'It's not a crisis at the BBC. Not yet, anyway BBC insiders paint a picture of a director-general who seems, at times, lonely and backed into a corner - not least at a hastily called press conference last Friday. Entwistle is still working day-to-day with a senior team, including Jessica Cecil, the head of the director-general's office, that he inherited from Mark Thompson. Some of that team - including the BBC's chief lawyer, Sarah Jones - get rave reviews from those who have worked with them. But Caroline Thomson, the former operations chief who missed out on becoming D-G when Entwistle was appointed, has now left - and taken her legendary skill at handling politicians with her. As well as Jones, Entwistle's (usually daily) meetings about the Savile fallout include David Jordan, the BBC's head of editorial standards, and Paul Mylrea, director of communications and public affairs. Entwistle is also said to take counsel from Ken MacQuarrie, the head of BBC Scotland. One of Entwistle's many headaches is to square competing internal bureaucracies. As well as his own seven-member executive board and 12-strong management board, he has to answer to the BBC trustees. Led by Lord Patten, the supervisory BBC Trust has (rightly) insisted on being involved in key decisions, not least about the leadership and terms of reference of the two formal Savile inquiries that Entwistle has now announced. There are 12 trustees, who have had two extraordinary meetings in recent days, as well as a small "Trust unit" of officials, led by the trust director Nicholas Kroll. Relations between BBC management and the trust have often tended towards the fractious; the trust is blamed by some in Entwistle's senior management for slowing down the corporation's responses over recent days - a suggestion that elicits a vehement denial from both Entwistle's own press team and from a senior BBC Trust source, who says that the suggestion is "intolerable" and "absolute nonsense." The trust, says the source, has approved both announcements for the formal inquiries within two hours of their being supplied in final form by management. It all seems a long way from the BBC's 17,000 rank-and-file staff, most of whom don't work in the gleaming New Broadcasting House alongside Entwistle. Those staff want him to get to grips with what has gone on at the BBC, and quickly. Concern is mounting, not just about the allegations against Savile, but also the potentially more dangerous situation around the spiking of the Newsnight report last year. "This is worse than Hutton," says a BBC News source bluntly, referring to the 2003 judicial inquiry that cost the then director-general, Greg Dyke, his job. It's the mirror image. Hutton was about a story [Andrew Gilligan's Today programme report on the Blair government's Iraq dossier] that shouldn't have run, but did. Savile is about a story that should have run, but didn't. When the Newsnight report was shelved last December, Entwistle was the BBC's head of television, and ultimately responsible for the broadcast of the Christmas tribute programmes. He has now announced that former Sky News chief Nick Pollard will lead an independent review into the Newsnight decision (making a total of no fewer than three reviews - the second formal inquiry, led by former High Court judge Janet Smith, will look at the Savile claims more generally, and there will be a third, less formal review of allegations of sexual harassment at the BBC). Fortunately for Entwistle, senior BBC News insiders poo-poo the suggestion that Newsnight succumbed to pressure to park its inconvenient investigation. "The system just doesn't work like that," said one. BBC News is like a fortress, and its staff take pleasure in telling any invaders to take a running jump. But questions remain about just why Newsnight editor Peter Rippon took the decision to stop the report, and how close it was to completion when he did so. On Sunday Kevin Marsh, a former editor of Today who has now left the BBC, wrote a blog that was sympathetic to Rippon. "When the Newsnight editor paused the investigation, it was still at the evidence-gathering stage... evidence he was beginning to have doubts about," wrote Marsh. "In other words, there was nothing to 'pull" - there was an investigation in progress and it had hit a brick wall. There was no script, even, in spite of what's been reported in the press. Meirion Jones, the then Newsnight producer who was putting together the Savile report (and who is now working on a new Savile investigation for Panorama), declined to comment when contacted by The Daily Telegraph. But Pollard will want to ask Jones whether Marsh's version of events is correct, or whether Jones's Newsnight report was - as some BBC sources continue to insist - actually at a more advanced stage (and therefore less easy to shelve for genuine "editorial reasons"). Entwistle's version of these events - when he appears before the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee next Tuesday - will be closely scrutinised. Pollard will also want to ask whether Rippon was influenced by any dealings he had, in advance of his decision, with his superiors in the BBC news department - including director of news Helen Boaden. BBC journalists were told at a recent morning briefing that Boaden and her deputy, Steve Mitchell, have - in accordance with proper procedure while the inquiry is in progress - stepped back from editorial decisions around the Savile story (with two other senior BBC News managers, Fran Unsworth and Peter Horrocks, taking their place). Some BBC journalists certainly lament what they see as a culture of timidity within its news operation. "There's been massive caution in News over the past eight years [since the Hutton Inquiry]," said one BBC News source. Some really strong middle-ranking editors, like Craig Oliver [now head of communications for David Cameron] and [recently departed BBC News Channel chief] Kevin Bakhurst, have left, and been replaced by people with nothing going for them at all - they're just placemen. The one thing they need to get the job is to show that they wouldn't run Gilligan. And there is more discomfort to come, not least in that broader review of sexual harassment: historic allegations, made publicly by DJ Liz Kershaw and presenter Sandi Toksvig, are echoed in private by other female BBC employees. "When I joined the BBC in my twenties, there were two regular presenters who behaved very inappropriately," says one. They would kiss and hug me, call me at home to 'discuss the programme. You just had to get on with it - you were a 'humourless frigid bitch" if you said otherwise." Entwistle has a fight brewing, too, with some of the BBC's most famous presenters. Lord Patten has said that many of them will likely have to be put on the BBC's staff, instead of being paid as freelancers through the now infamous service companies that the corporation once endorsed. But that will mean a significant pay cut, say those involved, with some of these presenters currently earning "two or three times" the salaries of equivalent staff. It will also be difficult for the BBC to create many new staff jobs for these presenters, at a time when it is supposed to be cutting its headcount. The likely result, says one BBC News source, will be "a big culling of presenters - it'll be fairly brutal." As Entwistle faces these multiple challenges, he is fortunate that he still enjoys the confidence and affection of many of his staff. But he is going to have to work very hard to keep it. "It's not a crisis," says a senior insider. Not yet anyway. But there is a sense of foreboding.