denied, in writing, that their troops were even in the relevant area at the time. It became clear very soon that the British authorities weren’t going to do much to help.

Being the junior partner in a wartime coalition left the British more concerned about upsetting their allies than finding the truth about the incident. And it probably didn’t help our cause that the missing men weren’t British passport holders but just employees of a British company.

The fact that more information was eventually discovered, though sadly it was mostly confirmation of bad news, was down to two women journalists at ITN.

The first was ITN producer Glenda Gaitz who we sent to Basra and, taking many more risks than we or she realized at the time, searched the city for any signs of her missing colleagues. With fellow producer Nick Walshe and ex-SAS men we had hired, she put up missing person posters, hired translators to check every hospital and they even arranged for DNA swabs to be taken from mortuaries and graves for any sign of the missing men. The DNA tests led to the discovery of Hussein’s body but Fred’s body has never been found. Glenda also managed to track down an American officer who witnessed what had happened. He explained that soldiers had seen an armed Iraqi vehicle coming towards them , feared for their own safety, and opened fire not realizing that the vehicle alongside the Iraqis was an ITN car driven by Daniel with Terry alongside him in the passenger seat. The Iraqis fired back and Terry was hit. Glenda also found the Iraqi driver of a minibus who put Terry and other injured people on board to drive them to hospital .He reported that the Americans had opened fire on his makeshift ambulance.

Glenda handed over her evidence to the British military police where Major Kay Roberts had been the sole internal voice trying to get enough resources from her MoD masters to help.

In 2006 a British coroner recorded a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ by American troops. The American military had refused to take part in the proceedings just as they had at any inquest into any British death in that war in which they had been involved.

As Mark Austin wrote this month  in a preview of his anniversary film: ‘the American authorities blocked and stalled, British prosecutors ruled there was insufficient evidence to take the matter any further and there have been no trials, no courts martial and no closure’.

ITN correspondent Penny Marshall set out to find more about the American troops who were involved. Through sustained journalistic enterprise she worked out that US Marine Lieutenant Vince Hogan was the commander of Red Platoon, Delta Company, on that day. He had given the order to open fire. Then she set about finding him. From the moment that Penny located Hogan in his home town he has never sought to avoid responsibility for what he did. When the idea of an anniversary film was mooted ITN asked if he would agree to meet Terry’s daughter Chelsey. He helped to provide her with a better understanding of what happened and why he had given the first order to open fire as the vehicles came towards him.

But he said he knew nothing of the shooting at the makeshift ambulance with the injured on board when it set off  in the opposite direction, away from his troops, towards the nearest hospital.Indeed he said he did not know it had happened.

Perhaps most importantly Lieutenant Hogan seems to have provided closure of a kind for Chelsey Lloyd.

As Mark Austin recorded after that meeting: “Chelsey, no longer consumed by a desire for vengeance, hugged Hogan before he left.As Chelsey and I walked from the coffee shop, I asked her whether the meeting had changed things for her .

“He was a good man, a nice man,” she said. “And I think I know why he did what he did.”

Mark continued:’She still doesn’t know exactly who killed her Dad. But ten years on she has some answers, she has some peace and she has a little more understanding.And that, for Chelsey, is something.’

Sadly there is no such comfort or closure for Fred Nerac’s wife Fabienne . With no clear evidence of what happened to her husband she kept a hope alive that perhaps one day he might be found alive. Eventually she had to give up that hope but maybe one day she,like Chelsey Lloyd ,will get some peace,some answers as to what happened on that day outside Basra ten years ago.

‘When Reporters Cross the Line’ is the title of a book which I am currently completing with a colleague,Jeff Hulbert. It will be published by Biteback in August.This enterprise partly explains the lack of blogs on this site recently.

One of the undrawn lines in journalism is what risks are worth taking in pursuit of a story.

As part of my research I have been listening to an interview which John Simpson,World Affairs Editor of the BBC,gave on 16th January to a former BBC Foreign Editor,Vin Ray, at the Frontline Club in London. The audio is available on a Frontline Club podcast on itunes.

I have transcribed a section of the interview in which Vin Ray asks about safety issues in dangerous places.

VIN RAY:

Do you have any kind of policy when it comes to safety,how do you make that judgement about what to do?

JOHN SIMPSON:‘I do but it sounds so self- regarding, I’m a bit embarrassed to say it but I’ve learned two things,only two things in my career,one is just to keep on going and manifestly I have done that but the other thing is when you are in these kinds of situations,get in there, just absolutely get in there,get closer to it…Sometimes your colleagues aren’t as enthusiastic and as willing as you may be,but what I feel about it is..

VIN RAY:you don’t worry about putting your colleagues lives by ‘getting in there’?

JOHN SIMPSON : I,I,no, no I don’t, because they are there to do a job, just as I am, I wouldn’t let them,I really,really wouldn’t let them go ahead of me or go to places where I’m not prepared to go,certainly I would think that was the most disgusting way of behaving but you know,the only point of being somewhere like that is to show people back home and around the world what is really going on.The cameraman,whoever else may be there knows that and that’s why they are there and it’s a duty which I think you don’t abrogate and I just think that you’ve got to get stuck in and if you don’t get stuck in you don’t get the pictures, and if you don’t get the pictures you’re not doing the job,and if you’re not doing the job,you’re not telling people what is really,really happening.You know nobody has to do this, you can be the Arts Correspondent, you can specialize, nobody in the BBC –I mean God you know as Foreign Editor of the BBC-sometimes its really difficult to drag people out of the BBC’s embrace,to get to dangerous places,so many people coming up to them and saying you don’t need to go if you don’t want to and don’t ,you know sometimes you really got to kind of grit your teeth and get  out of the bloody place because they want you to, they give you far too many chances I think to back out but that’s what I think. The cameraman, the kind of cameraman that I work with are people that understand that,I wouldn’t take anybody to anything that didn’t understand the problem and wasn’t prepared to do it. I wouldn’t look down on them,I wouldn’t criticise them, everybody has got a right to say this is a line beyond which I am not going to go but you are paid to do the job, you are paid to tell people what’s happening, then you got to do it.’

Today (Friday 18^th January 2013) the funeral is being held of the former BBC Director-General of the BBC, Alasdair Milne. As befits a bagpipe-playing former Gordon Highlander and Controller of BBC Scotland, the service will be at the main Church of Scotland ‘Kirk’ in London, St Columba’s in Pont Street.

Most of the newspaper obituaries of Milne have understandably focused on his tensions with Margaret Thatcher’s Government and with the BBC Governors who finally removed him after five years in 1987.But Milne’s years at the top of the BBC are also interesting for the way he chose to run the place and whether there are any lessons for the incoming Director-General Lord (Tony) Hall.

There are some similarities between the two men; BBC lifers with one career excursion, Milne to independent production, Hall to the Royal Opera House. But there are more differences, for starters Milne was arrogant, Hall is not.

The issue that connects them, and indeed all the successors and predecessors, is what a DG does about ‘the Barons’. These were and are the senior BBC executives, previously only men but now men and women, who control large chunks of BBC turf, remain publicly loyal to the concept of ‘one BBC’ but are brilliantly manipulative of the opportunities for personal fiefdom that such a massive organization inevitably creates.

Never having met Alasdair Milne myself I’ve taken the counsel of David Barlow, formerly Secretary of the BBC,a role which has always provided a perfect observation post for monitoring DGs at the ‘Third Floor Front’ of Broadcasting House (BH). He saw Milne in but had been succeeded by Patricia Hodgson by the time of the infamous Governors’ meeting when Chairman of the Governors ,Duke Hussey, showed Milne out.

David told me: ‘a Baron’s success and status was often determined not by creative achievement but by the size of his or her share of the licence fee cake. As someone once said, the BBC was a spend organization not, in those days, an earn one and this helped to determine the nature of the beast’.

BBC DGs have tried to manage the Barons in different ways.

The first was Milne’s way which, it seems, was to do a deal with them, ‘I’m a programme person too, you stay loyal to me and I won’t interfere’. This may sound surprising considering that Milne apparently had a very high opinion of his own ability to do whatever he chose to do. But not so surprising when you remember that he’d been a Baron himself, in charge of BBC TV, and that he’d grown up in a BBC which was used to feudal domains.

David Barlow’s view is that this practice goes back at least as far as when Charles Curran became the overall feudal ruler in 1969. Curran had little experience in television so did a deal with the Barons of Television Centre (TVC), especially Huw Wheldon, to keep out of their affairs. In return he would expect loyalty from them in other matters.  The next DG, Ian Trethowan, apparently did the same –he promised the succession to Alasdair Milne (which he later delivered) and left him to run TV. Trethowan also kept away from radio at BH which he had recently run and from external services at Bush House.

David Barlow remembers that when Milne was appointed as DG he broadly kept to the same rules – Aubrey Singer and Bill Cotton ran TV and Milne too also wasn’t that interested in Radio or Bush. But this regime apparently worked less well. Milne was bored with admin and missed the buzz of TVC, he was after all the first BBC DG who’d ever made big TV shows. He had major battles with his second Chairman, Stuart Young (brother of Tory minister Lord Young) who concluded together with some other Governors that Milne did not bring a coherent editorial strategy across the BBC and that in this vacuum what united the BBCmore than anything was not a programme ethic but resources –what David Barlow calls ‘the bogs, boilers and equipment’. Stuart Young died of cancer in his early 50s and was succeeded by Duke Hussey. In David Barlow’s view this emphasis on resources predominated in a divided Board under Hussey and when they fired Milne they appointed a man who knew about resources, Michael Checkland.

He provided model number two.:‘I’m not a programmes person but I will hire a deputy who is’ (enter John Birt) . The Baron who actually suggested Checkland hire Birt, Michael Grade, came to regret it as Birt,having spotted the flaw in the feudal/resources argument, saw an opportunity for another view of the corporation more to his liking. From his role of Deputy DG ,whose main responsibility was news and current affairs, he began to intervene in other key appointments at TVC and expressed views about scheduling. Birt had indeed seen that the feudal model did not handle News and Current Affairs satisfactorily – indeed different solutions had been found over the years none of them wholly worked and was much to the benefit of those of us over at ITN.

John Birt started his revolution by remedying that and as DG  developed his own solution for the battle with the Barons: ‘Tell me or my team absolutely everything that’s going on’.  At the time people compared it to the Stasi though some have since got nostalgic about it as they observed subsequent BBC crises where the centre wasn’t on top of the detail.

Model Number Four was ‘cut the crap’ –Greg Dyke’s antidote to Birtism. Staff loved the focus on creativity over control but it came a cropper when,during what became known simply as Hutton, it turned out that the centre didn’t know as much about what Dr David Kelly did or didn’t tell Andrew Gilligan about WMD as Greg thought it did.

Mark Thompson always struck me as a man who knew a lot of the detail about what was going on in a lot of BBC places and wasn’t frightened to put his boot in when necessary but Savile seems to tell us otherwise. The Pollard report suggests no great progress in inter-departmental co-operation.

Which brings us to George.

According to Lord Patten Entwistle got the job because he had a plan for sorting this problem out once and for all. The new DG certainly dispatched Baron John Smith of BBC Worldwide pretty quickly and COO Caroline Thompson wasn’t encouraged to hang around.

But we never got the chance to find out what exactly his plan was (one Baron tells me it wouldn’t have worked anyway) partly because he deliberately or accidentally didn’t know what was going on in BBC News. Bizarrely, even as George was resigning, the Chairman told us that he (and therefore presumably the next DG) would implement George’s plan anyway. I assume Lord Hall will have told Lord Patten when he took the job that he would come up with his own plan thanks very much.

Tony has the advantage of a programme background (so no Checkland style problems),a chance to appoint some Barons of his own on his own terms plus years of experience of what John Birt called ‘The Harder Path’ style of management.

But as Alasdair Milne would have told him ruefully, keep an eye on the Chairman. And that’s advice that John Birt, who like Milne had problems with Duke Hussey, would surely underline.

Robert Kee was one of those broadcasters who lived amazing lives before they ever set foot in a TV or radio studio. He was an RAF bomber pilot in World War Two,was shot down,captured and sent to the prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft 3. He was friends with some of those who took part in the ‘Great Escape’ from the camp and escaped himself.

He wrote a book about life in a POW camp ‘A Crowd is not Company’ which he said was a novel but turned out to be the true story of his own time there. In the introduction he wrote;
‘Everything that has happened to me since seems somehow secondary to what happened then’.

He went on to live what he called,in 1981, a ‘reasonably full life’,which is putting it modestly.

After the war we worked for Picture Post,the Observer,the Sunday Times,was Literary Editor of the Spectator and then went into television in 1958. He was a reporter on Panorama and then in 1972 was invited by the then Editor of ITN,Nigel Ryan,to present Britain’s first proper television news programme at lunchtime.It was called ‘First Report’ because there was no TV news before lunchtime in those days. There was also little newsfilm ready by lunchtime so the show was based around Kee himself.I worked on the programme as a junior producer .Kee interviewed all the newsmakers of the day and in a bold experiment that didn’t entirely come off he did live ‘vox pop’ interviewing people in the street via an outside broadcast camera and an amplifier through which he barked questions to rather startled citizens.

Kee was also no great fan of the teleprompter,preferring to read from a cluster of scripts which he clutched in front of him.When he and the rest of the ‘famous five’ launched the breakfast TV programme TVAM that didn’t turn out quite the way they planned.

But his greatest legacy to broadcasting and to literature was his interest in Ireland. Books like ‘The Green Flag’ and his 1982 BBC Two series ‘Ireland-a Television History’ were Robert Kee at his absolute best. You can get a flavour of the great man in clips from the series  here.

I did an interview about him for the Radio Four programme PM on the 11th January 2013 which should be on their Episodes page here.

The Pollard Report on ‘Savile’ is here,the BBC’s response is here and George Entwistle’s is here

There is a BBC Radio Four Media Show discussion about the Pollard report here. And a Media Guardian podcast discussion here.BBC News has done a Savile timeline with audio and video clips here. Former Newsnight researcher ,Hannah Livingstone,who worked on the  investigation into Savile has written an article here. There is also an interesting follow-up article on the Pollard Report by Miles Goslett here and the New York Times take on Pollard is here.

The BBC Trust’s findings on ‘McAlpine’ are here including Ken MacQuarrie’s report on what went wrong inside the BBC management.

Helen Boaden’s email to BBC News staff on her full return to duties as Director of News is here.

It is 250 pages long,it has taken longer and cost more than expected and some people in the BBC are wondering if it was ever necessary in the first place,and it comes out today (Wednesday 19th December)

But will Nick Pollard’s findings  be the top story out of the various reports released by the BBC as it attempts to bring the various Newsnight sagas to an end before Christmas?

Th full list of documents is:

1. The Pollard review into the handling of the Newsnight investigation into Savile

2. The McQuarrie report into the Newsnight allegations that led to the BBC paying damages to Lord McAlpine (previously only partly-released)

3.The conclusions of the internal disciplinary procedures  into the McAlpine allegations

4.The report of the BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee’s conclusions on ‘McAlpine’

In the outside world ‘Savile’ is a bigger story than ‘McAlpine’ partly because it has been going on longer and made more front pages.But inside the BBC ‘McAlpine’ is regarded as much more serious because it goes to the heart of what the BBC says it does best, produce  high-quality,totally trustworthy news and current affairs.If it can’t do that,what is it for?

So expect some headline-making disciplinary decisions.People may not be sacked but that doesn’t mean they won’t lose the jobs they currently have.

On Pollard, it is already taken for granted that it will start with a non-headline,there never was undue pressure from the top of the BBC on Newsnight editor Peter Rippon to drop the story.He just decided it himself.

The expected criticism of BBC Deputy Director of News,Steve Mitchell, may focus on two things.Firstly his alleged role in not correcting earlier the mistakes in Rippon’s blog after Rippon apparently confirmed to him that there were mistakes.Secondly his role in what’s known in most companies as the ‘risk register’, in the BBC’s case a list of planned programmes where there are risks which are being managed.This is a particularly interesting area because if the Savile investigation appeared on this list then it was another occasion when a Savile-related document would have gone to the office of the then DG,Mark Thompson,apparently without him noticing.If the story wasn’t on the list it is reasonable to ask why not?Or perhaps it was on the list and somebody took it off.

Supporters of Mitchell continue to swamp acting DG Tim Davie with messages urging fair treatment of their man.Meanwhile the Guardian reports that acting Director of News Francesca Unsworth has sent out an email saying that Helen Boaden will  return to her post in time to hold quarterly all-staff meetings in the New Year.

The most interesting story in the papers this morning is in the Times where Ben Webster reports that Nick Pollard has accused the journalist who led the investigation into Savile ‘of leaking information that embarrassed the corporation’.Webster says Nick Pollard wrote last week to the lawyer for Meirion Jones, giving notice that he would be accused of leaking the material.

This letter was one of the Rule 13 letters that had to be sent out to those criticised in the report.They and their lawyers then had the chance to comment and challenge the finding before publication.There is no doubt in my mind that Jones was one of those people who received such a letter.What we dont know ,and the Times carefully avoids saying, is whether Pollard has gone ahead with the criticism despite whatever Jones and his legal advisor replied.

Rob Wilson, the Conservative MP for Reading East,is quoted in the article as saying he is concerned that the Pollard inquiry appeared to be ‘seeking to blame a journalist for what has been described as the worst crisis for 50 years at the BBC rather than focusing on the behaviour of senior executives’.Undoubtedly if the final report includes this allegation against Jones there will be people who will be surprised either because they dont believe it is true or they find it odd that,in Rob Wilson’s words, the Pollard inquiry has been  ‘hunting down leaks and fingering individual journalists’.

As to what Pollard may say about the past year’s past two Directors-General,I will be surprised if there isn’t criticism of George Entwistle. Internally BBC people are reflecting that if ‘incurious George’ had,in that subsequently over-used phrase ‘got a grip’, the Pollard review might never have been necessary. As someone who was very critical of his performance in the John Humphrys interview I was slightly more sympathetic about his ignorance of the Guardian story on the BBC’s McAlpine mistake when I learned that one of the reasons was that he was at his son’s 18th birthday party.

As to Mark Thompson, the BBC has said that the Pollard review would look ‘at the BBC’s handling of material that might have been of interest to the police or relevant authorities’.I can’t see how you can do that without asking the Chief Executive of the organisation what he knew when and what he did about it. Of course,Mark Thompson flew back from New York to be questioned by Pollard and his QC so there was an opportunity to ask him this. Yet there are reports that the inquiry is not considering the events between January and October of this year which is when you would have expected the police to have been informed at some point.Hopefully this confusion will be resolved within hours.

One final point:in order to get these four documents out today -and avoid publication slipping even closer to Christmas and the inevitable allegation that the timing was a deliberate PR ploy- a lot of process has been got through at the BBC and the BBC Trust very quickly.I can’t believe there wasn’t somebody somewhere who wasn’t worried it was all being rushed and wanted an option to return to some issue or another in the New Year.

Tony Hall was at the BBC yesterday reading his copy of Pollard so he will be ready for any overspill into his new regime.

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.