BBC bosses must do jail time

Chris Patten lied to Parliament, says former BBC boss Mark Thompson, who has given the members of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee a detailed dossier of Pattens lies when last he gave evidence before the committee. The BBC Trust has responded that Patten may well have lied but he didn’t make the payments – a big boy did. All the illegal overpayments were made during the chairmanship of Sir Michael Lyons, who claims he knows nothing about anything and no-one even told him what the letters ‘BBC’ stood for or what the organisation did. Lyons claims he took the job for the good lunches and short hours and says he just had to sign stuff and was only hired because he owned his own fountain pen and had an Alpha-plus signature with swirls. 

MPs will have to try to get both sense and truth out of a series of BBC ex-and current bosses next week – concepts largely unfamiliar to anyone who works at senior level at the State propaganda ministry. BBC bosses will lie through their pants to Parliament basically because they think they’re better than MPs and have the moral right to do so.

In return, Parliament must ensure that some of them do jail time. Three years each for Chris Patten and Michael Lyons should do the trick, with eighteen months for Thompson and Entwistle (Who he?).

Why not?