Fatigue

It remains hard to decode much from the minutes of the new BBC Executive. There are still bits which are transparent - take this, for example, with non-executive director Simon Burke, a qualified accountant and chair of the Audit Committee, flexing his governance pectorals on the Annual Report: "The Committee had been keen to ensure that the challenges of the last year were accurately reflected and the Chief Financial Officer’s report had been amended accordingly".  A little later CFO Zarin Patel left the meeting, her last in post, having participated by video ahead of a kicking by the Public Accounts Committee.

Then, gnomically, in the next item - World Service Annual Review - we get "Peter Horrocks also updated the Board on a couple of other matters". So that's pretty open.

Later, there's discussion of the need to align the cuts required by "Delivering Quality First" with James Purnell's Strategy Review, due to come back to the Executive in September. No mention of the McKinsey work on "simplification", but an exhortation: "The Board noted the potential for ‘change fatigue’ amongst staff and the need to take this into account when involving staff in the strategy review and communicating key messages". For some, this fatigue has already arrived - other consultancies, including Bain's and the Boston Consulting Group, are said to be frantically interviewing middle managers for ideas before the villas in Tuscany beckon.

Lower down the chain, fatigue has hit Paul Moss, a reporter on the World Tonight. He has stuck his weary head above a dangerous and exposed parapet with a letter to the staff organ, Ariel, thus...

As a BBC journalist, I should really be capable of writing analytical and in-depth prose. But I am sitting here thinking of the BBC management who took all that money meant for programme-making and instead lavished it on each other's farewell hand-outs. 

And I'm thinking of how we have all been left to scrimp and save to fund the work we do, and how the BBC's reputation has plummeted in the wake of the pay-out revelations. 

And I find myself unable to write anything except 'B*****d, b*****d, b*****d, b*****d, b******s'.