John Birt's latest fine tuning of the BBC brought him into yet sharper contrast. William Russell profiles `a sort of czar'.

NOT since Dr Beeching decimated the rail network has the British public had a hate figure to chastise anything like John Birt, the 51-year-old director general of the BBC, accused this week by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee of acting like ``a sort of czar''.

The crime which prompted this latest attack was his having given less than 24 hours notice to senior colleagues and Government ministers of his plan to merge the World Service into the corporation's domestic operations.

Birt has been top man at the BBC since 1992, overseeing a whole raft of controversial changes - involving cutting staff numbers - which have also destroyed staff morale. In the process he has demonstrated he is the india rubber man of broadcasting. Attack him and he bounces back. Prick him and he shows no signs of bleeding. Nothing seems to hinder his career.

His salary and its various lavish perks were considered a scandal when he was appointed. He does not get paid anything like other heads of massive corporations, but the difference is that it is not shareholders who pay but the licence payers.

The latest pay rise, much of it in the form of a performance-related bonus, which was revealed this week gave him a 13% increase, more than four times the rate of inflation. It has enraged BECTU, the BBC Union, but Birt will pocket the #35,000 cash, which brings his take-home pay to under #300,0000. The unions will fume and life will continue.

BBC jobs have vanished in the drastic slimming down he has imposed under so-called Birtism. He introduced Producer Choice, blamed for most of the job losses, under which, instead of using in-house facilities, programme makers employ freelancers, invariably the same people they formerly employed who were made redundant. The difference is they can get their talents more cheaply, although that has not always proven to be the case. The extra paper work has created endless bureaucratic complications.

The BBC's new structure, under which television and radio come under one controller, is seen by many as a preliminary to eventually abandoning the whole idea of public service broadcasting and selling Auntie off.

Under the plans, the World Service, that most sacred of cows, will lose its separate directorate by next April. Merging it into the Corporation's domestic operations in some ways seems eminently sensible, if looked at Birt-wise on purely organisational grounds. In fact, the Service's character is unique and cannot be fitted into the more mundane domestic frame.

Any one of the rows could have sunk a lesser man, but Birt sails on regardless - as his performance before the Committee demonstrated. The point about Birt is that he is going to be around at the BBC at least until the Millennium.

For good or ill, he is shaping the BBC of the 21st century in his image. Not that the Birt Broadcasting Corporation is in bad shape. Financially the BBC is sound, artistically it is doing fine. It is just that the BBC is in a different shape from the one those who believe in public service broadcasting, in the Reithian tradition, think it should be in.

Of its slimsline structure, he has said: ``A lot of people will be nervous. However, at the other end of change lies a better world.'' The trouble is that, as a manager of men, he lacks the ability to inspire, to conjure up that better world to confound the sceptics.

Logical in his thought processes, he is a shy man who thinks things through carefully, is notorious for his singlemindedness and has a passion for statistics. A control freak, he professes to believe in consultation, but somehow fails to do it.

The veteran broadcaster, Mark Tully, one of the leading critics of the BBC's owlish-looking boss, argues that the Corporation is on the brink of turning into something Orwellian, an organisation run by fear and staffed by sycophants.

Birt does not have an easily likeable public image. The late Dennis Potter compared him and Marmaduke Hussey, the then chairman of the BBC Governors, to a pair of ``croak-voiced Daleks'', a marvellous metaphor prompting thoughts of the pair running around Broadcasting House croaking ``Exterminate! Exterminate!'' The analogy stuck.

Birt is famed for his Armani suits, although on him they could have come from off the peg at Burton's for all the good they do for his appearance. It is, however, a comment on the nature of the man, that beneath the cost-cutter, sacker, rampant reorganiser exterior apparently lies a would-be dandy prepared to spend vast sums on his clothes.

He arrived at the BBC in 1987 as deputy director general after a career in commercial television, first as a hands-on producer and then as director of programmes at London Weekend Television.

It was an instant case of a commercial cuckoo in the BBC nest. He was regarded as there to instil Thatcherite values into the organisation, which is, in many ways, what he has done - although he has responded to the changed Major years with skill. Everything, until recently, was dominated by the need to get the Royal Charter renewed. But the point about Birt is he has never been just a Tory man. He is by nature in there with whoever are the shakers and the movers, and as a result has wooed Tony Blair every bit as assiduously as he has John Major.

His justification of Birtism is that the BBC's extravagant organisation was failing to move with the times, which is true. The problem is that his style of management, involving consultation that emerges as diktat, has meant a loss of morale among staff. They are now so afraid they are next for the axe that they do not speak out against arguably ill-conceived changes, because not all change, even in a Birtist world - which is one dedicated to order - is necessarily for the good.

Birt believes change is necessary to preserve and strengthen the BBC's core values, and that the licence fee must be maintained as its means of funding. But if that is so, it has to be made super-efficient.

Part of the problem was the 1988 decision by the Government that the licence fee would in future increase only at the same rate as the retail price index, which effectively put the BBC on a fixed income in real terms. He has put it into a condition to compete in the digital, satellite, cable revolution, and in so doing is carrying out the Government's wishes.

Unlike most media people, he does not need to be liked and enjoys the support of the politicians for what he is doing. It is a winning combinbation.