'You want me to slag Murdoch off'

Jeff Randall, the BBC's ex-business editor, tells Vincent Graff why his new live slot on Sky News will be a big test, explains his contempt for the corporation and comments on Rupert Murdoch's corporation tax record - twice

Jeff Randall's new job came after a bit of argy bargy across the dinner table. Not just any dinner table - Elisabeth Murdoch's. Leading the attack were Stuart Rose, chief executive of Marks & Spencer, and Charles Dunstone, founder of The Carphone Warehouse. Randall - the Daily Telegraph's editor-at-large and former business editor of the BBC - found himself struggling to defend television's coverage of the corporate world. "The businessmen were berating the media, asking: 'Why aren't you guys doing a better job? Why don't we get a grown-up business show?'"

Then Randall's luck struck. Who should turn up in time for a digestif? Elisabeth's brother James, chief executive of BSkyB. He agreed with the businessmen's analysis, liked Randall's remedy (he has been a guest on his 5 Live show) and asked him to do something about it.

The result, Jeff Randall Live, starts next week on Sky News. It is the first big on-screen push into the corporate world since budget cuts forced the channel to close its business unit six years ago.

One thing: please do not call Randall's new 30-minute venture a "programme" or "show". It is, according to Sky News's pre-publicity, a "news strand . . . that will take a business look at the big news stories and issues of the day". Why so? Because two years ago, Sky News's so-called "appointment to view" programmes flopped and this time round the channel does not want viewers to be left with the impression that Randall's chat will get in the way of any urgent news stories. "What they're banking on is that if something really big breaks, I can news present and hold it all together while behind the scenes the boys scramble. That's going to be my test."

Opinionated television news

So what does Randall think of the way rolling news is presented in Britain? Sky News strives - and succeeds as often as anyone else - not to present any opinions as its own, unlike virtually all other areas of Rupert Murdoch's journalistic empire. (News Corporation owns 39% of BSkyB.) This is partly because that is how the people within Sky News want it - and also for reasons of regulation: Ofcom would not allow it any other way. But, the real world aside, would Randall like it if Sky were to be allowed to dress to the right? "As a consumer, would I watch it? Yes. For a start it would be such a novelty to have opinionated television news." And on the other side - Polly Toynbee TV? "I'd watch that too. If only to throw things at the screen. It'd be so refreshing."

In fact, his other employer, the Telegraph, has been gently edging into this market. Before we settle into his office, Randall takes me to see his editor, Will Lewis. (I do not think he has brought me here so that I can see that Lewis has on his wall a framed copy of Randall's Telegraph scoop revealing Michael Grade's defection from the BBC to ITV.) The editor is messianic about "Telegraph TV" - a whiz-bang branch of the paper's website featuring video of news stories. A key part of its USP, Lewis tells me, is that the story selection - and the way they are reported - deliberately breaks away from the diet we have been fed by the BBC and other broadcasters. Telegraph types will be dished up stories that they want to hear.

Not that Randall believes that the BBC is impartial anyway. He joined the corporation in 2001, drafted in by the then director general, Greg Dyke, who had "got utterly sick of every successful businessman being described as a fat cat, all markets being described as casinos and all profits being described as rip-offs". Randall was editor of Sunday Business and had written a piece criticising the way the corporation saw corporate life. He had been incensed when, a year earlier, the BBC's Nine o'Clock News had ignored Vodafone's £112bn takeover of the German telecommunications giant Mannesmann.

"It was the biggest takeover in history - a real 'Hey Doris!' story - but that night the BBC's flagship news programme didn't even cover it. They just didn't recognise business.

"Greg Dyke called me up and said: 'You can be one of those geezers sitting on the sidelines carping, bitching and whinging, or you can come here and do something about it. Have you got the balls to do that?'"

That was then. Now, a couple of years after leaving the BBC newsroom for a return to newspapers - although he still presents the 5 Live show - does Randall think much has changed? It will not surprise many of his former colleagues that he views the corporation with much the same contempt as when he joined it.

"I think there's a streak of hypocrisy at the BBC. I said it when I was there: its definition of impartiality or the middle ground is not how many of us see it. That's why I'm contemptuous.

"There is a liberal consensus. The BBC denies this but Andy Marr - who most people think is part of that liberal consensus - came out and said it. So it's not just right-of centre people. When you're there, you can feel it, you can smell it, you can almost touch it."

So what does the BBC, which recently scrapped a planned climate change special and claims to have no political opinions, believe in? Randall offers up three examples: that increased state spending is generally good; that there is little or no difference between being anti-immigration and being a racist; and that the death penalty is "appalling".

He goes over to his files to find a print-out of an email he received from a "very senior BBC person" while he was an employee there. Carefully obscuring the name of the sender, he shows it to me: "The BBC internally is not neutral about multiculturalism. It believes in it and promotes diversity, let's face up to that."

Randall says: "I'm amazed he put that down. What happened next was the BBC ran into a horrible brick wall when Trevor Phillips, the Chief Rabbi and then George Alagiah, its own British-Asian reporter, came out and said actually this headlong dash for multiculturalism is creating a divided society.

"But there are a lot of people out there who are not mad, who are not bad - decent people who think that the death penalty should be brought back, are deeply worried about immigration and think that the money that's been poured into health and education over the last 10 years has largely been wasted. They are all reasonable positions but inside the BBC they would all be seen as way out there."

As you will have gathered, Randall enjoys speaking plainly. Our 90-minute knockabout conversation is sprinkled with laughter and old-fashioned Fleet Street swearing; the Telegraph's editor-at-large had given the impression of not worrying about what he says or what others think of him. But there are times - how annoying! - when tact forces its way through.

Is it, I ask, a sensible practice for a company to get through eight bosses in four years (that is the number of people who have sat in the editors' chairs at the Daily and Sunday Telegraph)? What does he make of Patience Wheatcroft's departure?

"You can't possibly expect me to comment on that. You've got Will [Lewis] just along there two doors away if you want to get the Telegraph's line on the ins and outs of editors."

And a few hours after our interview, he rings me up. Something has obviously been preying on his mind since we parted company. He has thought of a better answer to one of my questions, he says.

I had asked whether it was right that Rupert Murdoch's main British holding company, Newscorp Investments, (quite legally) paid no net corporation tax over an 11-year period until 1999, thus depriving the country of an estimated £92m in income? Given that the company made huge profits printing newspapers that regularly attacked dole scroungers, I asked whether the firm's position was morally defensible.

"Look. I know what you want me to do, you want me to slag off Murdoch. Guess what? I'm not going to do that. Have another go." So he doesn't have an opinion then? "I do have an opinion: if you are a public quoted company, which Rupert Murdoch's companies are, you have a fiduciary duty to deliver the best returns to your shareholders. I don't think there's any company out there that wouldn't take the opportunity to pay less tax than it's paying now."

But morally? "I am not going to tell you what my view of that is morally."

People might draw conclusions from your silence on that, I say. "They might do, and they can draw whatever conclusions they like." Indeed they might. But not for long. Six hours later, the phone rings - with Randall's new, improved answer: "If I thought News Corporation was an immoral company, I wouldn't be working for it." Phew.

Curriculum Vitae

Age 52

Education Royal Liberty Grammar School, Romford, Essex; Nottingham University

Career 1982-85 Hawkins publishers 1985-86 assistant editor, Financial Weekly 1986-88 City correspondent, Sunday Telegraph 1989-98 Sunday Times (City editor, assistant editor, sports editor) 1994-95 deputy chairman, Financial Dynamics 1998-2001 editor, Sunday Business 2001-05 business editor, BBC 2005-present editor-at-large, Daily Telegraph

· Jeff Randall Live will be on Sky News at 7.30pm on Mondays from next week