Lessons in Accountability from the Bloodthirsty Bishop of Lichfield
Who goes - and who wields the axe
When an organisation really fouls things up do you demand the leader’s head? Of does that risk letting the actual culprits get away with it?
The news in the UK is full of resignations and demands for resignation. The head of the Office for Budget Responsibility has stepped down after his organisation embarrassingly revealed key budget measures two hours early on the internet. This blunder came alongside a bitter row with Labour Ministers over a letter Hughes had published clarifying when certain forecast information had been passed to the Chancellor, which has led to the Chancellor being accused of misleading the public and the financial markets in the run up to the budget.
This comes a couple of weeks after the BBC lost both its Director General and the Head of News following another scandal about a documentary that had given a misleading impression of President Trump’s speech on 6 January thanks to some deft editorial splicing.
A clip in the programme, broadcast the week before last year’s US election, spliced clips together from sections of the US president’s speech on 6 January 2021 to make it appear he told supporters he was going to walk to the US Capitol with them to “fight like hell”.
We are also in the midst of a yet to be resolved row about West Midlands Police, after they banned Maccabi Tel Aviv away fans from a European football fixture against Aston Villa in Birmingham.
The decision to make the ban was based on an intelligence report prepared by West Midlands police, purportedly based on Dutch intelligence about events when Maccabi Tel Aviv played Ajax in Amsterdam last year. This report characterised the Tel Aviv supporters as highly organised, skilled fighters “linked to the Israel Defence Forces”.
The initial decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans was criticised across the political spectrum. Attention is now turning to the basis on which the decision was taken. Nick Timothy MP has been leading the charge in Parliament, and a recent Sunday Times article suggested the police ‘intelligence’ report was no such thing. It argues that several claims are made without sources or evidence, and the information attributed to the Dutch police is contradicted by senior officers and official reports in Amsterdam. The Sunday Times and Nick Timothy argue the report appears to have been written to justify a predetermined decision to keep Israeli, Jewish fans out of Birmingham, in the face of sustained pressure by Islamist groups that the police force are afraid of.
The West Midlands Police’s chief constable Craig Guildford, the elected Police and Crime Commissioner for the area and other senior police figures attempted to defend the police’s decision making in an unconvincing appearance before the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee this week. It remains to be seen whether the senior leadership survives the pressure.
There is a common pattern to all of these episodes. Pressure mounts on the top person. When he or she acts promptly to step down to take responsibility for their organisation’s failings, they often get broad praise, as with Richard Hughes at OBR and, to a extent, Tim Davie at the BBC. Whatever happens, journalists are keen that the ensuing scalps should be as senior as possible. As the BBC scandal gained momentum, journalists commenting were keen to stress that ‘deputy heads will roll’ would not be enough to clear the air.
Of course, journalists have incentives of their own. The bigger the scalp, the bigger the story, and they are less interested in whether the personnel changes will actually help the organisation learn from its mistakes.
The very distance of the top person from the decision that originally sparked the controversy can, paradoxically, make it easier for an organisation to portray the loss of its leader as a politically inspired ‘act of God’. Often the leaders themselves use the opportunity of their resignation statement to stress their confidence in the organisation, while taking on themselves general responsibility for failings. Tim Davie’s statement on announcing his departure from the BBC is a case in point
“Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility.”
One shouldn’t underestimate how disappointing these sort of departures will be for the individuals in question. But with no question of personal culpability and a potential sympathy vote, their prospects are unlikely to suffer much. And in the case of Guildford the chief not only has a good pension to look forward, but he is in fact already drawing it, having done the curious ‘resign and reapply for his job’ manoeuvre that enables senior police officers both to receive a full pension and a salary at the same time.
The theory is that seismic departures at the top will lead to serious change in the organisations in response to whatever the failings have been. But this is a pretty indirect chain of causation. The argument is presumably that the departing leader’s successor will be all the more determined to ensure that whatever failings led to a predecessor’s departure are not repeated.
It is, however, just as possible that the new leader will announce that it is time for healing and to move on, leaving underlying problems to fester.
In the BBC’s case the main responsibility for the scandal surely lie in the first instance with the Panorama editor responsible for the initial editorial decisions, and then with the senior BBC leaders who repeatedly refused to accept there had been an editorial failing. When the scandal broke, hardly any journalist commentator, even those most friendly to the BBC and hostile to Trump, sought to defend the editing. In contrast, at a key meeting of the Editorial Standards Committee on May 12th , 2025 Jonathan Munro (deputy head of BBC news) asserted: “There was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol. It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short form clips.”
As the advisor to the Standards Committee and author of a report to top BBC management, Michael Prescott, put it
“On no other occasion in my professional life have I witnessed what I did at the BBC with regard to how management dealt with (or failed to deal with) serious recurrent problems”
While the BBC Head of News has resigned, Mr Munro is now acting in her place, while there are no reports of what if anything has happened to the Panorama editor.
In the case of West Midlands police, it is not yet clear how decisions were made. But if the report is as flawed and misleading as Timothy claims, the original responsibility for this probably lies at a much more junior level in the force, with more senior managers presumably taking the report’s findings as read when assenting to the operational decision. Of course the force’s top management are doubling down on the disputed report and cannot therefore avoid the consequences if Nick Timothy’s allegations are correct. But the allegations of partiality, deceit and cowardice go much deeper into the force hierarchy.
History suggests there are some radically different approaches for dealing with problems of this sort.
During Henry VIII’s reign, Rowland Lee the Bishop of Lichfield was also his highly ruthless Lord President of the Marches, responsible for making sure the King’s authority was respected in the lawless areas of Wales. For centuries the ‘marcher lords’ had been allowed to dominate the areas, and they protected their retainers from punishment for the crimes they caused.
Lee was determined to stop this and send a dramatic message about the changed power relations in the area. Lee gleefully reported to Cromwell that he had forced Sir John Scudamore, Sir James Baskerville, and others to “lay hands upon and help to execute their own servants and tenants” who had been convicted of robbery or riot.
Lee noted that this “strake deep into their credence in the country”
Lee’s policy aimed not merely to punish crime but to break the very idea of independent lordship by forcing the lords to be instruments of royal punishment even against their own followers. His rule marked the end of centuries of near anarchy in the marches and the full integration of Wales into the governance of England.
There are perhaps some analogies of approach here. Forcing an organisation and its leaders to impose internal sanctions on those that have brought it into disrepute binds both organisation and leaders permanently to the judgement, making it impossible to deny or gloss over the problem identified. It targets sanctions on those primarily responsible, sending a clear deterrent to others . It if doesn’t make as exciting headlines for journalists that’s a small price to pay.