As George Entwistle leaves the BBC and Tony Hall returns, I have been thinking about money.
Entwistle left with a full year's salary for his pains - £450,000. He also got, according the Mirror, £10,000 for legal advice and £10,000 for "communications support" (which seems to be a euphemism for bodyguards to protect him from the media scrum outside his home).
Interestingly, the Mirror also reports that in the last two years 10 senior BBC staff got compensation packages worth £280,000 or more. One of the failed applicants for the DG job, Caroline Thompson, left recently with a pay-off in excess of £650,000. I hope this sum will come as consolation for Ms Thompson, who otherwise might have been feeling quite miffed that Entwistle's successor has been appointed without the job being advertised again and without being given the chance to re-apply.
So what of Tony Hall? Well, Mr Hall has been Chief Exec at the Royal Opera House for the last 11 years. The ROH's 2010 accounts revealed that he was paid £390,000 for a job which still left him time to chair an Olympics commitee and do his bit in the House of Lords. The ROH is, you may remember, an institution that pays its MD Antonio Pappano nearly £700,000. Some of which is public money.
An environment in which two employees can get pay-offs totalling well over £1 million, all of which is public money, sounds as if it will suit Mr Hall down to the ground.
I have just paid the lady who cleans our house. She gets £8 per hour, well above the minimum wage. But probably not enough to cover bodyguards.
