That luminary of the Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge, has apparently described the appearance of former and current BBC bosses before the committee as "an unedifying experience". In the dispute about whether severance payments were necessary, and whether the BBC Trust knew about them or not - Mark Thompson says they did, Lord Patten says they didn't - it seems to be common ground that in the period 2009 to 2012 the BBC paid out £3 million to departing senior staff that contractually it didn't have to. In anyone's terms this is a disgrace.
The licence fee is a tax (and a poll tax at that, since it doesn't reflect ability to pay). If you want to own a TV you have to fork out. Would a government department be able to get away with paying its civil servants to depart like this out of taxpayers' money, at a cost to public services? Not in a million years.
Senior BBC executives are paid too much. Mark Thompson was paid £460,000. The argument used to be run that this was the going commercial rate. Curious therefore that the BBC seems to have been able to lure Covent Garden supremo Tony Hall for somewhat less than that amount.
The Corporation is effectively a Quango that is not subject to democratic control. Yes, it is meant to be regulated by the BBC Trust, but the Trust has an uneasy dual role as regulator and cheerleader, and unsurprisingly does both rather badly. The Corporation is staffed at the top level by people who live in a bubble, detached from rank-and-file staff and from the rest of us. How else to explain their kleptocratic behaviour?
The Trust is staffed by the same kind of people, the Great and Good whose lives oscillate between agreeable restaurants in London and weekends in the Cotswolds or Chiantishire. Unsurprising then that they should think there was nothing wrong with the payoffs. People like that expect to have their paths smoothed before them.
BBC executives had no incentive to stop the gravy train - they knew that when their turn came to leave they would also benefit from the public's generosity - and neither had the Trust. People working for the Trust know that their interests are congruent with the BBC itself, since damage to the Corporation jeopardises their own jobs. Why make a fuss about the size of severance payments? Bound to get into the papers, old boy.
What BBC staff further down the ladder must make of this, God only knows, told on the one hand that programme budgets are to be cut, and on the other that millions are being spent encouraging top staff from London to go.
There is a pleasing irony of the most mordant kind in the reflection that at a period when the BBC admitted it had a "liberal bias", its senior staff were fleecing the people left right and centre. This is the kind of behaviour you'd expect from a South American dictator or a crooked City capitalist, not from West London's bien pensants.
What lessons to learn from this?
One, the BBC Trust isn't doing its job properly. Ofcom anyone?
Two, spending other people's money is a lot less painful than spending your own.
P.S. It's being reported this morning that the BBC has commissioned a review into the relationship between the BBC and the BBC Trust. The Corporation quite often does this. In 2012 it asked for a review into its handling of the immigration issue from ex ITV CEO Stuart Prebble. The review came to a conclusion anyone with two eyes and ears could have reached, namely that the BBC had a "deep liberal bias". It cost £175,000 to find this out.
So what does the BBC do when it turns out that it's been wasting millions of licence-fee payers' money? It wastes hundreds of thousands in further navel gazing. I guess that's an advance of a sort, but the BBC leadership sails blithely, on unaware that, having done its best to cast the Corporation's reputation down, it is now dancing blindly around, trampling it into the mud. I am with Allison Pearson, who writes in the Torygraph this morning, "I have no desire to live in a Britain without the BBC. At the end of this unedifying week, that terrible prospect has come a little closer".
