* * * * Personalities or Principles?
The report of the special committee appointed to enquire into allegations arising out of what has come to be known as the Lambert case reflects no great credit and no great discredit on any of the B.B.C. officials concerned. There were errors of judgement and mis- understandings in various quarters and Mr. Lambert himself appears at a fairly early stage in the controversy to have become a man with a grievance—not entirely without excuse. The whole slander case, it will be remembered, binged on a conversation between Sir Cecil Levita and Mr. Gladstone Murray, then a high official of the B.B.C., regarding Mr. Lambert, which was it once reported by Mr. Murray to Mr. Lambert, and in observing that they "find it very difficult to under- stand the action taken by Mr. Gladstone Murray at the very outset of the affair," the Board have said what a good many other people have thought. The report is inconclusive in that it reveals no violation of any serious principle. It had to deal with intangible questions like the suggestion (in a letter from Sir John Reith) that Mr. Lambert "had become very difficult in the office," regarding which it can only be said that they involve personal relationships into which no Board can carry its investigations beyond a certain point. Altogether the report represents the affair, no doubt rightly, as having no more than an ad hoc importance. It provides no fresh stick to beat the B.B.C. with.
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