The corporation’s presenters and journalists were making news themselves – so of course they had to go to excruciating lengths to cover the story

“It could be a fun day ahead,” quipped Dan Walker from the BBC Breakfast sofa at 7.45am. At his side, co-presenter Louise Minchin made a face that was close to an eye-roll. In little over three hours, the salaries of many of the best-paid presenters at the BBC would be revealed – and both, presumably, knew what was coming.

Walker, we would learn, is paid between £200,000 and £250,000; Minchin, however, was not on the list, meaning she pockets less than £150,000 a year.



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The discrepancy may be explained by Walker’s additional duties for Football Focus and Radio 5 Live. Or it could be an example of the BBC’s outrageous hypocrisy and sexism. That was certainly the view of some rival broadcasters and news outlets, who seemed to display previously hidden outrage at the gender pay gap.

The BBC was originally ordered by David Cameron to declare salaries above £450,000 as part of its charter renegotiations. However, this figure was drastically reduced last year by Theresa May to £150,000, roughly in line with her own salary – evidently the new national benchmark for competency, or perhaps entertainment value.

All in all, it made for a deeply uncomfortable day for the BBC and its top presenters, just as the government, and its cheerleaders in the anti-Beeb rightwing press, had intended.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Humphrys (>£600,000); Mishal Husain (<£250,000). Photograph: BBC

Few institutions do self-flagellation like Auntie, and the broadcaster duly strove to show that it would not be beaten by its critics in its effective wielding of the scourge. Thus listeners to the World at One – which, like most bulletins through the day, led on the BBC pay story – were treated to the sound of Radio 2’s Ken Bruce (£250,000+) being doorstepped by his own colleagues on his way to work (“I don’t have anything to say about it, sorry. But thanks very much for asking”).

“As you’d expect we’ve been trying to contact some of the others whose salaries have been revealed, but none of them would talk to us,” said presenter Edward Stourton, who stressed (was that relief?) that he was not on the list. “We’ve had all all sorts of responses including ‘I’m out today,’ ‘No, I’m out of the country,’ [and] ‘No, I’m having absolutely nothing to do with it.’”

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Jeremy Vine might have foreseen, however, that he would need a better answer than the one he offered to one caller to his Radio 2 phone-in show, helpfully put through by his producer, who asked the presenter (£700,000-£750,000) if he was embarrassed to pick up his pay cheque. “Em … I just feel very lucky every day,” Vine told Harry Jones, a coalminer from Neath. But did he accept he was overpaid? “I don’t even really want to answer that.” It was, he said, for the BBC to justify. Jones, who has “seen men buckled up from working hard all their life through hard graft”, did not sound convinced.

Tony Hall, the BBC director general, spent the day inviting similar uppercuts in a round of interviews, none more bruising than on Radio 4’s Today programme, where it fell to presenter Mishal Husain to quiz her boss on why he hadn’t managed to slash more significantly the salaries of broadcasters like her. As ever, Husain was quiet, forensic and relentless, the best advertisement possible for her own value to the broadcaster.

The BBC may have reduced the total paid to top staff by 10% since last year, but it was still too high, wasn’t it, asked Hussain, who was co-presenting with Nick Robinson. And could he really say that “every one of those people is worth every penny of the licence fee that they earn?” And while they were at it, with just three women in the BBC’s top 10 earners, how was he going to reduce the gender gap?

An uncomfortable Hall insisted that by 2020 he would be able to look her in the eye and say he had achieved equality of pay.

A few hours later, the figures were published: Husain takes home between £200,000 and £250,000 a year, while her male co-presenter Robinson gets £50,000-£100,000 more. As for John Humphrys, he earns more than £600,000.