This is taken from The Observer, August 21, 2005:

Peer with a plan

He does nothing hastily or without reason, from leaving the BBC to throwing a party. So listen carefully when he delivers the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival

by Geraldine Bedell

'The question is, did he plan his marriage break-up using Powerpoint?' asks one former colleague of John Birt, adding: 'He is the most ridiculously rational man I've ever worked with.'

In an age awash with emotional intelligence, Lord Birt is an anomaly. Few people would dispute his mental clarity, his ability to identify how best to get from A to B. But few can be found to argue he's much good at persuading others of a less cause-and-effect disposition that it's a journey they want to make.

As director general of the BBC, John Birt may well have preserved the Corporation in public ownership. He shook up a complacent organisation now widely recognised to have needed it. Most importantly, his long view positioned the BBC for the digital age. But in the process he allowed himself to be perceived as dry, dusty and unfeeling. He made intractable enemies. And in the end that started to harm the organisation he headed, because it can never be really good for the head of a major institution to be reviled in the press by his staff as a robotic managerialist.

All of which makes Lord Birt's decision to give the MacTaggart Lecture at next weekend's Edinburgh Television Festival perplexing. Since its inception in 1976, the lecture has been a platform for major policy announcements and controversial industry attacks.

When Birt left the BBC, according to one former colleague, 'he made a very big deal about how he was nothing to do with the broadcasting world now'. His only intervention in broadcasting has been his reported support, during the charter renewal debates, for 'top slicing', a radical proposal to give a proportion of the licence fee to other broadcasters, which, in the end, Tessa Jowell quashed.

Lord Birt promptly announced that he would give the lecture and can scarcely fail to mention the proposals, which were drawn up by his close friend Lord Burns, the former top civil servant at the Treasury (and economic adviser to London Weekend Television when Birt was there and his neighbour in Wales).

Birt has privately denied that he had a hand in drawing up the proposals and may yet announce that, after all, he is not in favour of top slicing. But if he does confirm his alleged support for redistributing some of the BBC's licence fee, he will be seen to be pursuing a long-running, extremely vicious and highly personal feud with Michael Grade, now chairman of the BBC, which dates back to when they were both at LWT.

In his autobiography, Grade likened John Birt's skills to those of a 'Trappist monk' and claimed: 'The non-Birt people - those of us that weren't called John Birt - used to wake up and ask which new bit of our empire has he snaffled overnight to add to his.'

John Birt doesn't really do emoting. Earlier this year he announced that he was divorcing his wife Jane, whom he met in 1963, and that he intended to marry Eithne Wallis, former director general of the probation service. Right up until he made this announcement he and Jane continued to attend functions and see friends as if nothing was wrong.

Friends of Lord Birt profess themselves bemused at his decision to get involved in the lecture, with its potential for so much emotion.

Emotions have a dangerously anarchic and uncontrollable tendency and Birt prefers things neat and tidy. He recounts how he used to reorganise his mother's drawers at the age of two, unable to bear the mess of buttons and cotton reels. 'It gave me immense satisfaction,' he reports, 'to tidy the drawer each day; to bring order to chaos; to create neat, serried, perfect ranks of objects.'

After a Liverpool childhood and education by the Christian Brothers, and an engineering degree at Oxford, John Birt joined Granada and then LWT, where he created Weekend World, the immensely worthy current affairs show initially presented by Peter Jay. The programme sought to develop Birt and Jay's ideas that television must acquire a 'mission to explain' and rid itself of its 'bias against understanding'.

After five years as director of programmes at LWT, Birt joined the BBC in 1987 as deputy director general and director of news and current affairs. He took over the top job in 1992. From the outset, he set himself against the BBC culture, calling an early meeting of journalists and announcing that they could more or less forget everything they'd been doing: he didn't think much of it. The journalists feared that he meant reporting to become dry and sterile, and in particular that they'd be required to test theses, as at Weekend World, rather than to report what they found.

His belligerence was a tactical error, because he was actually trying to restore the primacy of journalism to a BBC that had become entertainment-led. 'You wouldn't find anyone at the BBC now seriously arguing that journalism is not the most important thing it does,' says one insider. 'That was not the case in the mid-1980s.' It was necessary to restore some balance to reporting: prior to his arrival a number of MPs had successfully sued over a programme called Maggie's Militant Tendency, in which footage of them was intercut with archive material of Nazis saluting.

Inside the BBC its journalists will now admit, there was a view at the time that the Thatcher governments did not have to be taken seriously, were somehow not legitimate. It was wholly untenable for a publicly-funded BBC to be so biased, and Birt insisted on journalistic objectivity.

For some, the journalistic checks and balances were sometimes too stringent. But it is interesting to speculate whether the David Kelly affair could have happened under Birt. He hated sloppiness and lack of process; he was also aware of a tendency at the BBC to be inattentive to the grievances of those outside. The Hutton inquiry may have helped speed the revisionism with regard to his time in charge: its journalists have become more aware of the need for frameworks and systems to protect them and acutely aware that robustness requires that their reporting be clearly defensible.

John Birt joined the BBC at a time when the Prime Minister was ideologically open to the idea of privatisation or sell-off, and worked hard on the non-Thatcherite wing of the Conservative party to preserve a view of the BBC as mattering. The less hostile journalism helped, obviously. So probably did the (internally unpopular) purchaser-provider split, which divided the BBC up into content providers and commissioners of programmes - each of which went on to develop their own unwieldy management superstructures.

Birt's greatest achievement was to position the BBC for digital broadcasting; he also quickly grasped the importance of the web. Producer choice - a euphemism for cost-cutting - addressed the fact that the BBC had become bloated and unaccountable and no one knew how much anything cost. It was a very 1970s way of running an organisation. From now on, programmes would have budgets and be required to account for what they spent within them.

Most of this nearly didn't happen. Soon after Birt became director general, his future was risked by revelations that he was selling himself to the BBC as a consultant, with Schedule D tax arrangements and an expense account which included secretarial payments to his wife and a large sum for suits. He survived, and joined the staff, where his salary rose to more than compensate. The scandal became known as Armanigate, since Birt is vain about his clothes: an acquaintance recalls once seeing Jane Birt in a beautiful dress and asking 'Is that Japanese too?' (Acknowledging that her husband was obviously wearing a suit by Issey Miyake.) 'No,' John Birt replied, indicating his own outfit, 'this is Japanese.'

Birt left the BBC in 2000, took his seat in the House of Lords, and in 2001 was appointed Blair's 'blue-skies thinker'. It's a bit of a puzzle what the PM gets out of this arrangement: the appointment has certainly resulted in no great policy development. Before the last election, Lord Birt was working on a reorganisation of Whitehall, but to date, the only thing that's happened has been a change of name for the DTI, which the incoming Secretary of State promptly changed back. A suggestion to build toll motorways alongside major roads was quickly dismissed by Alistair Darling.

Those who like working with Birt say he is invigorating because he's so rigorous and strategic, and in a world in which horizons are usually measured in hours, that might be an interesting thing for Blair to have around. Those who are more cynical point to his usefulness in taking flak: Birt is regarded with irritation and amusement in large parts of Whitehall. As for Birt himself, he likes being at the centre of power, and is drawn to fame: he left LWT having established a lifelong friendship with Cilla Black.

Altogether, Lord Birt is a curious person to have led a creative powerhouse in the late 20th century; a man who believes in cause and effect at a time when creativity is widely understood to emerge best from fuzzy networks of people and ideas. He is a person who keeps mementoes of his life tidily in envelopes, one for each year; he invited guests on a birthday cruise to the Galapagos Islands two years in advance. We can be sure that whatever he intends to say next weekend he's thought about it. There's bound to be some strategy.

John Birt

DoB: 10 December 1944

Jobs: Former director general of the BBC, adviser to the Prime Minister

Family: Separated from wife Jane (one son, one daughter); now with Eithne Wallis

Education: St Mary's College, Liverpool; St Catherine's College, Oxford