Finger from the Dyke

One can imagine some spluttering over the muesli at Thompson Towers this morning. The BBC's DG is just over a week away from two important events: The MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International TV Festival - and revealing details of a second "go" at sorting the BBC Pension Fund deficit. Things are probably already pretty tense.

So, muttering from the sidelines, comes Greg Dyke, in comments to The Independent.

...the former BBC director-general Greg Dyke says that the corporation's bosses, through their generous pay packages, are giving encouragement to the Government to take a knife to the BBC. "I do think that at a senior level they haven't really acted as they should have done in terms of senior salaries. I think the salaries at the BBC are a red rag to a bull at a time when the Government is cutting organisations because too many public-sector people are earning too much money," he says. "I think the chairman of the [BBC] Trust [Sir Michael Lyons] should have done something about it, and hasn't."

The analysis of many is that the Gregster, whilst making the Corporation feel happy, set the framework in which salaries soared away, and failed to balance the books, in a sort of "deficit denier" way about licence fee income. The question for Thommo, and his various finance and personnel chiefs, is have they done enough to turn it round in the six subsequent years ?