How the BBC lost the plot over a cat

This scandal has legs (four, at the last count). It pitted two age-old BBC values against each other: the Corporation's earnest desire to involve viewers (who named the cat Cookie) against its equally strong desire to steer those same viewers towards the safe and acceptable (Cookie could mean something to do with sex! Let's go with the runner-up name).

For me, the BBC's contortions reached their most exquisite when it was portentously announced that an additional kitten, named Cookie, would be drafted in as solemn redress.

But to the Beeb's miserable staff, and anyone who cares about it this has, of course, been another awful week. It's not down to dishonesty. The BBC is painfully honest. It's down, I think, to the almost limitless capacity for self-harm of the Corporation's own management.

Individually, BBC managers are intelligent, rational, fair and farsighted. Collectively, they are foolish, panicky, unjust and inept. Strategically, BBC managers are rather successful. I know no other British state institution which has adapted so well to changing times. Tactically, in any crisis, they are all over the place.

In the various deception scandals, their extraordinary decision to sack junior people - while protecting Alan Yentob, one of their own - has caused rightful anger among the troops. Yentob's deception, with film deliberately edited to suggest he had conducted interviews he hadn't, is rather more serious than the naming of a cat. This disparity in treatment is indefensible.

Dare I, at this point, mention what happened after I left the Beeb? An internal inquiry into the Hutton fiasco concluded that I, the most junior person involved, was wholly responsible - as if I'd somehow seized the mike at gunpoint that fatal morning. I did wonder why, if that was genuinely the case, the BBC's management had ever come to my defence in the first place. The fact was, we were all responsible.

When I worked there, I used to marvel how an organisation with so many managers could be so badly managed. But I realised that that was the problem. Rod Liddle, my old Today editor had the stale breath of five different bosses over his shoulder.

Those bosses spent too much time worrying what politicians thought of them and too little on the basics. So some systems didn't work as they

should and when crises in those systems arose, they over-compensated.

At ITN, at Sky and at most newspapers, the lines of command are clearer. So too are lines of accountability. Of course, the BBC is much bigger than any of these. But it might adopt more of a cell structure, instead of trying to run everything centrally. If it goes on as it is, there will certainly be more scandals. That's just the way the Cookie crumbles.

For Andrew Gilligan's full column, buy Monday's Evening Standard