The BBC is hardly a stranger to crises of various kinds and rows with powerful political figures. Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher was furious when the BBC interviewed IRA terrorists in Northern Ireland and gave them – as she put it – the “oxygen of publicity". Over the years when I presented what was billed as the BBC’s “flagship” TV news and current affairs programme, Newsnight, our editors made two catastrophic errors. One editor halted an investigation into the popular BBC TV personality Jimmy Savile because – in that editor’s view – the researchers had not found enough evidence that Savile was a sexual predator. When that evidence did emerge, the BBC’s failures were brutally exposed. Then the BBC ran a report wrongly claiming a leading Conservative member of the House of Lords was himself a sexual predator. He wasn’t. The accusations were utterly false, and after this shameful episode, George Entwistle, the BBC director general at the time, was forced to quit after only 54 days in the job.