THE tabloids revelled in BBC failings over Jimmy Savile and Lord McAlpine but the reputational damage to it and flagship current affairs programme Newsnight was of the corporation’s own making and not Fleet Street’s revenge.

BBC bosses sowed the wind of tabloid anger in their evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into media practice and regulation.

Their testimony included hostage-to-fortune statements about superior standards of journalism at the BBC and attacks on levels of political influence over tabloid editors, overlooking what Lord Leveson himself described as the tabloid tendency to exact revenge via “high volume, extremely personal attacks on those who challenge them”.

When Newsnight failed first to expose Jimmy Savile as a serial sex offender and then falsely insinuated that former Conservative Party Lord McAlpine had similar propensities, the corporation reaped a newspaper whirlwind.

That no tabloid had had the courage to expose Savile despite repeated allegations and that several police forces had abandoned investigations for lack of evidence was beside the point.

The BBC had proved over-respectful of Savile’s privacy and, in the case of the wholly innocent McAlpine, not respectful enough. Its case for a superior sort of journalism was blown and, in wrongly incriminating a former Tory grandee, it had proved what many in the press thought – it had a Left wing bias and for that alone should have been answerable to Leveson.

Worse, in the repeat failings of its then director general George Entwistle to manage Newsnight and in the costs incurred in various inquiries and damages to Lord McAlpine, the BBC had proved the perennial Fleet Street charges of being poorly managed and profligate with public money.

The wounds, I suggest, were self-inflicted and made worse by the parade of BBC names who held forth publicly on the BBC’s failings including David Dimbleby and Martin Bell, while an angry interview with John Humphrys on the Today programme cost Entwistle his job after the shortest tenure in the corporation’s history.

The hardest impact was a massive decline in the BBC trust rating, the currency on which it trades and of which it had made such a virtue during its evidence to Leveson.

So while the tabloids covered the scandal in merciless detail and commentary and indeed felt vindicated in many of their views of the BBC, they did not construct revenge by scandal. They hadn’t needed to. The BBC had done it for them.