puff 177 A Post for Vestey

Mike Vestey once sorted me out in a kind of cross interview situation in Wiltshire . I was getting his thoughts for a radio programme called London my London to be broadcast from a station in Awapuni and Vestey was interviewing me for his column in the Spectator...Peter Cleave
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Michael Vestey BBC journalist who articulated the loathing of Birtism
Tim LlewellynTuesday September 5, 2006The Guardian
Michael Vestey, who has died suddenly aged 61, was a consummate broadcaster, one of that generation of journalists who in the 1960s brought district reporting cunning and Fleet Street knowhow to the BBC's high-minded newsrooms, but were as articulate and erudite as the corporation alumni they so often elbowed aside. Like many of his era, he met his nemesis in John Birt and the rolling revolution the authoritarian director general imposed in the early 1990s.
Unlike many, however, Vestey enjoyed revenge, and indulged it both in his roman a clef, Waning Powers (1995), a novelistic scourge of BBC news managers, and also in his radio column in the Spectator, which broadcasters turned to with trepidation. His comment, in the BBC house magazine, Ariel, that Birt "stifled much of the creativity of the BBC, wasted huge amounts of money on management consultants and constant restructuring, and disposed of many older but talented people who knew radio and television well", exemplified the sort of acerbic intervention he would make.
Vestey's disdain for inadequate superiors was palpable, but to his peers - whose praise the genuine journalist values more highly than that of bosses - he was a masterly reporter, foreign correspondent and current affairs presenter with an elegant turn of phrase and a convincing, resonant, unmannered delivery. His prose was tough and alive but never maudlin, and he refused to be "involved", a modern fashion he hated.
Vestey was born in Bournemouth, and brought up and educated in south London, joining the West Kent News Service in Tonbridge Wells at 17. Its then owner, Bob Friend, also later a BBC foreign correspondent, remembers him crashing two cars in his first week (Vestey was a lifelong motor racing aficionado), and sums up those days as "lots of fun mixed with fairly hard work".
In 1965, Vestey went to the Daily Sketch as a reporter, and then to the quintessentially 60s magazines, London Look, London Life and the London Magazine, before joining the Sunday Express diary team. It was perhaps mingling with the gossip fodder of Belgravia and the shires, and amid the jeunesse dorée with their Vidal Sassoon haircuts, Biba smocks and Mary Quant mini-skirts that he acquired the gloss that slightly daunted us at Broadcasting House when he arrived as a radio reporter, via Radio London, in 1973.
There was a patrician quality leavened with high Toryism that appeared to set "the Colonel", as he became known, aside. Yet he quickly proved that this was a style behind which there was hard professional substance. Reporting assignments in Northern Ireland; a dangerous and successful year in southern Africa, including Rhodesia/Zimbabwe; a tour in Iraq for the early stages of the conflict with Iran; and an assignment in Patagonia during the Falklands war (where, to his delight, he found British spooks consorting at General Galtieri's expense with the Chilean military) all demonstrated that he was among the finest BBC foreign correspondents. But largely for family reasons, he did not apply for a posting overseas.
Later, in the mid to late 1980s, Vestey was temporarily a foreign affairs and a defence correspondent at Broadcasting House, and was attached to the World Service correspondents' staff at Bush House. He found the most amenable niche of his middle years, however, at the World Tonight, on Radio 4, his natural home, where he was able to indulge his foreign affairs experience, produce analyses and occasionally present the programme.
His love and care for the English language was reflected in his admiration of Orwell, Greene, Waugh and of his own BBC heroes, Charles Wheeler and Alistair Cooke. But in the age of the worship of "accessibility", such skills and sentiments counted for little, and, inevitably, Birtism did for him. Vestey watched with alarm as the corporation began to change from a worthy, if eccentric, institution into the multi-faceted, streamlined provider of 24-hour information and crass entertainment that it largely is today, pace his havens of Radios 3 and 4.
Eased out in early 1994, Vestey, by this time living in Dorset, near Shaftesbury, worked for Meridian TV in Southampton, but concentrated his writing and literary talents on his Spectator column. From 1996 onwards, he excoriated Birt and his apparatchiks for inaugurating "a decline in morale and consequently the quality of programmes" (as he once put it in a book review). He kept watch on broadcasters' increasing unfamiliarity with the writing and pronunciation of English and indulged his quirkily conservative view of the world and his antipathy to the European Union.
In my view (that of a reader, God forbid, of the Guardian) Vestey was to some extent a tongue-in-cheek rightie, provoked into baiting his prevailingly pinkish colleagues at BBC current affairs. It is also to his credit that my obsession with - and his loathing of - the Middle East never came between us.
As for Europe, he was most vehemently not of it, but was never happier than when in it. He and his partner of the last 11 years, Katie Byrne, spent much time at his apartment in the Umbrian village of Panicale, near Perugia. He remained on good terms with his first wife, Lorna, whom he married in 1968, and was devoted to their three children, Corin, Rosalind and Nicholas. A second marriage, to Sarah Beddington in 1989, also ended in divorce. They all survive him.