Greg Dyke: Inside Story Book

Greg Dyke is the former Director-General of the BBC who was forced to leave his post following a battle with the government over reporter Andrew Gilligan’s claim that the government had knowingly ‘sexed up’ the intelligence relating to Iraq’s military capabilities. Inside Story makes no attempt at live and let live, which is a bonus for readers. It was no secret that Dyke felt he had been unjustly treated. He himself opens the book by saying that he has always found autobiographies ‘ridiculously self-serving’ and not to be taken too seriously. So why would anyone be interested on more words spent on the ‘Gilligan affair’ and why should we be interested in his life? The answer to each of these questions is that, firstly, the real story about the Gilligan affair, the role of Alistair Campbell, the BBC governors, John Scarlett, the Hutton enquiry and Tony Blair is in the fine details. Second, if you are at all interested in television then Dyke’s story is a fascinating one. Before becoming Director-General of the BBC in 2000 he was Editor-in-Chief at TV-am, Director of Programmes at TVS and LWT, the Director of Channel Four Television and Chairman and Chief Executive of Pearson Television. Discovering how the world of broadcasting works, how it has changed and developed over the years, seeing how and why television shows succeed or fail and hearing of the personalities, friendships, rivalries and political in-fighting from someone who sat at the top of the tree is informative and highly entertaining in itself. Dyke devotes a whole chapter to a painstaking and ultimately damning analysis of the Hutton Report, particularly Hutton’s ruling that it was not part of his remit to consider to what sort of weapons of mass destruction the Government’s dossier on Iraq actually referred. The BBC itself, or at least the governors, are named and shamed for their cowardice in the face of political bullying and, in the short concluding chapter, Dyke persuasively argues that the structure of the BBC should be reformed and the governors disbanded on the grounds that they are, literally, a group of amateurs who belong to a bygone age. Finally, and most importantly, Dyke forces the reader to accept a stark choice: either Tony Blair knew that Iraq was incapable of threatening Britain with weapons of mass destruction (which means he lied about the ’45 minutes from destruction’ claim) or he didn’t (which means he is incompetent). What makes the final chapters compelling is that Dyke tells a plausible story about how the government, how Tony Blair, got away with misleading the country. There’s no conspiracy theory here, just a story about a slightly careless reporting, a pressured head of intelligence, a powerful spin-doctor, an amateurish Lord who allegedly made an inexplicable mistake and a group of cowardly BBC governors. On the whole, between the television and the politics, Inside Story makes for a fascinating and revelatory read. --Larry Brown,/i>Read More