On accountability and responsibility

The more the panic at the BBC develops – the Director General resigning after a few weeks in the job, being given twice his contractual pay-off for doing so, and with suspensions and stand-ins all over the place – the more I ask why George Entwistle went in the first place, even after his craven interview with John Humphries on 10^th November and his admission that he took insufficient notice of the Newsnight crisis once it had started to develop.

There has been a lot of talk – not least from Entwistle – about his ultimate ‘responsibility’ for what happened. In fact, he is ultimately accountable for what happened. As he noted, the Newsnight programme went through the various checks that existed long before he became Director-General. Both the journalism and those checks were done in a sloppy and unprofessional way and didn’t keep to basic standards, but others were responsible for them.

As a manager, accountability incorporates responsibility if you set up structures and/or procedures that are flawed, fail to reform them when you detect problems - whether inherited or your own, or fail to have sufficient oversight of those that are in place. The first doesn’t apply to Entwistle; the second can’t yet apply as he had only been in the post for a few weeks. The third is more arguable, but I believe a new person in a huge job should be allowed to make errors, if only for the purpose that they learn from and don’t repeat them. Also, in theory a fire could develop anywhere in the BBC’s vast forest, but one cannot expect the DG rather than the system he or she oversees to pick them up.

Finally, with regard to the second point above, accountability is an active thing: it is about putting things right, and the new DG was not been given this chance. If he had been given that chance, and had failed, then we could have started talking about his responsibility.

Meanwhile, let’s panic. What else is there to do?

In praise of maps

What wonderful things maps are. No symbol of our loss of innocence is more beautiful.

Maps changed our world - that line of mountains, those headlands at each end of the bay, the horizons beneath which we carried on our lives - and the lands and people beyond it. The world was flat until maps appeared in all their essential flattiness.

Now Mankind could fly without leaving the ground, could burn his wings without crashing to earth. The world became of three dimensions. While always compromised by its curvature, maps are things of revelation. Even the most prescriptively and deliberately drawn leave as much to be imagined as read, while large scale topographical maps are a wealth of the unstated but discernible. And they are never up to date. Maps contain within them the tools with which we can question both what we see and what we understand.

For this reason maps should be treated as kindly as books, and we should resist the shallow, utilitarian prescription of satellite and other devices, for to travel is better than to arrive - whether you think you know where you're going or not.

But would Petraeus betray us?

I hope I'm not alone in thinking it ridiculous that David Petraeus has resigned as head of the CIA because he had an extra-marital affair. That's between him and his wife and family.

It doesn't matter whether he was good or bad at his job, since the 'rule' would apply to the good as well as the bad, and could apply to any organisation or post.

Nor does it say much about the suitability of his character for the high post he occupied, if that is the reason. John F. Kennedy was himself an adulterer, Winston Churchill a drunkard and Adolf Hitler a teetotal vegetarian who wept to music and couldn't abide cruelty to animals (and in that sense he was a man whose time has come, a modern role model if ever there was one).

That Petraeus had it off with his biographer might make people want to read the book with care, but it's not as if he was popping over to Iran to call on Mrs Ahmadinejad and leaving his papers in the wardrobe, is it?

Meanwhile, there is no doubt tumult everywhere in Langley, Virginia, and you don't have to love the CIA to see the danger of following the principle elsewhere.

It's just daft.