Helen Boaden, director of news at the BBC, has maintained a Trappist silence since the beginning of the Savile affair.
But yesterday she made a rare public appearance, not to defend herself but to pay tribute to the retiring Radio 4 newsreader Peter Donaldson. After 43 years with the Beeb he is leaving and a farewell party was held in his honour at the Yorkshire Grey pub in Langham Street.
Boaden, wearing a slinky black trouser suit, made a startling revelation during her speech. “I’ve lost a stone since all the Savile business erupted,” she disclosed.
Boaden offered to resign at the height of the Savile scandal in October but was rebuffed by then director-general George Entwistle. Last month she returned to her £354,000-a-year post, following the publication of the Pollard Report, and she sent an internal email to staff admitting that she had spent “several bruising weeks away” and had found the furore tough to weather.
After Boaden’s speech yesterday, erstwhile newsreader Brian Perkins paid tribute to Donaldson: “Goodbye then to wars, crises, assassinations, cover-ups and unsavoury behaviour — and those are just the stories about the BBC that he read. Goodbye, too, to Peter’s immaculate pronunciation of Lee Bum Suk and Cardinal Sin.”
Donaldson made an intriguing disclosure of his own. “I thought I had a nice little earner lined up in the form of doing the podcasts for the Guardian and Observer,” he said. “So I made a pilot programme. And then the voice from on high came back: ‘Too BBC’.”
