BBC made mistakes in Jimmy Savile scandal, says Greg Dyke

Former director general says early statements were not strong enough and reasons for Newsnight decision were not explained
Greg Dyke
Greg Dyke was director general of the BBC between 2000 and 2004. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA

Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC, has said the corporation made mistakes in its handling of the Jimmy Savile affair, as the BBC prepares to broadcast a Panorama special examining why Newsnight dropped an investigation into Savile's history of child abuse.

The criticism came as the former Tory MP Edwina Currie was accused of giving Savile a job overseeing the running of Broadmoor hospital while she was health minister in the 1980s. The Sunday Telegraph claimed he was put in charge of a taskforce after a series of industrial disputes, despite having no professional qualifications in mental health.

Dyke, who ran the BBC between 2000 and 2004, said the corporation had failed to respond robustly to the rapidly developing crisis when it emerged that the Newsnight investigation had been dropped, shortly before the corporation was due to run two tribute programmes to the late broadcaster.

"I think the BBC made two early mistakes," Dyke said on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday morning. "First of all, the first statements about this were not strong enough and were not saying: 'This is a really serious issue and needs to be examined.' It's not enough to say: 'We looked in our files.' So that was a mistake. But, you know, they happen.

"The second one was when they started saying that the Newsnight programme wasn't running for 'editorial reasons'. You needed to explain what they were. Why did the editor of Newsnight decide this wasn't a strong enough programme to be broadcast? Now I suspect he didn't think that the evidence was strong enough. But he, or someone, needed to say that. And nobody did."

Last week Scotland Yard announced it was launching a full-scale criminal inquiry into Savile's alleged sex ring. The Met police is looking at 400 separate lines of investigation and more than 200 potential victims.

Also on the Andrew Marr Show, the campaigner and broadcaster Esther Rantzen said she was not surprised by the number of people who had made statements to the police. She said: "Savile was a predatory paedophile. When I started to look at this subject back in 1986, when we launched ChildLine, I was told that a paedophile commits a thousand offences against one child if it's in his family or against a thousand different children. So I'm not a bit surprised at the numbers that have come forward."

Asked by Marr whether she had "any indication of what a monster Savile was", Rantzen said: "No, and that is my biggest regret. Because if a child had disclosed then people could have acted and if they didn't act then it's entirely reprehensible.

"What was swirling around was rumours, but no disclosure from a child – or indeed from an adult survivor that I know about – until after Savile's death. That is a big regret and it just underscores for me how difficult it is."

Currie told Sunday Telegraph reporters that she had a record of a meeting with Savile in Leeds in September 1988, the month a new taskforce was appointed to oversee Broadmoor. In the entry, she described his thoughts on Broadmoor as "intriguing".

Currie said she had noted that during the meeting Savile told her he suspected staff were inflating their salaries, and he threatened to pass the information to newspapers if the staff caused him any trouble. Savile also told her he had uncovered millions of pounds missing from budgets and poor use of the hospital's housing stock.

Evidence is emerging that former BBC colleagues of Savile knew there were claims he was a serial abuser of young boys at many locations, including on the corporation's premises. The Observer reported that a lawyer who specialises in sexual abuse cases is taking evidence from 12 people, both men and women, who claim to have been abused by the presenter.

Alan Collins, of Pannone solicitors, said he had spoken to several former colleagues of Savile, who said it was apparently well known within the BBC that the TV presenter was "interested" in young boys.