Balen out

BBC News today says farewell to man-of-mystery, Malcolm Balen, who has apparently been Head of Editorial Standards.  John Humphrys says he was the man who used to have to read his Daily Mail pieces before they were handed over to Dacre Towers. Denis MacShane, when still an MP, told the Commons in 2008 "I have here a letter from Mr. Malcolm Balen, a senior editorial adviser at BBC News. It is very friendly, but whenever someone from the BBC writes to one of us on these issues they go into a special room, cover themselves in grease, and then go for a swim in oil, so what he says is, to put it mildly, quite hard to grasp...."

Malcolm Balen, 66 (BA History, Peterhouse, Cambridge) was a news trainee, then reported for Look North in Manchester at the start of the 80s.  In 1989, he joined Channel 4 News, then became editor of the BBC Nine O'Clock News in 1994. From a post as Executive Editor, he was tempted to the London News Network service on ITV in 2000 (The Guardian at the time said he had been sidelined at the BBC by Roger Mosey). 

He's found time over the years to write a biography of Kenneth Clarke, a history of the South Seas Bubble (reprinted under three different titles) and A Model Victory, an account of the Battle of Waterloo. 

But his legacy will be the still-secret Balen Report - 20,000 words on the BBC's Middle East coverage,. commissioned in 2003 by Richard Sambrook. The BBC has paid substantial legal costs over the years to keep it from public gaze. Don't tell The Jewish Chronicle, eh ?