So that’s why the BBC is so keen on public sector pay rises

LET’S compare and contrast two men called Nick. General Nick Carter, the head of the British Army, has served his country for almost 40 years. He’s seen active service in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. Frequently risking his life, he holds the Distinguished Service Order, a medal for exemplary bravery.

This 58-year-old father of four earns £175,000 a year, and few would deny that he’s worth every penny.

Now let’s meet Nick Grimshaw, a presenter on Radio 1. Mr Grimshaw has done well since he joined the BBC in 2007.

He has his own BBC breakfast show, and the high media profile that affords him meant he landed a plum job as a judge on the ITV’s X Factor, as well as appearing in soap operas such as Coronation Street and EastEnders.

Offensive

Now in his early 30s, Mr Grimshaw, who likes to go out partying with the model Kate Moss, earns about £375,000 — that’s more than twice as much of our money as General Carter receives.

That’s morally offensive, and in itself a sign that something has gone horribly wrong with public service in Britain.

If Mr Grimshaw worked in the private sector, it would be none of our business. We could shrug our shoulders and blame market forces.

But Nick Grimshaw doesn’t work in the private sector, he works for one of Britain’s great national institutions, the BBC. It takes about 2,500 licence fee payers, each forking out nearly £150 a year, to pay Nick Grimshaw’s hefty salary.

Many of those people will be struggling to pay their mortgage and raise a family. Yet if they want to have a television, they do not have a choice in whether they pay for a licence. They get prosecuted if they refuse to pay.

This disparity is indefensible. Remember that the BBC fought a long rearguard action to prevent the world knowing about the extortionate sums it pays its senior employees. Now we know why.

The bosses at the BBC didn’t want licence fee payers to know about the culture of greed that has taken over at the top of an organisation that used to be renowned for its integrity. Nick Grimshaw is not by any means the worst offender. Many of the salaries paid to the senior BBC stars are far more disturbing.

Take the case of Huw Edwards, a talking head who presents the news by reading an autocue. A soft, easy job if ever there was one. Edwards, one of life’s plodders, might struggle to command £50,000 or £60,000 a year out in the real world.

Yet he is paid an unbelievable £550,000 per annum. That’s 20 times the national average wage.

Gary Lineker, meanwhile, gets £1.8 million — that’s more than ten times General Nick Carter — for his part-time BBC assignment talking about football.

More than 12,000 licence fee payers have to put their hands in their pockets each year to pay for Lineker, who is notorious for dabbling in tax avoidance schemes.

And that £1.8 million is just a fraction of Lineker’s income, because he also works for BT Sport and has lucrative advertising contracts for such things as crisps.

Yesterday, just before the salaries were announced, Lineker tweeted this deeply offensive message: ‘Happy BBC salary day. I blame my agent and the other TV channels that pay more. Now where did I put my tin helmet?’

He clearly thinks the whole thing is good for a joke and all very funny.

Mr Lineker then followed up with a second hilarious tweet: ‘This whole BBC salary exposure business is an absolute outrage ... I mean how can Chris Evans be on more than me?’

No doubt all those people who pay his BBC wages felt their sides splitting. Lineker — who loves to display his Left-wing conscience on Twitter — appears to have no conception whatever how offensive to ordinary licence fee payers all this is.

It has become clear that the publication of these grotesque salaries is the BBC’s equivalent of the MPs’ expenses scandal which brought the House of Commons low nine years ago. (It is not without irony that it’s only thanks to the efforts of MPs that the Beeb has been forced to unveil these salaries.)

Parliament largely cleaned up its act after the expenses scandal. Will the BBC do the same?

The signs are that it has no intention of doing so at all. Yesterday morning, the BBC director-general Tony Hall told Today programme presenter Mishal Husain that ‘every one of those people is worth every penny of the licence fee that they earn’.

Fame

Really? Does Hall honestly think that Radio 5 part-time ‘shock jock’ Steve Nolan is worth £450,000 per annum (paid by more than 3,000 licence fees)? That Chris Evans is worth £2.2 million?

Consider, by the way, that while General Nick Carter earns around ten times the salary of a private soldier in the Army, Chris Evans earns in the region of 80 times what a BBC researcher would. That hardly smacks of decent moral values. And let’s not forget that many BBC presenters use their fame to earn massive extra income from speaking fees, as well as receiving a cast-iron pension.

The fact is that in the past 25 years, the BBC has been captured by a financially ravenous metropolitan media elite.

As far as this financial elite is concerned, it is right and proper that a newsreader such as Huw Edwards should be paid nearly four times as much from what is effectively the public purse as the British prime minister.

Almost as bad, the huge sums the state-owned BBC pays its stars distorts national political debate.

Greed

Lavishly remunerated presenters naturally feel gratitude to the state for their comfortable lifestyles, and see more government spending as the answer to every problem. Perhaps that’s why the BBC seems to spend so much time putting the case for increases in public sector pay.

How can Tony Hall really believe that his overpaid and pampered talent are worth every penny they earn?

I regret to say that we need to look no further than the American political novelist Sinclair Lewis for the answer. Lewis remarked: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’

This level of greed makes me despair, because I love much of what the BBC produces.

It employs many dedicated technicians, producers and researchers who are lucky to get paid £25,000 or £30,000 a year. They give their lives to the Corporation and I know from personal experience of making BBC programmes how capable and dedicated they are.

How these people must despair at the money being paid to the talking heads on the airwaves.

But the real problem for the BBC is that if it remains so divorced from the values and experiences of ordinary Britons, why should these licence fee payers feel obliged to support it with their hard-earned money?

It takes 12,000 people’s licence fees to pay Gary Lineker’s salary