Jimmy Savile: George Entwistle was too vague, says former BBC boss Sir John Tusa, one of the founding journalists on Newsnight and a former managing director the BBC World Service, has been less than impressed by George Entwistle's handling of the Sir Jimmy Savile crisis. "He is the director-general and, as such, the editor-in-chief," says Sir John. The question of whether the Newsnight programme on Savile should have been pulled is an editorial matter. Entwistle should have said to Lord Patten, his chairman, 'I will find out what happened; I will set up the inquiry; we willl then report to you and the BBC Trust; and then you can decide what to do.' You can't have both the non-executive, which is Chris Patten, and the executive, tumbling over one another with different inquiries. One inquiry, run by the editor-in- chief, who then hands it to the non-executive chairman, that's how a sensibly run organisation would work. Speaking at a party at the Royal Academy for Charles Saumarez Smith's book The Company of Artists, Sir John says the line that the BBC initially put out, that Newsnight's Savile investigation had been dropped for "editorial reasons," was "too vague." He tells Mandrake: "Either there is a good reason or there is a bad reason. You have to keep things clear. At the moment things aren't clear. Is he sympathetic to Entwistle? He wanted to be director-general and, if he went into it thinking that it was going to be easy, he has certainly been disabused of that. It makes one wonder if the director-generalship, as at present constituted, isn't virtually undoable.