Is this really the man to make the trains run on time?

SO Tony Blair has recruited Lord Birt to "sort out the railways". The news of the former BBC boss's new mission has provoked hilarity at his previous employer, where he presided over a sustained decline in morale and audience ratings - not to mention an exodus of embittered, disillusioned staff.

John Birt's hierarchical management style alienated BBC programmemakers (who, like cats, need constant stroking). He blew nearly pounds 100 million of licence-payers' money on management consultants. And he introduced a fatuous "internal market" - forcing BBC departments to trade with one another, invoicing as they went - with predictable results: a vast increase in the number of accountants, and absurdities such as the pounds 100 it cost to provide Peter Sissons with a black tie when rehearsing coverage of a royal funeral.

Birt, said director Jonathan Miller, turned the BBC into "a vast bureaucratic engine from which programmes emerged only as a form of exhaust".

Given this background, it's easy to see why many people see Birt's new role as absurd.

In vain does Downing Street seek to point out that he has not been engaged to "sort out" the railways but to conduct a "blue skies" inquiry, looking at long-term public policy issues.

In fact, Downing Street ought to be more bullish, because there are reasons for thinking that Birt has finally found a job that he might be good at.

What people overlook is that he is an engineer by training and temperament.

He is fascinated by systems and their interactions, and is famously obsessed with statistical analysis. This always marked him out as an alien in the world of media "creatives", where anyone who can do long division is regarded as a descendant of Einstein, and where hunch, intuition and champagne are viewed as the main ingredients required for creative decision-making.

BIRT'S penchant for analysis first came to light in 1974, when he was working at London Weekend Television with Michael Grade, the man who epitomises the media paradigm of an intuitive decision-maker. Grade unexpectedly resigned from his job as LWT's director of programmes to take up a job in Hollywood and - to everyone's surprise - Birt was chosen to replace him. Before Grade departed, the two men had a conversation in which Birt promised that what he lacked in intuition he would make up for with analysis.

And he was as good as his word, becoming notorious within ITV for exhaustive studies of the minutiae of audience-research data.

This empiricist fetish also coloured his attitude to journalism. Birt's passion for understanding how systems work led him to scorn muckraking journalism in favour of what he called "a mission to explain".

The function of journalism, he maintained, was not to "pick at the scabs of society", but rather to explain to the public the true complexity of affairs, so that citizens could make more balanced judgments about political and economic issues.

Heartbreaking stories about starving families were not the right vehicle for explaining a world recession: one had to probe beneath the surface to examine the underlying mechanisms producing the phenomenon.

This is one reason why the Blair team is so attracted to Birt. Within the magic circle of specialist advisers who work for "President " Blair, there is a profound yearning to escape from the sound bites and knee-jerk superficiality of everyday political debate. These are people charged with devising ways of modernising Britain, and they despair of obtaining rational outcomes from the yah- boo politics of leak and spin. They long for "joined-up" thinking, which looks for systemic interactions and long-term analysis. And in Lord Birt they have found a soul mate.

WHAT they also like about him is that he travels without political or ideological baggage. For Birt is the ultimate political chameleon. He once worked as an informal media adviser for Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, yet was brought in by a Thatcher administration to sort out the BBC's Leftist journalists and was assumed by Tory ministers to be "one of us". But when New Labour began its irresistible rise, Birt was the first to turn up at Cherie Blair's 40th birthday bash.

To the modernisers at Number 10, this lack of conviction may be part of Birt's charm. Talk to them privately, and you find a profound belief that nobody with a stake in the current system - whether they be civil servants, companies, trade associations, charities, politicians or unions - can be trusted to provide impartial analysis of Britain's most serious public-policy problems in areas such as prisons, transport, health or education. That is why so many outsiders have been imported - specialists who are derided by the usual channels because they allegedly know nothing about these complex areas, but who are valued by Number 10 precisely because their minds are unclouded by conventional wisdom.

John Birt is this kind of outsider, par excellence. Indeed, it was the first thing people noticed about him when he arrived at the BBC in 1987. Not only had he not sprung from the corporation's ranks (he had hitherto worked only for the opposition), but he paid no obeisance to its hallowed traditions and displayed no deference to its ancient prejudices. For example, on his one (and only) visit to Lime Grove, the decrepit but sacred fount of BBC news and current affairs, his most noteworthy observation was that the lavatories were disgusting and that the place should be condemned (which it duly was). Given the number of sacred cows grazing contentedly on the transport patch, this kind of iconoclasm might be what is required.

Copyright 2002
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