Vine ‘paid £80,000’ for running commentary on Scottish referendum

The ‘star’ system rewards individuals showing off more than high-quality programme-making

JEREMY VINE was paid as much as £80,000 for just one programme on the night of the Scottish independence referendum.

A well-placed source has told The Daily Telegraph that the BBC offered Vine the sum for working on the 2014 referendum. The payment was separate to his earnings as a presenter on Radio 2 and as host of television quiz show Eggheads and other programmes.

Vine, 52, emerged last week as the fourth highest-paid BBC star behind Chris Evans, Gary Lineker and Graham Norton. Last year he earned between £700,000 and £750,000 for a number of shows across the corporation.

Vine’s work for the BBC enables him – in common with other stars – to negotiate separate deals for each programme he works for. He was asked to work for the BBC on the night of the Scottish referendum in 2014. The terms of his contract are secret but the source said: “Jeremy Vine was paid £80,000 to work on the Scottish referendum. There was some preparation involved in the run-up … but the main job was working through the night as results came in.” Vine did not present the show but appeared on a regular basis throughout the evening explaining how the result would likely pan out based on results as they came in.

It is not clear whether Vine is paid similar sums for general elections on top of his other work – but it is thought likely he negotiates a fee for each event. It is not known if Vine received similar

fees for the two general elections and the EU referendum as well.

A BBC spokesman said: “As well as presenting his daily Radio 2 show, which brings news and current affairs at the heart of the daytime schedule to 7.02million listeners a week, Jeremy is also the co-presenter of Crimewatch and presents Points of View. In the last year Jeremy has also presented 132 episodes of the popular daytime quiz show Eggheads. His experience of political, live and overseas reporting means he is also important as a co-presenter of major national events like general elections and referendums.” Vine and his agent both declined to comment.

While women at the BBC fumed over the glaring gender pay gap, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’S long-serving Middle East editor, appeared unhappy to be in the lower reaches of the published list.

Bowen earns £150,000-£199,999, putting him in the same bracket as fellow foreign correspondent John Simpson but behind newsroom-based colleagues George Alagiah and Huw Edwards. He had a busy day on social media, retweeting praise from followers including: “Shameful that journos like @Bowenbbc who constantly put their lives in line of fire are in the lowest bracket of the BBC pay table.”

‘There was some preparation … but the main job was working through the night’

The 8am news on BBC Radio 4 yesterday reported the discovery that male northern elephant seals “use the rhythm of their deep, grumbling calls to identify each other” on the beaches of California. “Once the lower-ranked males heard recordings of big high-status giants,” the report continued, “they hauled themselves away.”

This was an almost perfect description of the BBC’S pay policy towards its top performers, including the fact that female seals were simply not mentioned. A few deep, grumbling calls from Chris Evans (£2.2million a year) or John Humphrys (“up to” £649,999), and the beach empties.

Obviously it brings profound pleasure to millions to see the BBC exposed in this way. Scarcely a news item or feature in its output does not drone on about issues of “equality” of one sort or another. Now we know what the BBC does, as opposed to what it says. Men paid, by the public, two or three times more than cabinet ministers harangue them about the gap between rich and poor. Is there any other organisation in Britain which would consider the outrageously dull Huw Edwards (up to £599,999 a year) four times more valuable than the excellent Jane Garvey of Woman’s Hour, whose salary is too modest to feature on the BBC Rich List at all? Poor – well, not rich – Ms Garvey asked the sinister, Left-ish Eddie Mair (up to £349,999) on air if he would take a pay cut. The item was swiftly ended with her question unanswered.

Yet, despite the BBC’S embarrassment, I sense that the “gender gap” story is the one it is steering everyone towards. After all, it is always hard, sometimes contractually impossible, to cut people’s pay, so the most likely result of this BBC sex war will be that the women will get more while the men stay the same. Then the whole point of exposing the figures in the first place – to force the BBC to control its costs – will have been up-ended, and licence fee-payers will be still further imposed upon. In its eternal struggle to gouge more out of the involuntarily-paying public, the BBC will have won.

On the day that the pay story broke, I happened to receive notice of payment from the BBC. I had appeared on Jeremy Vine’s programme, What Makes Us Human, on Radio 2. I wrote a 500-word talk on the title theme, delivered it on air, chose some music and then was interviewed by Jeremy for about 30 minutes. The labour involved was roughly half a working day. For this, I was paid £112.50.

According to the BBC Rich List, Jeremy Vine gets up to £749,999 a year. So my internet calculator, dividing his “up to” salary figure by the number of working days in a year (and assuming he is paid while on holiday), assures me that Jeremy received £1,444.230576927 for interviewing me.

Although I usually try, mischievously, to get more money out of the BBC, I am not complaining about being considered 12 times less valuable than Jeremy Vine. Nor am I accusing him of greed. He is entitled to ask for what he thinks he can get. He does his job in a friendly and professional way and I enjoy talking to him (which is why I agreed to go on).

No, the problem lies with the BBC, and what it thinks it is. In order to justify its compulsory licence fee, it has constant recourse to its public-service ethos. Its statutory job is to “inform, educate and entertain”. Nobody else, it says, can do this properly. It is unaffected by commercial motives. It provides something for everyone, and that something will always be good, it implies.

But in reality the BBC sees itself as just another media competitor, threatened by commercial rivals, whether they be the old, muchweakened ITV, or Netflix, or the internet in general. So it claims it must pay whatever is needed to get and keep the best.

This argument has now more or less collapsed in relation to BBC executives – although the numbers of them earning more than £150,000 (roughly 100) remain stupefying. In about 2008, I remember having lunch with Mark Thompson, the then director-general of the BBC, and telling him that his salary – roughly £800,000 – was too high. He assured me it was the going rate. He was soon forced to cut it, though. The present director-general, Tony Hall, decided to bring his own salary down further. He jogs along on £450,000. No one tries to claim that the BBC is less well led as a result.

Now, at last, the same public scrutiny is being applied to the presenters. In 2008 – that fatal year which exposed what Dr Johnson called “the insolence of riches” – Jonathan Ross, alongside Russell Brand, made his infamous, obscene telephone call on Radio 2 to the actor Andrew Sachs. It turned out that Ross was on £6 million a year from the BBC. His prodigious pulling power justified every penny, we were told, but when he belatedly slunk out of the Corporation in 2010, life continued much as before. The star system began to weaken.

After this week’s Rich List, we can all form our views. Perhaps there should be a programme called I’m a Celebrity… Fix my Salary. Every performer on the BBC earning more than the Prime Minister (Mrs May gets £149,440 a year) would have to come on and justify himself or – in much rarer cases – herself. The millions relieved of £147 a year for a television licence could finally exercise a bit of direct democracy.

Actually, this would be a mistake. The star system is not only an unjustified exploitation of a public service privileged by law. It is also an artistic mistake, working against the virtues that the BBC does still, in some respects, possess.

BBC executives defending the pay of the Evanses, the Edwardses, the Gary Linekers and so on, always speak of “the talent”, meaning only the people famous on screen or radio. This is insulting. It implies that the almost invariably extremely nice, modestly paid, highly intelligent, self-effacing producers, who make the programmes of the famous presentable to the outside world, are not talented. It also ignores the strength of public service broadcasting, which lies in the collective attempt to maintain high standards rather than the compulsion of a few individuals to show off.

It is no accident that the presenters of the World Service or Radio 3 do not appear in the Rich List. They live by the old-fashioned belief that what they present matters more than they do. Of course, no one working for the BBC would actively prefer to be poorly paid, but many of them do happily make a choice between the public service ethos and the dreams of avarice.

For example, Sarah Sands, who was until recently the editor of London’s Evening Standard, took a cut of half her salary to become editor of the Today programme, for this reason.

It is also no accident that news presentation on the more widely watched domestic channels is increasingly hysterical and politicised: it has become a forum for would-be stars seeking fame and fortune.

If the BBC has a future, it is surely not as a platform for a few egos, but as an ark of our culture.