No apologies from Dyke

Until the Alastair Campbell dating service brought us together, we'd never met. We operated at completely different levels. I had a lot less money, and slightly less hair. But there were, you could say, certain parallels between Greg Dyke's BBC career and my own.

We started on the same day, 1 November 1999. Both of us were outsiders, brought in to liven things up. And our BBC careers ended within 24 hours of each other, after things got livelier than either of us could reasonably have foreseen.

So, I think I understand how Dyke feels. When you lose your job for reasons which are wholly insufficient and unfair, you have a choice to make. You can shout out your rage, blame your enemies, and risk allegations that you are bitter, obsessive, a bad loser; or, my own preference, you can mostly keep quiet and hope that other people will reach the right conclusions for themselves.

The high court of conventional media wisdom has already ruled that, in writing this book, Dyke has made the wrong choice, "reopening old wounds" - as if the gross injustice done to him should somehow no longer matter merely because it is eight months old.

It is, I think, true that some of Dyke's language betrays too much soreness. Describing as "posh ladies" those on the board of governors who got rid of him sounds chippy.

Campbell is carpet-bombed with adjectives - pompous, vitriolic, a maverick, a political thug, a time bomb waiting to go off, an out-of-control bully, a deranged, vindictive bastard. It would have been subtler and more effective to point out the great persuader's essentially tragic nature.

Every time Campbell tries to tell us what to think, even at his big moment of post-Hutton triumph, the entire nation takes one look and firmly commits itself to the polar opposite.

Dyke, a prominent New Labour donor and enthusiast in the past, also makes too much of having been personally "betrayed" by Tony Blair. This makes him sound, unfairly, like the crony that his critics always complained he was.

The proper charge (also made here, to be fair) is that Blair has betrayed the country and the principle of a free, unbullied BBC; the Prime Minister owed no allegiance to Greg Dyke.

But this is a better, more measured book than the newspaper serialisations made it look. There is a careful dissection of the Hutton Report, and of my famous early-morning twoway.