Interview with Greg Dyke

He has held the roles of Director General of the BBC, Chancellor of the University of York and now Chairman of the Football Association; you could be excused, therefore, for thinking that Greg Dyke is talking rubbish when he says that he isn’t very good at working his way up.

“I’ve always been better at working downwards than I ever have been at working upwards. I can’t be bothered with working upwards, which is a mistake in life – you need to do both!” he tells me, as we sit down together for what is likely to be one of his final visits as Chancellor to the University he graduated from with a degree in politics all the way back in 1974.

Dyke took on the role of Chairman of the FA earlier this month, meaning he will have less time to dedicate to the University. Within a year or two he expects to give the job up, but this is something he would have done anyhow, even without the job as English football’s chief slapped on his plate. It is not unsurprising that a man who has had such a varied and fruitful professional career should always be keen to keep things fresh and sees each new role he accepts as having an expiration date, and he stresses the importance of not allowing yourself to blend in with the surroundings.

“I’ve done nine years now as Chancellor. I did one term of five years and they asked me to do another term of five years so I would’ve logically left sometime next year. They have asked me, because there’s a new Vice-Chancellor coming, if I will stay on for a year or two to help him come in and then he can find my successor. I don’t mind doing it – I’m quite pleased to do that, but I do think there is a time limit that you should do jobs for – I think if you do the for too long you do become the furniture.”

That said, he does admit to wishing he has been able to spend a little more time as Director General of the BBC – a job from which he was ousted in the wake of the Hutton Enquiry by a board of superiors with whom he was not always on the friendliest of terms.

“I would like to have spent another two years as Director General of the BBC because we were doing some interesting things that hadn’t come to fruition and they got lost, particularly about the relationship between the management and the staff,” he tells me.

“We spent a lot of time trying to make people feel valued, which is how I think you’ve got to run organisations and it was disappointing to go at the very moment I went.

“I didn’t really resign, they pushed me out, my Chairman had resigned, which was a mistake, and I think once he went it was pretty clear that they wouldn’t want to keep me. There were quite a lot of the board who didn’t like me, and that was perfectly mutual.”

Suddenly, despite the array of top jobs he has inked on his CV, Dyke’s claim that he is far better at working downwards than up begins to make a lot more sense. Indeed, he was extremely popular with the station’s workers during his time in charge and it is seen by many as a shame that he was forced out by an enquiry he says would nowadays be seen as a “joke.”

The 2003 Hutton Enquiry centred around the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly, a biological warfare expert and former UN weapons inspector in Iraq.

On 18 July 2003, Kelly, an employee of the Ministry of Defence, was found dead after he had been named as the source of quotations used by BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan. These quotations had formed the basis of media reports claiming that Tony Blair’s Labour government had knowingly “sexed up” the “September Dossier”, a report into Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.

The inquiry opened in August 2003 and reported on 28 January 2004, clearing the government of wrongdoing and slamming the BBC. Even at the time the report was met with scepticism by the British public, and was criticised by the newspapers of both the right and left, including The Guardian and the Daily Mail.

“10 years ago I think there were still people who thought the government’s position and Hutton’s position was the right one,” says Dyke. “Now I don’t meet anybody who doesn’t think that they sexed up the case for war. It’ll be interesting when Chilcott comes out later this year – an enquiry into the war, because if Chilcott comes out and says I don’t think they did sex up the case for war I don’t think anyone will believe it, but I don’t think that’s what Chilcott will say anyway.”

Despite the manner of his exit from the BBC, Dyke does not seem bitter, and was still able to achieve much he is proud of during his relatively short tenure. Of everything, he speaks with most engagement on his work fighting workplace racism – something for which he received an award as well as an unexpected front page splash in the Mail on Sunday.

“I spent a bit of my life working in the race relations industry and was always very interested in the whole issue of how people integrated into our society. When I got to the BBC it was pretty obvious to me that the work force didn’t reflect what you saw outside in any way, and whereas my predecessor had done a huge amount of work in making sure more women came into the BBC and making sure more women got promoted in the BBC, which meant that a lot of the top jobs were held by women, it wasn’t true of ethnic minorities, and what I decided to do was to try and change it.

“I got interviewed one day by a radio programme in Scotland and she asked me a question, she said ‘do you think the media is hideously white?’ and I said I think the BBC is hideously white. I never thought about it again until it was the front page lead on the Mail on Sunday, and it’s one of those quotes I’ve never regretted, because it made the staff of the BBC, particularly the management, understand that we were going to change. Not because we wanted to give more jobs to black people or to Asian people but what you wanted to do is you wanted your work force to more properly reflect what was happening out there.

“You could go to places like Leeds where there was a big ethnic community and you found there was no-one of an ethnic background working at BBC Leeds at that time, and that had to be changed, and it has been changed.”

As far as racism within the sphere of university goes, Dyke was unaware of the recent scandal involving John Hey’s use of the ‘n-word’ in an Economics lecture and of Vision’s latest front page story regarding an ex-student’s claims that the University of York is “institutionally racist” – perhaps showing the lack of day-to-day involvement a Chancellor has with his University. He regards these claims as extremely unlikely, however, and also sees enticing more international students to York as an important priority.

“I’ve been to quite a lot of universities – people give you honorary degrees and the rest of it – and it’s interesting, they vary enormously,” he tells me. “My daughter just got a doctorate from Queen Mary so I went over to there for the graduation ceremony and the mix of students compared to say, York, is dramatically different. It’s partly about the Asian community living in the east end and girls particularly not going away from home. It’s one of the challenges for York, is how you increase the number of ethnic minorities wanting to come here. I’ve discussed it quite a lot with Trevor Phillips, who’s the head of the commission for racial equality, and he says, actually, if you look at it, ethnic minority students tend to go where there are already ethnic minority students, so it’s self-perpetuating, but it’s something York’s got to crack.”

He continues: “I think the idea that a university is institutionally racist is unlikely. I’m not sure anyone quite worked out what institutionally racist means. Institutionally racist means you would have policies, and I just don’t believe any university could be like that. There could be discrimination that is going on by default, which has happened at lots of organisations, but I see no sign of an institutionally racist organisation here.”

An increase in international students is just one area in which Dyke would like the University to improve. As Chancellor he is not in charge – “You’re basically a figurehead. You do give out the degrees, do a lot of PR, but you don’t run the University. It’s one of those great jobs – you have all the fun without any of the responsibility” – he says, but he still has an active engagement with the institution and is able to pick out points that he feels are important for York in the years ahead. One of these is employability – something at which York has been poor in recent times and has been the main factor in its slip down the university rankings and out of the top 10.

“I think in the world we now live we need to give students more help in terms of jobs, because it’s a much harder world, it’s a much harder task to get a job after leaving university than it was 20 years ago,” he says. “When I left everybody got jobs, so I think I would concentrate more on that.”

He also speaks about another recurrently raised issue with the University – the alienation of Heslington East from the original campus on Hes West.

“I’d like to build a few more buildings between Heslington East and Heslington West – bring it in a bit. Of course, the planning permission didn’t allow that but I would go back and start looking at that again because I think Hes East is brilliant but I think it needs to be brought closer. Oddly it was the University people who lived in the village who opposed it.”

And he backs the outgoing Vice-Chancellor Brian Cantor in the final part of his three-point-plan for York, championing a push towards engineering degrees: “I suppose Brian’s always on about how we should do more engineering here,” he tells me. “I’m not an engineer but this is a strong science university and I think I would move more towards engineering.”

As for a return to the top 10, Dyke is not overly concerned by a system he considers as “odd”, and places more value in his knowledge that York is undoubtedly a top university.

“I think York is a very good university, I think it sits up there amongst a lot of them. I think most league tables are odd. One of my theories about league tables is that no-one’s interested in them until you’re up there. It’s a bit like joining the Russell Group – nobody ever talked about the Russell Group until suddenly we joined and now they’re saying the Russell Group is very important. I think you’ve got to look at what you’re doing at a university but I think one of the challenges for the new Vice-Chancellor will be to boost research income.”

The new Vice-Chancellor, namely Koen Lamberts, who has been brought in from Warwick and will make the transition up north next January, has Dyke’s backing, though the Chancellor admits that he had no role in picking the man himself.

“I had no role in picking the new Vice-Chancellor. I have met him, but I had no part in it. I liked him a lot when I met him. Academia is a strange job where you apply for and get the job and then it’s nine months before you get there. In every other world it’s faster than that, but he’s looking forward to it a lot.”

On the subject of new arrivals, I was keen to find out what it was like for Dyke to return to a university at which he has once studied, and off the back of no academic qualifications to speak of, as the figurehead of the whole institution. To assume such a position can be seen as nothing but a triumph – an affirmation of one’s success, but Dyke regards his acceptance of the role more as a repayment to a place to which he feels indebted than as a sign of the University’s recognition of him as a success.

“I left here in ’74 and I really had no contact with the University for a long time and then in a few years in the nineties I made quite a lot of money and I decided I’d come and give some to the University because I came here without any real academic qualifications at all and they took a risk on me,” he says.

“I thought risk deserved reward so I came back and built the JLD, the hockey pitch. That got me involved and they gave me an honorary degree and then when Dame Janet Baker was leaving as Chancellor, I let it be known that I’d be quite interested in doing it.”

The rest is history, as soon Dyke’s tenure as Chancellor will be when he steps down to complete a total turnaround of the University’s two most senior positions – in name at least. His time at York has seen some great changes, most notably of course the expansion of the University to Heslington East and the building of a second campus, but he now shifts his focus to another organisation which is undeniably in even greater need of change.

The much-maligned FA is largely unpopular with English football fans, to change this – to shift the opinion of the organisation and indeed of English football as a whole to an overall more positive one is undoubtedly a huge challenge. It was exactly this, however – an inherent desire to tackle pastures tough and new which seems to drive Dyke on from one life success to another, coupled with a lifelong love of the game, which left him no choice but to accept the role of Chairman when he was offered it earlier this year.

“What happened is a head-hunter came to see me and asked me if I was interested. I thought about it for a while – it meant giving up being Chairman of Brentford which is one of my great loves. My wife hates football anyway so I had to take that into account. She’s made it very clear she never intends to come to anything to do with football, but I’ve always been interested in doing jobs that I thought were quite difficult. I have no interest in being the ceremonial head, I’m interested in trying to work out a strategy and work out where football goes from here and I think that is quite difficult, and that’s why I took it,” he says.

“What you’ve really got to do is work out, in any organisation, is what are the priorities, what are you trying to achieve, and one of the things I will announce early on is how do you improve the England team, which I think is connected to the number of English playing in the Premier League which is now down to 30% and falling. It’s easy to say that – what can you do about it? That’s the challenge.

“I think there are a series of priorities,” he adds. “I think the job of a referee, for instance, is pretty tough in top football now. I think everything you do in the television age can be said to be right or wrong very quickly. I have to say, and this can’t be done by the FA, it has to be done by UEFA or FIFA, but I think the coming of television technology to help referees is essential.”

These are views which will be popular with the football-loving public. A rejuvenated national side and the elimination of refereeing howlers, should Dyke be able to help achieve them, would arguably be his greatest successes. Doing this, particularly in a role in which he can only spend less than four years due to the FA’s insistence that the Chairman is replaced at the age of 70, however, will be far from easy. The first one in particular borders on the unachievable, but Dyke will relish the challenge and will hope he can at least set the ball rolling for his successor. When asked if he thinks England can win the World Cup in the next 20 years, he replies: “I would like to think so.”

Two further areas of the game about which Dyke feels passionate are Financial Fair Play and youth football. He appears to back a system in which Financial Fair play follows a more standardised model as opposed to the numerous systems which currently exist, which differ from country to country and even from division to division.

“With Financial Fair Play, we’re really just beginning to see it,” he considers. “I think Financial Fair Play is essential, but of course we’ve got different systems – there’s a different system at UEFA, there’s a different system in the Premier League, there’s a different system in the Championship and there’s a different system in both the two divisions of the Football League, so we try to understand the differences between all these systems, but I think the idea that you can’t just keep spending fortunes on football players seems to me to be the right model.

“Interestingly a book I read recently showed there seems to be quite a strong correlation between how much you spend on players’ wages and where you end up in the league, but there’s not the same correlation between how much you spend on transfers.”

As for youth football, Dyke has already been scouting opinion as to what needs to be done to improve a system that is evidently inferior to the likes of Germany and Spain in its current state. “I’ve talked to a lot of people in football on a professional level in the last couple of months about what we need to do and I think we’ve got to look again at the way kids develop,” he says.

“I think there is a problem in that the really talented kids all get hoovered up by the biggest clubs and with one or two exceptions they just never get a game, and they just wander off and do something else with their lives.”

To wander off and do something else with life, though, is something all too familiar to Dyke himself. He took a knock at the BBC but that hasn’t stopped him from going on to assume the positions at the very top of his varied chosen fields that he has.

After several years in which he has mostly been out of the public limelight, he now becomes an important national figure again, and after years of being merely a figurehead at York, he is ready to return to a role in which his input will once again be vital to the shaping of a major national organisation. Whether he will succeed or not only time can tell – he says he is good at working downwards within an organisation, but this time it is not just the workers he will have to placate, but an army of baying English football fanatics. Good luck.