John Birt, the outgoing director-general of the BBC whose army of accountants and pen-pushers have been blamed for crippling the corporation's creativity, wants £250,000 to reveal the secrets of his management style.
The £400,000-a-year new life peer, who will quit the corporation this week with a pay-off rumoured to exceed £200,000, is hawking around a 'best-seller for the international market'.
Birt's decision to pen the guide - which will include a chapter entitled 'How to avoid mistakes most commonly made by managers' - has provoked derision at the BBC, where his authoritarian regime provoked the biggest crisis in the corporation's history. His 10-year reign was punctuated by allegations from critics that he was damaging the corporation's creative output.
Critics as varied as Michael Grade, former head of Channel 4; Mark Tully, distinguished India correspondent; and playwright Dennis Potter led the revolt. They condemned Birt as 'Big Brother', a 'control freak', 'a bureaucratic vandal' and a 'croak-voiced Dalek'. It was said his management style made the BBC 'a secretive, top-heavy and forbidding fortress from which no stray opinion is permitted to escape the BBC's own thought police'.
Birt was at the centre of an early controvery when it was revealed he was being paid as a freelance via his own private company, his wife had two BBC salaries and his £4,000 Giorgio Armani 'wardrobe expenses' were being claimed in tax returns.
One senior BBC programme-maker said yesterday: 'Birt set new standards in bullying, cost-cutting and enriching himself. He sacked thousands of staff and appointed endless bureaucrats who had futile meetings to implement debilitating and lunatic plans.
'Staff morale has still not recovered. He could not be less well qualified to be a management guru.' Although he collected many enemies, some people outside the organisation believed his reforms were laid the foundations for the BBC enter the digital age. 'It hurt a lot, but it needed to happen,' said one commentator.
Birt 'auditioned' half a dozen literary agents before choosing Jonathan Lloyd, managing director of Curtis Brown, who has a reputation for securing big money deals.
Birt and Lloyd, who also represents Raymond Seitz, the former US ambassador to Britain, and Marion Keyes, the bestselling Irish novelist, are negotiating with six publishing houses, including Random House, Fourth Estate and HarperCollins.
The two men have handed publishers a document marked 'Private and Confidential', which outlines the autobiography.
Birt and Lloyd originally proposed a third book on the media in the twenty-first century, but industry sources say it was dropped after publishers said the market was too small for three Birtian tomes. Although he is famously said to have a grey image even on colour television, Birt, 55, who was ennobled in the New Year honours, is convinced he can produce a bestseller.
Lloyd told The Observer the books would be 'among the most riveting and important of the year'. He denied Birt's public image would put off readers. 'People are entitled to their opinions but the books are exciting and original.' Asked whether he was confident he would secure a hefty advance for his client, Lloyd said: 'I always do.'
Publishers close to the negotiations are less sure. They dismiss Birt's proposal as 'a yawn'.
'If John Birt feels he will get £250,000 for a proposal like that, he is in for a shock,' one said. 'The autobiography proposal reads like his Who's Who entry and the management book sounds like the Ladybird Book of Organisational Theory rather than an international bestseller.'
How to be a BBC fat cat and make sure you lap up the crème de la crème
Do:
• Sack 4,000 staff and bring in a new tier of highly-paid middle managers, accountants and management consultants.
• Give yourself a £50,000 pay rise when everyone else is getting 1.5 per cent and ensure that your wife is paid two salaries. • Communicate by terse handwritten memo only.
• Dismiss critics as 'fuddy duddy old soldiers sniping with their muskets'.
• Tutor the canteen staff in the art of napkin folding, especially into the shape of dinosaurs.
• Get the licence payer to stump up thousands for your leaving do.
Don't:
• Work for the company that pays you
£410,000 a year. Be a freelance and reduce your tax bills instead.
• Buy your own Giorgio Armani suits. The tax man will kit you out.
• Tell the chairman if you have the Exclusive of the Decade, such as, say, the first and only TV interview with Princess Diana.
• Stay in London on Fridays. Head straight for your country retreat.
• Leave when your successor is appointed. Hang on for five months annoying everyone until you get a peerage. Then head for the door.
