I am sorry to disagree with the Secretary of State in his first few hours in office, but I would not reinvent the BBC as it is now. It resisted all the way taking the threshold down to £150,000, so that we would actually know what was going on. The fact that it tried to solve the problem with Carrie Gracie with a bung of £45,000 says to me that there is an endemic problem: the BBC does not understand and it does not get it. Some of the men are overpaid. The fact that the BBC did not wish to address this issue until it was forced into it shows that we need a root-and-branch analysis of what is going wrong in the BBC.

I agree that a root-and-branch analysis is needed and must happen. There is of course much more to the BBC than just the high pay. There are the local stations and the local work, which receive far less scrutiny than many of these issues at the top. We must ensure that the solutions brought by transparency for top pay apply throughout the organisation, and apply to presenters and off-air staff right across the BBC, and not just at the top.