Dyke's tough stance

Greg Dyke's morale-boosting email to BBC staff on Monday was the BBC director general at his "cut the crap" best - robust, direct, unyielding. Dyke defended the corporation's handling of the Gilligan affair and attacked the Government, all but accusing ministers of leaking Dr David Kelly's name to the press and hastening his suicide.

This was not the boss merely "backing his journalists". This was a man leading from the front. In his usual "Call me Greg" style, he insisted he had taken the key decisions. The buck stops with me.

So far, it is a fight the DG seems to be winning. Opinion polls say that four out of five voters trust the BBC rather than the Government. While the world purports to be waiting for the Hutton report, the contestants are carrying on punching after the bell. At the moment, it is Dyke's BBC that is ahead on points.

If things stay that way, it is Dyke's approach that can claim a great deal of the credit, whereas in the past, when the BBC faced a crisis, it would be the underlings who were publicly foaming at the mouth while the DG told them to calm down, take the long view and follow the diplomatic route. The BBC used to use the back channels to open negotiations with Downing Street. Corporation executives and ministers would have crafted the kind of compromise agreement at which the BBC excels. Not this time. Dyke, I am reliably informed, has had to be restrained from taking an even more aggressive stance. He has personally written much of the blisteringly uncompromising correspondence that has gone to Downing Street on BBC headed notepaper.

He has personally rejected a "retract but don't apologise" compromise agreement under which the BBC would have conceded that the Government had not, after all, sexed up intelligence in its rush to war but would have stood by its decision to run Gilligan's story because it was "in the public interest".

He has even managed to get the BBC Governors - not known for their courage under fire - to issue the strongest defence of BBC journalism in the corporation's history.

So what is it that has driven Dyke to such vigour? For one thing, he is very confident of the BBC's position. As BBC vice-chairman Richard Ryder implicitly confirmed in a letter to The Times yesterday, Dyke was the only senior BBC executive to be told the name of Andrew Gilligan's source before Dr Kelly's death last week.

Today comes news that Gilligan's BBC colleague Susan Watts made a tape recording of Kelly expressing concern about Downing Street's handling of the case for war. Further, those who have seen Gilligan's notes, taken at his lunch with Kelly on 22 May, say they tally very favourably with the meaning - even if not in every detail with the words - attributed to Kelly in Gilligan's report. This is said to have reassured a number of people inside the BBC who would have been more confident had the story been brought in by a John Simpson or an Andrew Marr.

Some of the detail was imperfect, it is admitted privately. Clearly Kelly was not in intelligence, as some at the BBC have claimed. Alastair Campbell's name, although not in the original report, became associated with the "sexing up" charge, but who else but the head of communications-would be responsible for presentation, for the advocacy of the Government's case for war?

As for whether the BBC gave disproportionate weight to the disaffected voice of a scientist disagreeing with the Joint Intelligence Committee, the BBC says it was merely reporting, leaving the listener to draw conclusions. The gist of the story, they say, was right.

"Greg is a big-picture kind of bloke," says someone who has worked closely with him, "and the big picture is that the story is right. Kelly was a credible witness and what Gilligan reported was endorsed by other credible journalists inside the Beeb."

Apart from the rightness of the BBC's case, in Dyke's mind there are other factors at work. One is the former Labour Party donor's determination to disprove once and for all the charge of being a poodle of the Blair Government, as some of his opponents claim (and there are those inside the corporation who think he has overcompensated and gone too far in that quest). In any event, there is every sign that the charge rankles, an irony after the Iraq war in which the Government was quick to challenge the BBC over any perceived lapses in impartiality.

But there is another major driving force: the influence of management guru Gareth Jones. Dyke so admired Jones that he brought him in from academe to run the BBC's vast Human Resources department. Jones didn't last long - he loathed the place, finding it "too political", too fond of "power-plays". But Jones's ideas still wield an immense influence over Dyke. Jones co-wrote a book, The Character of a Corporation, required reading for anyone who wants to understand Dyke.

Crucially, Dyke is forever drawing a sharp distinction between management and leadership. He believes the BBC has been long on the former and short on the latter. In his book, Jones describes what he calls the "Communal Leader" - charismatic, inspirational, visionary, "the sun around which the organisation rotates", whose motto is Fight the Good Fight. It is up to that ideal that Dyke is trying to live, and the man who never shuns a fight couldn't have taken on a bigger challenge.

BUT Alastair Campbell feels just as passionately as Dyke that he is in the right. And every time Dyke ups the ante, Campbell does so too, leaving neither side with any wriggle room. This is war to the death. If Dyke wins, he will indeed have established himself as an inspirational leader - of a hugely re-energised corporation where, to quote Gareth Jones again, "you find creativity and openness towards ideas, joined with a fierce determination to defeat the competition".

The BBC is facing an imminent review of its Royal Charter, an audit of its internet services by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, not to mention moves by the new regulatory watchdog - Ofcom - to take over the governors' role as the BBC's regulator. But that does not faze Dyke.

Someone who has seen Dyke at close quarters in the past few days is impressed by his state of mind, even though the DG knows he is entering a bloody scrap. "Greg is bullish by nature, but he is extremely bullish about this. He likes to win, and he's pretty confident about this one." This is no ordinary row. If Dyke's optimism is well placed, who can say how many Government scalps he will claim?