In August 1999 my eight-year term as the BBC's National Governor for Northern Ireland came to an end. I left that great national institution both enriched by my experience and apprehensive about the future. In what follows I will seek to describe the nature of that enrichment and the reasons for that apprehension.

At that time in 1999 my daughter Caroline was working in London as a litigation solicitor at Herbert Smith, and I had asked her to join me for dinner on my final visit to London as a Governor. When she met me in the lobby of the Langham Hotel, just across the street from Broadcasting House, I offered to take her over the road to show her some of the theatres in which the drama of BBC governance had been played out. We visited the empty Council Chamber, a place of solemnity and institutional gloom, around whose rectangular tables I had sat with my colleagues so many times. Portraits of former Directors General, of varying artistic merit (that is, the portraits), gazed down upon us from the walls. Some of those portrayed had left a lasting mark on the Corporation, for good or ill, but only one of the line appeared in stereo, as it were. From a forbidding portrait and a magisterial bust, the founding father of public service broadcasting and the BBC, John Reith, exuded a powerful mana. Somehow he resembled a bizarre hybrid of an Old Testament prophet and the lamented doleful Scots actor, Alastair Sim.