For the most part I have concentrated in this book upon events of which I had personal experience during eight years as a member of the Board of Governors. I am, however, anxious before I conclude to examine the state of the Corporation today and the prospects for its future, and both present and future are or will be affected by the fallout from the extraordinary events of January 2004, arguably the most damaging in the long history of the BBC, leading as they did to the departure of Gavyn Davies, the Chairman, and Greg Dyke, the Director General. In this fateful drama the person I had known longest was Lord Hutton, a retiring Law Lord and a former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, who had been appointed by the government to consider and report on the sad events centring around the suicide of Dr David Kelly. Brian Hutton and I had been amongst a small group of Ulstermen at Oxford University in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and I would encounter him regularly on ‘the Liverpool boat’ as a new university term was about to begin. He had made his way to Balliol from Shrewsbury School, and even as an undergraduate studying jurisprudence he had something of the High Court about him in his manner and high, fluting voice.