The Daily Novel

Lord Hussey of North Bradleywould have relished the plethora of obituaries that have appeared since his death last Wednesday at the ripe old age of 83. Since he was a shrewd newspaperman he would have noticed that most of the bouquets came from his friends and that the brickbats came from those he would have expected them to come from.

Marmaduke Hussey, or Duke as he was known to his colleauges from the shop floor upwards, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and he advanced through life via Rugby, Trinity College, Oxford and the Grenadier Guards. In 1959 he secured his place within the elite by marrying Susan, the daughter of the fourteenth Earl Waldegrave. She became a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, who was friendly enough to grace some of Hussey’s dinner parties.

By the time I interviewed Lord Rothermere in 1963 Hussey had become his most trusted aide. He sat in during the interview and escorted me downstairs afterwards. On the way he told me what a great journalist I was and said that I should ring the City Editor of the Daily Mail, whom he would talk to in the meantime. In 1967 he was made managing director of the main Daily Mail company.

In fact, he did not do very well in this job. But you will not find this mentioned in the Daily Mail obituary, nor in either of the two long pieces in The Times. To discover that you need to go to The Guardian, whose full-page obituary was written by Dan van der Vat, the author and a former journalist on both The Times and The Guardian. He reports that his leadership was marked by the Mail’s expensive failure to challenge the Daily Express in its dominance of the middle newspaper market and the collapse of his subsequent efforts to merge the Express and Mail groups.

Van der Vat also details the failure of Hussey’s period as chief executive of Times Newspapers under Lord Thomson. This led to the disastrous twelve month closure of The Times and subsequently to a strike by Times journalists. This in turn led to The Times, the Sunday Times and all the other components of the group built up by Lord Thomson being sold to Rupert Murdoch for the paltry sum of £12 million.

Rees Mogg, who was editor of The Times when Hussey was chief executive, does deal with that the disastrous events of those years. He takes the view that Hussey was the hero and the blame for the failure was due to other factors, including the fact that Kenneth Thomson did not back him sufficiently. Mogg denies that he was the man who suggested to the Conservative government that Hussey should be made Chairman of the BBC in 1986 at the age of 63. Mogg thinks that Thatcher appointed him because:

he had been the outstanding media manager prepared to fight a battle against the union militants

Hussey’s record was also defended in The Guardian, by a letter from Liz Forgan, the chairman of the Scott Trust, the nearest thing at The Guardian to a proprietor. Unusally she writes to her own paper complaining about the ’sneering obituary’ written by van der Vat. Like Mogg she thinks Hussey saved the BBC.

A more balanced view is given by the obituary in the Daily Telegraph:

Hussey succeeded in restoring corporate governance and financial control at the BBC and laid the basis for a renewal of its charter by the Conservative government in 1996. But his appointment led to a series of damaging internal divisions which caused a haemorrhaging of talent from the corporation, and provoked criticism that he had sacrificed the BBC’s institutional soul to cost-effectiveness.

Hussey was undoubtedly chosen for the BBC because the Thatcher government felt they could rely on him to deal with what they thought was the corporation’s left wing bias. And it certainly helped that he was the brother in law of the Conservative minister, William Waldgrave. Hussey sacked the incumbent Director General, Alastair Mant, who had fought fiercely for editorial independence. He first appointed the accountant Michael Checkland as Director General and later replaced him by John Birt, who behaved far more like an accountant than Checkland, although in fact he was a television man, who brought the world Weekend World as well as Cilla Black. But his rule took editorial morale at the BBC to its lowest ebb.

Hussey was certainly a man of courage who strode through life, ignoring physical pain and the handicap of an artificial leg. But he was most definitely not an ‘outstanding media manager’. More like what Louis Heren, then deputy editor of The Times called a ‘good company commander…unfit to be a general’. In my view he was the living embodiment of the Peter Principle of management, which is:

The theory that employees within an organization will advance to their highest level of competence and then be promoted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent.