So Greg Dyke, Director General of the BBC has gone. Speaking personally, I think he's done the honourable thing in an age in which the concept of honour has become fragile and frayed. He's recognised that being part of a team - even one as large as the BBC - involves collective responsibility; and he's shown that leadership means accepting responsibility. In that he's earned our respect.

More importantly, and this really is the mark of a leader, he's shown that the cause is more important than the person: that the BBC is too important to our national life to have its reputation endangered by prolonged debate. In his resignation statement he said he hoped his departure would draw a line over the past; and that more important than the BBC itself was the people it served, the British public - and that too was right.

I for one will miss him. He was always much larger than life, feisty, cheerful and relentlessly upbeat. He never saw himself as one of nature's intellectuals - he once said he had the attention span of a gnat - but he loved the Beeb and the people who worked for it, and they loved him in return. He humanised what could otherwise have been a faceless organisation; and I'm really sorry that it had to end this way.

And if there's one thing I want to say, as a regular listener to the BBC, it's this. Over the years, you've won the respect of the world - because in a highly commercialised society and an ever more competitive broadcasting environment, you've stood for something else. Integrity, honesty, fairness, balance, I'm not sure what the right word is, but part of your mandate has been to see broadcasting not as a business but as a service. Service is a religious word; and there is something fundamental about truthful reporting, without which democracy is blind and freedom eventually loses its way.

The Hebrew Bible kept its hold on the moral imagination of a hundred generations because of its relentless honesty. The Book of Kings tells of King Jehoshaphat whose prophets tell him what he wants to hear. Exasperated he turns to one and says: "How many times must I tell you to tell me nothing but the truth in the name of G-d." News doesn't have to be sexy or sensational. All it needs to do is to tell it the way it is; impartially, objectively, without taking sides. That's the BBC we love, whose normal service will, I hope, be resumed as soon as possible.

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