Should John Birt be remembered as the chief architect of the BBCs disgrace?
At the age of 76, two years younger than the current US president, he told MPs that he could remember virtually nothing of what happened 25 years ago, when Bashir first duped Diana, and then members of his team covered up what they had done. Yet he had made what he called a forensic study of Lord Dysons report into the underhand methods used to land the Panorama interview, and learned, he said, for the first time, how Bashir had lied and lied again about his use of forged documents. Despite his role as BBC editor-in-chief at the time, he insisted no one had passed on this critical information to him. No one had shown him the four-page report by a senior executive in March 1996, a few months after the edition of Panorama went out, or mentioned the letter of reprimand written by a BBC apparatchik and sent to Bashir, he said. While his trusted lieutenant, news chief Tony Hall, knew all of this, Birt insisted to MPs he knew absolutely nothing about Bashirs mendacity  even though the two executives spoke at length at the time and exchanged memos constantly about the burgeoning scandal. Birts lack of knowledge about what happened on his watch has proven to be a constant stumbling block. He refused an invitation by committee chair Julian Knight MP to do as Lord Hall had done and apologise to Matt Wiessler, Panoramas graphic designer who tried to raise the alarm about Bashirs methods but was subsequently blacklisted by the BBC. Birt claimed he lacked sufficient evidence of events to do so. However, having received an apology from the BBCs current director general, Tim Davie, Wiessler told me: The real apology should come from the man that was in charge of the BBC at the time  John Birt. When youre the captain of the ship, youre the captain of the ship. If something happens, you have to know about it, and I cannot believe that the cover-up would not have passed across John Birts desk.  Whether Birt was across the detail of the Panorama deception, or whether he was indeed truly ignorant of it all, his tenure as BBC director general will now be chiefly remembered for one of the journalistic crimes of the century. As a result, the corporations global reputation for honesty and truth-telling is in tatters, and likely to remain so for years. I have watched the scandal unfold from a position at the centre of events. It was in 2007 that the BBC answered my first Freedom of Information request for the internal Bashir papers by saying, quite simply  and falsely  that there were none.