The News Agents: The BBC vs. Lineker: They think it’s all over ... it isn’t

This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

Basically, on Friday, you just made a catastrophic mistake.

You didn't realise what was going to happen, and now you've just tried to put things better.

No. I think what we did was make a choice to take action, and out of that, we have got

to a point where we've agreed how to go forward and protect the BBC's impartiality. That's

what we're doing.

On Friday, Tim Davy, and if you know Tim Davy, there is a certain swagger about him

and self-confidence. You didn't hear that today. But on Friday, they made a decision

that they were going to pull Gary Lineker from the studio and say you can't present

that to the day. On Monday, today, they have said, oh yes, you can go back to the studio,

but nothing has really changed because Gary Lineker has not apologised at all for the

tweets that he put out. And indeed, one tweet today says, a final thought. However difficult

the past few days have been, it simply doesn't compare to having to flee your home from persecution

or war to seek refuge in a land far away. Repentant? Gary Lineker? Not a bit of it.

The BBC? It seems so.

So Gary Lineker will be back on air hosting the FA Cup quarter finals after a weekend

which showed this extraordinary groundswell of solidarity from his colleagues at the BBC

and further afield from football managers, from commentators, from anyone involved in

the game who felt that they had to take Lineker's side over the BBC when it came to supporting

one of their own over this question of the tweet and impartiality. And today, you can

use whatever football analogy you want, whether it's the own goal or the back of the net.

But don't make the mistake of thinking that this is settled now. There are questions still

around Richard Sharpe's future. He's the chairman. There are probably questions around

Tim Davies' future too and whether that was, in fact, a catastrophic mistake. There are

questions around the power that the BBC still wields and just what that issue of impartiality

really means when it's been sullied by a row over editorial independence like this one.

So in true W1A fashion, the BBC has now launched an inquiry. There will be a report in a few

months time. We'll probably hear there are new guidelines going to be introduced for

freelancers.

They think it's all over. It isn't. Welcome to the news agents.

It's John. It's Emily.

And it has been a weekend which has been so painful for the BBC and for Emily and I who've

spent so many combined decades working for the corporation uncomfortable to watch a mess

unfold that you feel was kind of unnecessary and self-inflicted with the inevitable climb

down capitulation. I don't know what the best word is to describe it that has happened today.

I think Tim Davies looked like he wasn't having the best of times when he faced David Silateau,

the culture correspondent this morning and his apology was to viewers, first and foremost.

It was to staff members who had supported Gary Linnaker and been unable to go on air

for their coverage over a weekend of sport. And it wasn't directly to Gary Linnaker, but

I wonder what is going through Tim Davies mind right now because he staked a lot on what

he called impartiality and its importance within the BBC. And I worry now that the cover

has been blown actually on double standards that when you use a word like impartiality

which everyone wants to get behind, which works both ways, it has to be fair. It cannot

just be a cover for caving into political pressure from the government of the day. If

you truly believe in impartiality, then you stop your contributors from tweeting of their

critical of any of the parties, or you stop your entertainment correspondence from tweeting

in favour of the Prime Minister of the day, or you stop them from owning right-leaning

magazines, or you call out your chairman who looks deeply compromised by his donations

and his relationships. Otherwise, you will not be taken seriously when you use a word

like impartiality. It cannot, cannot be used carelessly. It makes a mockery of the independence

and the free thinking nature of such a magnificently important institution as the BBC.

Let me just read a few comments that I've had on this from people who are very senior

at the BBC. Some have been there for decades, others who are in very prominent positions.

This one. Perfect Storm. Tim spectacularly misjudged his power. His impartiality push

is shot to pieces. There's a complete lack of trust in it given his own Tory background.

Robbie Gibb on the board and Richard Sharp failing to declare his massive conflict of

interest. A set of guidelines which don't work in a social media age, but not sure what

this review can possibly come up with other than to exempt all freelancers. At least it

buys time. Something else as well from someone else in a very senior and prominent position.

Gary is the only person who could have achieved this, but Tim deserved it. He thought he knew

everything. He was so cocky and Tim so foolish to choose impartiality as his thing, giving

credence to those who could bang on about us having lost it. I've got many, many more.

People from the BBC just appalled at what has unfolded, but also this definition of impartiality,

which looks like it has been foisted on the BBC by the government. So it is the government's

view of impartiality. Because on Tuesday, when Gary Lineker tweeted this, there was

no comment from the BBC, nor on Wednesday, nor on Thursday, until Friday afternoon when

Gary Lineker was pulled from the schedules. What had changed in those three days? Well,

the tabloids had had a go, the government had had a go, and it looked like, it looked

like Tim Davy thought, I have to act. And so he acted on Friday afternoon after a storm

had erupted. And then you go into war without a battle plan. And sure enough, come Monday,

there's been this extraordinary reaction of hostility. And Tim Davy has had to climb down.

Look, we've talked about it on the news agents before. You cannot be lectured on impartiality

from somebody who literally worked on the Brexit campaign, who ran the comms for a Tory Prime

Minister, who tried to set up a right-leaning broadcaster, which was a rival to the BBC.

I raised it last year when I spoke in Edinburgh at the MacTaggart Lecture. It is the same.

What are you talking about, Robbie Gibb? I'm talking about Robbie Gibb, who worked alongside

Theresa May, who has helped start up GB News, and who calls himself, as it were, an impartiality

czar, which is like looking at a fox taking a chicken's hand and leading it towards a

nice warm oven and saying, come with me. I know what's best for a chicken's safety.

I'm not sure chickens have hands, but you get my drift. And I think the BBC should have

been so alert to that so early. And yet what happened was they went along with being told

that they were out of step with the public, or they didn't understand how to do impartiality.

You cannot take lessons in impartiality from one side of a populist government.

But that is what seems to have happened. And I think what has been calamitous, and I use

the word advisedly, for the BBC, is the BBC hoped that impartiality would be the way,

the means by which it would stay above the political fray, above the party political

dogfight. But on Saturday, when Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour Party leader, comes out and says,

the BBC has caved into the government, you realise that the impartiality strategy has

exploded. Because the BBC, by taking this stand, gives the appearance that it has taken

its orders from Downing Street and a right wing tabloid press, and a right wing chairman

who has kind of didn't declare his £800,000 loan or facility of a loan to Boris Johnson

when he was Prime Minister, when he was applying for the BBC chairmanship job. And it just

looks like the BBC has been acting on behalf and at the behest of the Conservative government.

And that cannot be a definition of impartiality. And so when Gary Lineker turns round to the

BBC and says, no, I'm not going to take this tweet down. No, I'm not going to apologise

for it. The BBC puffs out its chest and says, we are all powerful, and then discovers it's

not.

I also think this shows you a kind of redistribution, actually, that balance of media power. Because

we grew up in a country where the BBC was all dominant, because there wasn't really much

else, quite frankly. If you had this absolutely extraordinary plum job presenting match of

the day on the BBC, then that should have been the be all and end all of where the power

lay. But you see where Gary Lineker is now. He is a big figure. I mean, he's always been

a big figure in his own right as a footballer. But he's also a big figure in his own right

as a social commentator. He owns podcasts. He's got millions of followers on Twitter.

And so suddenly, the idea of this monolithic cultural beast, which the BBC has always been,

I think is slightly more ambiguous today, because there are other avenues quite simply.

And one of those is social media.

There has been an arrogance of power, dare I say, at the BBC. And look, for 38 years,

I worked at the BBC and love my career. And I'm so proud of the BBC and all the journalism

that it does. And you know, some of the stuff that it's just fantastic. But at the same

time, as a member of staff, you have at times felt trampled on by their power. We're going

to publish your salary. We don't care what you think about that. I know you didn't have

that in your contract. We're going to do this. We're going to tell you what you can

and can't put on social media. For journalism, I thought that was absolutely fair enough.

Understandable. Totally right. But Gary Lineker was not a journalist. And Gary Lineker is

a human being. If Benedict Cumberbatch gets a part in a drama that's going to run for

26 weeks, are you going to say to him, for those 26 weeks, you're not allowed to post

anything on social media that might be critical or supportive of the government?

Or if you catch trains for a BBC feature, right, as Michael Portillo does, and is a

commentator on GB News, it has to kind of, it has to work both ways or it can't work

at all. And I think increasingly we're getting to a place where it probably can't work

at all because by its very nature, social media is spontaneous and it's almost impossible

to police. And it's almost impossible to find the nuance between what is criticism, what

is opinion, what is stated facts. We can take you into climate change questions or asylum

policy questions or belief in the right of a cyclist to cycle without getting run over.

Are all these questions then on the line? It's a really big question. And going back

to this sort of the way that we come folded, Tim Davy flew to Washington just as this

was taking off. And I got contacted from my old colleagues in DC saying, oh my God, can

you believe it? Tim Davy is coming out to Washington. I said he's not going to come

with all this. He'll be counselling that. He'll be counselling that like a shop. And

again, I think that was showed a certain sort of degree of, oh, well, we can do what

we like. There'll be no problem. And then there is a ginormous problem that the BBC

has and is not sure how to handle. And it's now left the most sulfurous mood inside broadcasting

house and in Salford and I've no doubt a Pacific key where people are thinking what the hell

has happened. And you've got this magnificently BBC outcome whereby I would imagine you've

got Tory ministers, MPs, furious that having backed Tim Davy's tough stance last week are

now tearing their hair out that there's been capitulation. You've got BBC staff who were

thinking how on earth has this handled? You've got the Labour Party thinking you did this

at the behest. So the BBC has managed to piss absolutely everybody off without exception.

That is, to be fair, an absolutely normal BBC storm and might even speak in their favour

to the fact that it is almost impossible to please all of the people all of the time.

So you just have to piss everybody off at the same time. You have to piss everyone off.

Or you have to choose the track that feels right to you as long as they're choosing the

track that feels right rather than being pushed around by those in positions of power. I think

that's the key.

There is another question and it is a bigger question and we've talked about it about impartiality.

I've always supported the idea of impartiality, but I wonder whether impartiality in a time

of hyperpopulism is still relevant, where things that are being said about an invasion

or that a hundred million may be coming to this country or climate change doesn't exist,

which is what Donald Trump would say in America. You can't report that by the normal methods

of, on the one hand, on the other, some say this. You've got to call out lies. You've

got to call out falsehood. You've got to call out lies. And I just wonder whether the BBC,

people talk about analogue thinking in a digital age. I think that the BBC, its definition

of impartiality, might have been fine for 20, 30, 40 years ago. But is it relevant to

today where you are getting things being pushed out, where the perpetrators, the politicians,

know it to be untrue and don't feel comfortable in calling it out?

I'd also say there is this insidious ideal being created around patriotism, whatever

that means. I mean, I would say I've worked in the BBC for 20 years. I've worked under

Labour governments. I've worked under coalition governments. I've worked under Conservative

governments. And it is only under populism, populist Conservative governments that I have

ever been called out for my journalism. And I remember doing a Newsnight interview with

Andrea Ledson, who was at that time in the Cabinet, and I was asking her about Brexit

negotiations. And she told me it would be nice if broadcasters could be a bit more patriotic.

Now that's a very insidious thing to say to somebody who works for a state broadcaster.

Actually, to say to anyone at all. But the idea that my role should change because I

had to apply whatever patriotism was to my understanding of Brexit, or to that interview,

or to the negotiations, is so far away from what many of us would go into journalism to

do. We try and analyse, we try and ask questions, we try and get to some form of understanding

and questioning of those in authority. We don't sit there trying to parrot questions

or lines of patriotism. I think that story, that anecdote about Andrea

Ledson goes to the absolute heart of it. Because when you say, oh, you should be more patriotic,

well, my instinct is, yeah, I'm very proud to be British. She doesn't mean it's about

being proud to be British. She is saying, you get behind the government because supporting

me equals patriotism, equals the right thing. I am right because I am saying it. And our

job is the complete opposite. It's not that we're going to say you're all a bunch of liars,

but we are going to test your opinion. We retain the right to question. We retain the

right to be sceptical. And when you have a government that is trying to define for you

what impartiality amounts to, that is a very, very dangerous place to be.

In a moment, we're going to be talking to Amanda Unici, who for years, for decades has

written comedy for the BBC and has deep worries about what has unfolded in these past few

days. Welcome back. I'm delighted to say, joined in the studio now by Amanda Unici,

who has spent years, decades writing, creating some of the most brilliant comedy content

for the BBC and knows how the BBC works. And I just wonder what you have made of the past

week in the life of the corporation. Well, I've used this phrase before, but I always

think that when the BBC is accused of a crime, even if it's one it hasn't committed, it will

hand itself into the first police station. It wasn't so long ago I was on this podcast

to talk about Channel 4. I seem to have become your... You're a leisure agent. Public broadcasting

under crisis correspondent. What do we make of it? The whole thing is a mess, that actually

there is no real way to put in writing the dos and don'ts of what people are and aren't

allowed to say, if they don't actually work in a newsgiving capacity at the BBC, if they

have to be presenting a sports program as opposed to a news program, as long as people's

opinions don't interfere with the job that they're doing on television. So, if Gary

Linnick had said Liverpool's defence was shocking, a bit like the language Soella Braverman

is using, then that would be a breach because clearly he'd be kind of on air voicing opinions

that it wouldn't be his job to do in that role. But we're so used to people being able

to do one thing as a professional on our screens and yet quite rightly be allowed to vent their

opinions off screen. The big thing for me is showing is that the system doesn't work

where we have the government still able to appoint people to our biggest broadcaster.

So when a crisis like this happens at the BBC, normally you go to the chairperson of

the board of the BBC for their views. But he was absent all this week for very, very

clear reasons because of the questions overhang him. So the system doesn't work. And I think

if we are going to have an inquiry or a look again at how it works, I do urge the BBC and

people who work at the BBC to be a bit more belligerent and argue that if you are going

to have a truly independent state broadcaster, it has to be truly independent. And therefore

all these decisions about who's on the board and who's running the licence fee should be

done truly independently. Otherwise, this will happen again and again and again.

There was something you said there a moment ago that you just cannot write guidelines

that will affect all these people who are outside of news. What the BBC has now said

is that's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to come up, we're going to review

and we're going to codify this again. Yet it's impossible, isn't it?

Well, good luck to them because a lot of this revolves around social media and we still

don't know how social media works. We're still working it out. It's still a bit of a Wild

West. Is social media a publisher or is it just a platform? Are social media companies

responsible for the views that users of it put out? We're still trying to examine that.

These guidelines may well have worked at a time when presenters, public figures, your

Terry Worgans and so on, the only way they could express views outside publicly would

be to write a column. But now it's so easy to express your views. Social media is this

strange blend of the intimate and the public in that you write on it as if you're speaking

to one or two people to voice your own personal beliefs. But actually, it's a platform that

potentially billions, to use Suella Braverman's maths, billions could potentially be looking

at. And we still don't know how it works. We don't know what responsibility Facebook

has for the stuff that is on its platform. So how any inquiry is going to get to the

bottom of that is beyond me. And I wish they would use the moment to do a little bit of

a jujitsu move and put it back to the government and say, you need to keep out. Not because

you're Tory, because successive governments have done this. We've had under Labour, we

lost a director general after the whole Hutton inquiry. Under Margaret Thatcher, BBC lost

a director general. So it's a continuous thing because we haven't done this clear separation

of the government from our biggest public broadcaster.

I mean, do you think Gary Lenaker will be chastened by this in any shape or form or

do you think this shows a kind of recalibration of power in the country?

I suspect he will have to be thinking twice about everything he writes down in a tweet.

I think he's already been, you know, he got more than he bargained for in doing that tweet.

I think it surprised him. I mean, I don't know. I'm just speculating here. But what

concerns me is that the government seems to be making it harder and harder for people

to want to work at the BBC.

If you're starting out and you want a career in writing, in comedy, presenting, you're

going to be told, yeah, but we'll be publishing everything about you, your salary. We will

be telling you what you can't say on social media. We'll give you a clue. Why would people

want to do that, starting out? Would they would prefer then to do, you know, do what

you were doing, you know, do your own podcast, go take the Netflix money. You know, we have

the best broadcasting infrastructure in the world that makes the best television and radio

in the world. Why are we doing it down so much? So at the moment, the BBC is a little

bit like a vassal state where it has to every now and then be reminded that the government

is in charge and will tell it how much money it's getting. And at the weekend, we've got

lots of ministers ordering the BBC to be independent. You can't be independent if someone is ordering

you to.

But do you think this will change now? Do you think the BBC will shift as a result of

this row?

My worry is it will shift a bit more in the cautious side, whereas it should be using

the opportunity to shift a bit further away from that and saying, look, we're not going

to allow all our presenters to voice their opinions on air. But we do want to, you know,

we recognise how social media works these days. We can't just impose very, very literal

strictures on what people can say and what they can think. You brought up last week the

Robert Jenrick quote of people working at the BBC should reflect public opinion. Well,

no, they should be reporting it, but they should be analysing it and they should be

challenging it. And impartiality is not the same as timidity. You can be impartial, yet

you can do a very, very probing, searching, report on issues. And I worry that there is

a subconscious fear within people, specifically in news in the BBC, that if they go a bit

too far into looking at the details of something that they're going to get into trouble.

Yeah, the whole thing of self censorship. Tim Davy, the director general has chosen

impartiality to be the way in which he will be judged. And yet impartiality is being defined

in a way by the government for the BBC.

Exactly. Who is in charge of declaring whether something is impartial? Not so long ago, if

you talked openly about climate change, there was an automatic something you had to then

get someone else on who was skeptical about climate change. Now, climate change is now

a given, you know, 99.9% of scientific evidence shows, you know, it's accepted fact. But what

happens if someone in charge, a government minister says, actually, I think more views

should be expressed on, you know, the future of the climate and whether there really is

a human responsibility, human involvement in this. And, you know, that's a big topic.

But on questions of race on questions of language used to describe immigration, who's the one

that decides what is impartial and what isn't. And I think, again, you can be forensic and

determined in how you look at a subject while still being impartial.

I just wonder how you think it applies to comedians. To Steve Coogan, who has come out

with pro-labeled things. Can the BBC employ them now or not?

Well, there is an increasing use, I think, of politicians using the offence as a useful

tool to stop criticism. So like if you did a joke that was about immigration policy.

Let's say randomly. To take a very easy, very, very straightforward

example. It's no more common for ministers to say, well, I think that was inappropriate

rather than, oh, very funny, but let me offer you my opinion.

What would you make of the government saying, why doesn't the BBC have more right wing comedians

on or right wing satirists?

I think they try. You know, I don't want to be general about this. There are no rules

here, but there's something about comedy, which is it is a bit subversive. It bends and twists

and it distorts and it exaggerates. It looks at institutions and the things we take as

the norm and it probes them. I'm not saying that's necessarily a more left-of-center

thing than a right-of-center thing, but it is slightly, it's disruptive in a kind of

hopefully creative way.

If you're a comedian whose strength is making fun of doing comedy about the news or the

government, there is also the situation that the government has been conservative for the

last 13 years. So inevitably, a lot of your targets are going to be within the government.

And so should the BBC say what you've said, actually, we've had a conservative government

for 13 years and comedy is by nature subversive, or should it say, yeah, we'll try and correct

that?

I'm trying to find right-wing comedians. It's more trying to encourage people to look at

as many targets as possible. I did a show in the 90s, The Friday Night Armistice, and

it was all through, it was a tail end of the John Major. And then the first four or five

years of Tony Blair, I had no qualms whatsoever about looking at aspects of Tony Blair that

were ridiculous, you know, his high-mindedness, his control of the agenda, the fact that they

would try and manipulate and control the messaging, the shutting down of ministers with any kind

of personality, the sulfur government, that, you know, taking power away and initiative

away from politicians and political departments and putting it back in at number 10, which

then led to something like 20 years ago, the invasion of Iraq at the whims of one person

in charge.

And part of my fret over the last seven days with the lineca thing was not so much what

Gary Lincoln said, but the fact that on BBC One, the main news bulletins on BBC One, the

six o'clock and the ten o'clock, were going with the Gary Lineca story rather than analysis

of the government policy, because it was the same week that the government had announced

a policy.

But you could say, actually, this has been the best thing for labour ever. I mean, to

that extent, if the point was highlighting dislike of the conservative immigration policy,

they've done it. Or has it kind of just droned it out, really? Have we lost the opportunity

to actually do an analysis of that policy? Because it was a policy where, you know,

Sir Ella Brownman said, literally, this is pushing legality to the limit.

Amanda, thank you so much for being with us.

In a moment, we're going to be hearing about a crisis that was averted and it was the collapse

of Silicon Valley Bank, which would have seen up to 3,000 British tech businesses go under

if there hadn't been a very timely intervention. That's all to come.

This is the news agents.

Welcome back. We're going to talk about Silicon Valley Bank now, which, at 6am this morning,

was looking perilously close to utter collapse and taking with it the money, the investment,

the companies of some 3,000 British technology firms who've all got their deposits there

and who were all facing not being able to get their money out. It had echoes of 2008

but 4 technology businesses. That was their financial crash. By about 10 past 7, it sounded

like HSBC, a megabank, had come to the rescue.

So what actually happened in that 24-hour period where it looks so perilously close

to collapse? We're joined now by Hugh Van Stenis, who has not only worked for the Monetary

Policy Committee, the Bank of England, but I'm going to call you a sort of a bank bailout

expert, Hugh, because you've been in and out of the Treasury throughout a financial crisis,

seeing how close these things come to complete destruction, right?

Well, more or less. Well, thanks for having me on. But no, it was quite a weekend and

it was very reminiscent of 2008 again, where calls were at 3am in the morning, where trying

to work out how on earth to resolve both the US Bank and the Bank of the UK.

And how perilous was it? And how precarious would it have been if that hadn't got sorted?

Well, should we take that back to the US Bank? This is the second largest bank failure in

US history. You know, this is really is a big deal. And so the Fed even stepped in last

night offering huge amounts of cheap funding for the banking system, because the real problem

here is that interest rates have gone up really fast and the banks owned a lot of bonds, which

have therefore gone down in value. And that's what really was hanging over poor old Silicon

Valley Bank in the States. Silicon Bank was a bank which grew like a weed. So their deposit

base tripled in three years reminds me a little bit of Norse and Rock. Again, always be worried

a bank which grows a bit too fast because they don't know what they're doing.

So you think it was the bank's fault?

Oh, no, I think they made one heinous error, which was that they, with all these deposits

they gathered, they bought a lot of long term government bonds, which then went down precipitously

in value. So if you took the mark them to market, it's like selling a house. If you

actually sold it, what would the loss be? It'd be a $16 billion loss, but they only

had $12 billion of equity. So they're effectively wiped out. So they made a really dumb rates

trade.

Take us to the weekend, where we've seen on Friday what's happening in Silicon Valley

itself and there's a subsidiary in the UK. I was struck this morning by the fact that

it took less time to sort this out than it took to sort out Gary Linnaker's tweet. Bank

of England and the Treasury kind of managed to do this faster than the BBC could sort

out one tweet. It must be fiendishly complicated to get HSBC to come and say, well, hang on,

okay, we'll take this, but this is the terms of it and this is what we are prepared to

expose ourselves to in terms of debt and all the rest of it.

So I think the answer is yes, but let's just be clear. The US banks and the bank are used

to clearing up a bank over a weekend. What was crazy about this one is they had to intervene

at 12 o'clock lunchtime on Friday because the bank was running out of money so fast.

So in fact, this is a digital bank run 20 times faster than anything we saw during Lehman's

or the UK banking crisis. You mean because everyone now just goes

to their accounts online? Absolutely. They got cleared out.

So you're never going to see those queues again? Well, I mean, in fact, that was the

fascinating thing. There were no queues outside the Silicon Valley banks. It was just corporates

whipping their money out online. And in fact, people were sending on WhatsApp screenshots

saying, I can't get my money out because the system was overloaded. So this was a WhatsApp

bank run rather than a physical one. Very bad for television. Much better pictures

when you see people queuing anxiously for their money.

I'll share with you my WhatsApps then, OK? But you're right. No, but then come to the

weekend, there's one good thing. So out of the financial crisis, every big bank needs

to have what's called a living will. So what if you collapsed? What would you do? And so

thank goodness this bank had just got large enough that they had done that in the last

two years. So actually for the Treasury and the Bank of England, at least they had something

to play with. But, you know, obviously there was a lot of chats on the weekend.

So why would HSBC take it on? I mean, with the Treasury, would Jeremy Hunt, would Rishi

Sunat Basit have said, you've got to do this?

So first off, you know, this is the bank to a lot of the tech startup community. So actually

it's a really vibrant, interesting entrepreneurial group. This is where the growth of the UK

is coming from. So actually it's great to be the banker to entrepreneurs. I mean, HSBC

is a large, more stodgy bank compared to Silicon Valley Bank, but of course they can calm the

mess down. I think the interesting question here is whether actually it's the Bank of

England who is in the lead or the Treasury. At the end of the day, the bank doesn't want

systemic risk across the markets. And so in the States, it was really the Fed who is in

control rather than the Treasury. And I think that as ever, success has many fathers.

And just what would have happened if they hadn't come in? The risk of contagion, the

risk of people losing confidence in the bank that they've got their money in and thinking,

Christ, I must pull everything out.

We can actually hear, I think, from Tommy Ricketts, who's the CEO and co-founder at

Be Zero Carbon, who is one of those small startups that was absolutely petrified this

weekend.

We're a carbon rating agency based in London. We employ 130 people across science, technology

and finance. We've raised 60 million in the past two years and we banked with Silicon

Valley Bank's UK subsidiary. On Thursday night, we were tipped off, although the market action

showed us concretely that Silicon Valley Bank was in trouble.

Come Friday morning, we had lined up a series of withdrawals from our cash balances in Silicon

Valley Bank and actually were lucky enough to have the majority of that money relocated

into other bank accounts. Others were not so lucky. In fact, I was getting messages

all throughout that day of founders with stuck funds, some of which had deposited that money

that week, unable to get a hold of anyone, unable to access their money and ultimately

terrified that they would not only not have any funding for the future, but literally

not be able to make payroll for March.

Must be nightmarish. You suddenly think, holy crap.

I think it's panic. I mean, in fact, because the bank got taken out at lunchtime on Friday,

there's a whole bunch of companies which couldn't do payroll Friday afternoon in the States.

This isn't just a theoretical risk. This actually happened. What you found was some of the venture

capital founders digging into their own pockets or saying, I'll give you some IOUs and I promise

I'll get you paid next week. No, there was pandemonium across Silicon Valley and it's

UK equivalent.

Does this stop it now or is there a potential contagion from what happened to Silicon Valley

Bank?

I think in the UK, that probably has stopped it. I mean, look, the trouble is that what

stops a crisis is what stops it. You never quite know. I think the hosing of the system

in the States gives a bit of room for maneuver. But no, look, I think most banking crisis

in history, there's a flight to quality. Smaller banks lose to bigger and more stable banks.

Flight to quality means people choose to go after safer things they trust rather than

clever, risky, shiny objects.

So let's give an example. Let's say during the financial crisis, hedge funds are a bit

like venture capitalists would maybe bank with one bank. After eight, no one, but no

one has one click account. They all have two, three, four. So at a minimum, they're going

to spread their bets more widely. And the way they spread them to will be the big, boring

banks because that's going to be a safety. So I think for the smaller entrepreneurial

banks, this is going to be a challenge.

Just to finish you, this is a discrete event. We're not going to have you back on the podcast

on Thursday to say, oh my word, what's happened to this little bank that we've never heard

of?

Oh, I think the story rumbles. I mean, we've had three banks go bust in four days in the

States, including the second and the third largest bank. So this is a big deal. And we

hope that this calms the storm. But in financial history, it normally takes months and months

to come through. And I was looking back, Jay Powell, the governor of the bank in the States,

is very influenced by one of his predecessors, Paul Volcker. And in 1984, when they had an

enormous bank crisis, he stopped all rate increases. And within six months, they were

cutting interest rates. It's quite possible now that this does create a real credit squeeze

and a really big change to the market environment.

Pee, that was so helpful, actually. Somebody who can put it all into a bit of context for

us.

It's tricky.

It's really tricky.

Thank you so much.

Pleasure. Hopefully we don't have to get you back again too soon.

I hope so.

I've just got to end with the kind of thought of where we started and the role of people

behind the scenes who have been advising Tim Davy, who are advising Gary Lineker. I understand

that Matthew Freud, PR guru, who has worked very closely with the tabloids, was once married

to Elizabeth Murdoch, has played a critical role in advising Tim Davy. And also, of course,

on the other side, Gary Lineker, his champion this weekend has been Alistair Campbell, who's

already brought down one director general during the whole Iraq crisis in 2003, and

the 6072 way with Andrew Gilligan on the Today programme.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because Alistair Campbell and Gary Lineker are clearly close

friends and they are business partners. But you do forget occasionally that Alistair Campbell

is also one of the most sort of vociferous and bulldog-like director of comms that this

country has known. So when he goes on the airwaves and he fights the good fight for

Gary Lineker, that is part of the PR battle. And I think when you look at this weekend

in the round, it has been a PR contest, right? It's been a PR contest between the BBC, who

has always felt all powerful as that cultural institution, and Gary Lineker, who feels that

he's speaking, you know, as he would say, on behalf of people who are voiceless, but

has the whole footballing community right behind him. And that was why this was such

a dramatic clash of the footballing community and the public reaction and this huge British

institution.

But you'd have to say, if you were judging it, go back to your metaphor where we started

this podcast with, that if it was a PR battle, Gary Lineker has come out very much on top.

We'll be back tomorrow. See you then. Bye.

This has been a Global Player original podcast and a Persephoneka production.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.