Chance Governs All
Marmaduke Hussey
Macmillan £20, pp336

It is April 1991 and the chairman of the BBC governors is sitting in his office when the Home Secretary rings. 'Hello, Dukie, it's Kenneth (Baker) here. I've been talking to John (Major)... You're doing a bloody good job in difficult circumstances and we'd like you to do another five years. I hope that's fine with you. I must dash. I'm seeing the Prince of Wales in three minutes.' Thus, in the highest echelons of state, are the mightiest decisions taken. Thus, Dukie rides again.

What's in a name? You wonder constantly through this occasionally touching and often inadvertently hilarious memoir what would have happened if Lord Hussey's uncle, killed on the Somme, had been called Reginald or Ernest, not Marmaduke. Then the boy named after him would have been Reggie or Ernie Hussey, not Duke. No subliminal clouds of sub-aristocratic glory, no glorious career?

Marmaduke Hussey is a courteous buffer of the kind the Conservative Party used to recruit effortlessly. His dad was Director of Education for Uganda. He went to Rugby and Oxford and made a lot of friends. He joined the Grenadier Guards and lost a leg at Anzio. He married a nice girl - a Waldegrave, no less - who became a lady-in-waiting to the Queen.

The difficulty, thereafter, lies in discerning quite where his achievements lie. Duke joined the old Daily Mail as a management trainee, got on well with Lord (Esmond) Rothermere and became general manager of the Scottish edition. Closed. He became managing director of Associated's national titles and lost pots of money. He left, whereupon 'the Mail's fortunes rose almost daily'. He surfaced as CEO of (Roy Thomson's) Times Newspapers and took on the marauding unions over new technology. He lost. Mr Murdoch, who does not lose, stepped in.

But the better class of parachute always opens. Rupert gave him a consultancy. He had a mild dabble in local radio. And, then, Stuart Young, the BBC chairman, died. 'They'll be hard pressed to find some idiot to take it on,' Dukie told a chum. The phone promptly rang. Had Rupert put in a word with Maggie? He rather thinks so. 'Does he know anything about broadcasting?' she asked her Cabinet. 'He's chairman of a local broadcasting company,' someone volunteered. Ah! 'that settles it'.

The rest is history, which, like all history, may be variously interpreted. Hussey arrived and, lecturing the troops on libel, apologised to Neil Hamilton. He sacked Alisdair Milne as Director General and appointed Michael Checkland. But Checkland was full of 'ingrained attitudes': no modernising chap to get the charter renewed. He was shafted, too, and the Birt era began. More woe. 'The problem with John is that, while he is a good guided missile, on autopilot he is just as likely to hit his own troops.'

Alas, the wider ironies escape him. Milne's BBC was 'out of control, with some pretty unreliable characters'. Just like the Thomson organisation, which flaked around him in the heat of union battle. Checkland believed 'in fix and fudge' - vile anathema to this hardened Fleet Street general.

So the charter was renewed. As virtually his last act, he cast the vote to uproot radio from Langham Place to White City. A new chairman - name nowhere mentioned - turned the governors 'into a good chorus for the musical version of the Vicar of Bray '.

It is all, in its baleful way, rather sad. Marmaduke Hussey had - and has - many virtues. He was affable; he fitted into a newspaper world where gents still ruled (one rival managing director had been his fag at Rugby); he had his recruiting successes. But the thought that he somehow 'saved' the BBC - as Lord Birt prepares to write his own memoirs - butters few crumpets. The Beeb is too vast, too amorphous to need salvation from one hand. It walks effortlessly on, with the dinosaurs.