1950 [1945] Hrs GMT
London
Friday
19 November 2010.
Editor © Muhammad Haque.
Further citation of external reports on the day of disgrace to democracy in Britain.
"There aren’t many broadcasting figures whose elevation to the House of Lords would prompt a vituperative attack on live TV but Michael Grade still appears to have his enemies. Invited to air his views on the hot-off-the-presses list of new peers on BBC Two’s The Daily Politics, Peter Oborne, The Daily Telegraph’s chief political commentator, laid into Grade, who will take the Conservative whip.
“I think Michael Grade is a disgrace to himself and he will now become a disgrace to the House of Lords and to the Conservative party,” said Oborne. This wasn’t Lord Archer we’re talking about.
What was Grade’s crime?
“He behaved quite disgracefully as Chairman of the Board of BBC Governors when he left after two years for a high-paying job in the private sector (running ITV). “I think if you’re going to the Lords you have to have a record of public service and to leave a great public sector job, to be the inheritor of Lord Reith and to piss off after a few months in the job, to coin a phrase that is very low-grade behaviour.”
It will be interesting to see what Grade makes of those comments.
When Greg Dyke questioned his professional conduct whilst Chair of the Governors in an article in The Times, Grade sued and forced a retraction.
There were people in Whitehall who were upset when Grade suddenly quit for the promise of riches at ITV, were he able to turn round the BBC’s great rival.
He left before the new post-Hutton inquiry BBC Trust structure, replacing the Governors, had been properly introduced, a process it had been his job to manage. From Grade’s point of view, his arrival at the BBC after the Dyke/Gavyn Davies departures stabilised a mutinous ship and restored confidence to the corporation. The Chairman’s interventionist role would be diminished under the new Trust structure, which was already well in train and the challenge of rescuing ITV was too great for such a showman to resist. He’ll be a doughty fighter for Britain’s creative industries in the Lords, where the ghosts of former BBC chiefs roam like the living dead.
Will he reignite his feud with Lord Birt, the former BBC DG, who once dismissed Grade’s “trite and pedestrian” LWT
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