Now where have I heard the name Nevile-Jones before?
It looks like she would have been on the BBC Board of Governors. No less. Apologies for the long articles but both the Observer and Independent took the articles down and Bilderberg.org is now the only place you'll find it.
THE GOVERNORS WHO VOTED FOR DYKE TO GO...
http://www.bilderberg.org/pepis04.htm#quinetiq
Independent - 30th August 2004
DAME PAULINE NEVILLE-JONES
Position: Chairs the BBC's audit committee and the governors' World Service Consultative Group. Time spent on the board: She was appointed in January 1998 and her term of office has been extended to the end of next year. (doesn't mention her job as a director of the new private defense company QuinetiQ ed.)
PEPIS #61 -
Bilderberg's backstabber at the BBC - 30Aug04
http://www.bilderberg.org/pepis04.htm#quinetiq
The role of BBC board member and 2004 Bilderberg attendee Pauline Neville-Jones in the ousting of the BBC's popular Director General Greg Dyke is revealed in the UK papers this weekend. Someone somewhere must like Dame Pauline because her term as a governor has been extended for an extra year beyond the normal maximum.
Below, from today's Independent, is the first analysis, albeit brief, I've yet seen of the business interrests of the various governors. A subject we should all make our job to scrutinise.
In another Bilderberg related story a suspected Isreali spy has been found in the office of Bilderberger, number three civillian official and US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/featur ... rozen.html
Tony
(qinetiq - their website is at
http://www.qinetiq.com )
How two pillars of the establishment helped to engineer a very British coup at the BBC
My clashes with the two 'posh ladies'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/st ... 03,00.html
Greg Dyke
Sunday August 29, 2004 The Observer
Two BBC governors, Pauline Neville-Jones and Sarah Hogg, were far more vocal than the rest, and I nicknamed them 'the posh ladies'. It was clear neither liked me much and Sarah, I now know, actively disliked me. The feeling was mutual.
Pauline, a career civil servant at the Foreign Office and a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was among a number of governors who opposed my appointment as director-general. She was a powerful voice on the board, worked hard and was very clever in a manipulative, FO sort of way.
But neither I nor the two BBC chairmen I worked with, Christopher Bland and Gavyn Davies, ever totally trusted Pauline. She had applied to be deputy chairman and was turned down. She was incredibly ambitious but I always suspected she had not been as successful in life as she had wished.
Although a big supporter of the BBC, Sarah Hogg never left her politics or prejudices at the door of governors' meetings. She was married to a land-owning Tory MP, Douglas Hogg, and lived in a political world.
When we tried to update our political coverage, Sarah led the opposition: we shouldn't upset the politicians. She was upset by the lack of coverage of the Countryside March in September 2002 (probably the only march she'd ever been on). She insisted the BBC was not covering rural affairs properly, and got a full investigation, costing thousands of pounds.
This struck me as a classic case of special pleading from a governor who lived on the family estate in rural Lincolnshire.
Her term as a governor was due to finish, and she didn't want it renewed. Neither did Gavyn or I. By the time Hutton published his report, Sarah's time was almost up.
The day it appeared the governors met from 5pm until the early hours. Gavyn and I left after 40 minutes when they began discussing what should happen to the management team. We had agreed with Pauline Neville-Jones the previous night that it would be impossible for Gavyn and I to resign at the same time.
However, Gavyn announced his resignation before the meeting. As we left, I reminded Simon Milner, the BBC secretary [for governance and accountability] of what Gavyn and I had told him of our talk. It was Milner's job to tell the governors that if I was to go on, I needed their public support.
Sarah Hogg had her last chance to settle old scores. I now know that she arrived determined to get rid of me.
I waited in my office for maybe an hour and a half before Milner came to say Pauline and the deputy chairman, Richard Ryder, wanted to see me.
Ryder was pretty blunt. He said the governors had decided I should go: if I stayed I'd be a lame-duck director-general. This was ridiculous: there was never a chance of me being a lame-duck anything.
I asked if this was the view of them all. Richard told me he hadn't expressed a view but was reporting the views of the rest. Pauline said nothing.
I hadn't seen it coming. I was completely shocked. I had no idea what to say. I pointed out I had a contract they would have to honour, but if they didn't want me I wouldn't stay.
I went back to my office and sat stunned. I had worked flat out for four years to turn round a deeply unhappy and troubled organisation, and I was now being thrown out by the people I respected least, the governors. My main emotion was disbelief.
Before Gavyn headed home at about 11 pm, he decided to say a final goodbye to his former colleagues, but when he walked into the room he found the atmosphere had changed completely. It was a very hostile environment, with the aggression mainly coming from Sarah, who, he said, 'was seething'.
I've since discovered that she told Gavyn the day before that he shouldn't resign, but I should. He told her there were no circumstances in which he'd let me go while he stayed, and I think that was one reason Gavyn resigned: if one of us should go it should be him, and that way he would protect me.
Others at that meeting say that when Gavyn walked in Sarah launched a ferocious attack, accusing him of 'cowardice under fire'.
It was three days before I began to realise that perhaps all was not as it had seemed. This idea came to me when someone at the BBC told me she believed some of the governors had been out to get me, regardless of Hutton. It got me thinking: did some of them have another agenda?
By then I knew that three of the 11 governors had supported me in the vote: the ballet dancer Deborah Bull, the Oxford academic Ruth Deech and voluntary sector consultant Angela Sarkis.
The 'posh ladies' had opposed me, led by Sarah Hogg.
I began to think about the conversation Gavyn, Pauline Neville-Jones, and I had the night before Hutton was published. If Pauline had said she thought it impossible for Gavyn and me to leave at the same time, shouldn't she have argued on my behalf, given that Gavyn had already gone? Yet she had not. I thought some more.
Pauline had always been a big supporter of Mark Byford. Like most BBC lifers, he was better [than me] at the politics of dealing with the governors.
It was a game I refused to play. I saw no reason to treat the governors differently from everyone else. I certainly wasn't going to regard the earth they walked on as holy ground.
After I had left the BBC one senior executive said to me that if I had been a bit more servile to them, I would still be there today. I have no doubt that's true. Certainly both chairmen in my time there suggested I ought to be more respectful and make fewer jokes at governors' meetings, but I was never going to do that. I have never respected position for its own sake and I was hardly likely to start in my fifties, particularly when dealing with a group of people, most of whom knew nothing about the media and who would have struggled to get a senior job at the BBC.
So why hadn't Pauline supported me? Again I thought back a few months. In early December 2003, Gavyn told me Pauline and Sarah had been to see him, demanding that Mark Byford be appointed my deputy and be put in charge of BBC News. I was then to have been told it was a fait accompli.
I objected, though in many ways the idea of Mark becoming my deputy was a good one. With Hutton pending, even someone as naturally combative as me recognised this was not a time for a bust-up with the governors. To appease them, I suggested we appoint Mark as my deputy, but with different powers from those they suggested.
The governors agreed, and he began work on 1 January last year. A month later I was gone and he was acting director-general. The establishment figures had seized their chance and got rid of the upstart. It was, in many ways, a very British coup.
The BBC has a good man as its new chairman in Michael Grade, but to do his job well he needs better, more knowledgeable governors to support him. I hope the six current governors who voted to get rid of me - Dermot Gleeson, Merfyn Jones, Fabian Monds, Neville-Jones, Robert Smith, and Ranjit Sondhi - will realise that what they did that January night was bow to pressure from a political thug called Alastair Campbell.
What happened to me is irrelevant. Director-generals come and go; but there is no greater betrayal of BBC principles than to fold under political pressure, particularly from the government of the day.
These governors got it seriously wrong and they should accept that. They should now resign. The BBC deserves better.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/media/ ... ory=556471
