On accountability and responsibility

The more the panic at the BBC develops – the Director General resigning after a few weeks in the job, being given twice his contractual pay-off for doing so, and with suspensions and stand-ins all over the place – the more I ask why George Entwistle went in the first place, even after his craven interview with John Humphries on 10^th November and his admission that he took insufficient notice of the Newsnight crisis once it had started to develop.

There has been a lot of talk – not least from Entwistle – about his ultimate ‘responsibility’ for what happened. In fact, he is ultimately accountable for what happened. As he noted, the Newsnight programme went through the various checks that existed long before he became Director-General. Both the journalism and those checks were done in a sloppy and unprofessional way and didn’t keep to basic standards, but others were responsible for them.

As a manager, accountability incorporates responsibility if you set up structures and/or procedures that are flawed, fail to reform them when you detect problems - whether inherited or your own, or fail to have sufficient oversight of those that are in place. The first doesn’t apply to Entwistle; the second can’t yet apply as he had only been in the post for a few weeks. The third is more arguable, but I believe a new person in a huge job should be allowed to make errors, if only for the purpose that they learn from and don’t repeat them. Also, in theory a fire could develop anywhere in the BBC’s vast forest, but one cannot expect the DG rather than the system he or she oversees to pick them up.

Finally, with regard to the second point above, accountability is an active thing: it is about putting things right, and the new DG was not been given this chance. If he had been given that chance, and had failed, then we could have started talking about his responsibility.

Meanwhile, let’s panic. What else is there to do?

In praise of maps

What wonderful things maps are. No symbol of our loss of innocence is more beautiful.

Maps changed our world - that line of mountains, those headlands at each end of the bay, the horizons beneath which we carried on our lives - and the lands and people beyond it. The world was flat until maps appeared in all their essential flattiness.

Now Mankind could fly without leaving the ground, could burn his wings without crashing to earth. The world became of three dimensions. While always compromised by its curvature, maps are things of revelation. Even the most prescriptively and deliberately drawn leave as much to be imagined as read, while large scale topographical maps are a wealth of the unstated but discernible. And they are never up to date. Maps contain within them the tools with which we can question both what we see and what we understand.

For this reason maps should be treated as kindly as books, and we should resist the shallow, utilitarian prescription of satellite and other devices, for to travel is better than to arrive - whether you think you know where you're going or not.

But would Petraeus betray us?

I hope I'm not alone in thinking it ridiculous that David Petraeus has resigned as head of the CIA because he had an extra-marital affair. That's between him and his wife and family.

It doesn't matter whether he was good or bad at his job, since the 'rule' would apply to the good as well as the bad, and could apply to any organisation or post.

Nor does it say much about the suitability of his character for the high post he occupied, if that is the reason. John F. Kennedy was himself an adulterer, Winston Churchill a drunkard and Adolf Hitler a teetotal vegetarian who wept to music and couldn't abide cruelty to animals (and in that sense he was a man whose time has come, a modern role model if ever there was one).

That Petraeus had it off with his biographer might make people want to read the book with care, but it's not as if he was popping over to Iran to call on Mrs Ahmadinejad and leaving his papers in the wardrobe, is it?

Meanwhile, there is no doubt tumult everywhere in Langley, Virginia, and you don't have to love the CIA to see the danger of following the principle elsewhere.

It's just daft.

The Meaning of Life

At the end of the day and when all’s said and done,

And the finishing post at the end of life’s run

Can be glimpsed in the distance – just over the hill

That we all one day roll down whatever our will –

We fall to consid’ring the meaning of life,

Its purpose and pity, its trouble and strife.

Thus exercised, surely we can but conclude

With a shrug of the shoulders, a sagging of mood,

That the nearest to knowledge, the furthest from doubt,

The best guess we have as to what it’s about

Is the Hokey-Cokey:

Knees bend,

Arms stretch,

Ra Ra Ra.

That’s what it’s all about.

Yes, that’s what it’s all about.

Dumbing up, nailing down.

Sinister developments in British higher education: 70-odd of 104 universities (my God, we have 104 universities?  We ARE bright!) have signed up to a scheme that, according to BBC Radio 4, is intended to replace simple degrees over time. This will be an end of course report, written by the institution - of which the degree result will be a part - that details 'other activities' such as volunteering, club and society membership, sporting achievements, roles in the student union and so on.

Designed to "benefit employers, and above all students" (note the order, not the emphasis), in my view this is the logical extension of the patronising and utilitarian straitjacket that increasingly passes for education lower down the brain chain. On being asked rather neatly by the interviewer whether "part of student life is sitting and thinking, sometimes in pubs”, the man (it was 6.40am, I was cuddling my pillow, and I didn’t get his name) simply dodged the question.

If students, who are legally adults whether we like it or not, want to list, promote or fabricate their achievements, they have a mechanism called the curriculum vitae. Universities have no place in either writing it for them or, by so doing, making them mere cogs in a machine that we should continue to kid ourselves they may run one day.

Go away!

I once challenged a Staffordshire Terrier owner whose dog had jumped up at one of my kids at the entrance to a playground. I asked her to control her dog. She said that he was quite friendly and wouldn’t hurt them. I pointed out that, however friendly her dog, my and others' kids might not like it jumping at them in that way. The woman and her male companion’s response was to repeat the words “Go away, go away” again and again in a rising crescendo of anger.

In the end I was grateful for my children’s presence. Not only were my fellow adult citizens public-spirited enough to modify the words “fuck off” which would otherwise have leapt to their lips as their preferred means of continuing the debate, but I didn’t have to take the three of them on armed with nothing but a large cuddly toy. And come to think of it, had my children not been there I wouldn’t even have had that.

There are plans afoot to train UK citizens how to deal with "challenging situations" like this. You know: people who are recreationally damaging things or who can't control their kids in public and - by extension, because these are the ones that are most likely to hospitalise me - people who throw litter everywhere or let their dogs defecate indiscriminately. Among the things to be taught are 'conflict resolution techniques' and 'negotiation skills'.

Leaving aside the question of whether the state should mind its own business, what fascinates me is the fact that we have let individual sovereignty over society go so far that the non-negotiable no longer exists. How many ways are there of negotiating someone out of letting their dog shit where the bus queue stands? You just don't let your dog do it, and you clean it up if it does, and if you can't work that out on your own I am not going to waste my time chewing the fat with you.

I'm going to tell you this just this once.

God Save The Dream

I spent much of yesterday evening and already an hour this morning dabbing my eyes at the joyful and deeply eloquent speechlessness of all of the GB Olympic athletes, rowers and cyclists who did so well yesterday. I am sure this is replicated in the other teams.

Such was the spirit between the heptathletes after Jessica Ennis crossed the final finishing line to win gold that I half expected them all to lift her up and chair her on a lap of honour.

In the end it's only sport, and in the big scheme of things sport is probably rather silly, but to see such distilled human joy amid this gentlest and most generous patriotism transcends that essential daftness, suggests that all is not indeed lost for humanity, and has me reaching for the hankies every time.