The Carrie Gracie and Toby Young coverage shows just how self-obsessed the media is

What, I wonder, did those outside what we now call the mainstream media – most of the country, in other words – make of the headlines that greeted them after the festive break? Concerns about the NHS hovered in the background. A Cabinet reshuffle was in preparation. Abroad, there were noteworthy developments in Korea (a turn away from conflict, perhaps), in Syria (the beginning of a potentially even nastier endgame), and the latest Trumpery (questions over the President’s mental stability, courtesy of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury).

But for the best part of three days this week the national media pushed most of this into the background to make space for the fortunes of two individuals who could reasonably be described as inhabiting the charmed world of the metropolitan elite. Carrie Gracie had published an open letter, explaining her resignation as the BBC’s China editor, while Toby Young, self-styled journalist-provocateur and founder of free schools, was trying to defend his appointment to a public body created to monitor higher education.

As was to be expected, they and their friends were highly articulate in their defence, as were Young’s enemies in attack. And in both cases the principles at stake are important. But are they important enough to warrant the quantity of newsprint, airtime and bandwidth they commandeered? How relevant is the complaint of Gracie and the indictment of Young to the rest of the country, really? Grenfell Tower, inequality, Universal Credit, Brexit, anyone?

But this is not to say that the principles are trivial. Carrie Gracie resigned after discovering that, despite being promised pay parity with male colleagues doing what she regarded as an equivalent job, she was actually being paid considerably less. I have great sympathy with this, having been in a similar position several times in my own career: finding out that I was paid less than any of the men holding not just equivalent, but more junior, positions, even though my qualifications were at least as good, if not better. I must also admit that my efforts to redress the balance were always only partially successful.

The principle of equal pay for equal, or equivalent work, is unimpeachable – and the law. But, and I regret to say this, equivalence can be elusive. Expertise, time spent, air time, ratings, may all come into it. But in making her case, Gracie had one enviable advantage – denied to most in the private sector – of being able to resign from one position with enormous fanfare, while being assured of transferring to another secure job within the well-padded BBC. Resigning in the private sector means resigning, with the insecurity that entails.

So it is not clear that hers is an example many can follow. It should also perhaps be said that there was a time when BBC pay was mostly transparent and gender-neutral – as Gracie would wish it. It was also much lower, comparatively, than it is now. I began my career at the BBC, and there were published pay scales. There were “tricks” – upgrading someone a year or two before retirement to improve their (final salary) pension – and discrepancies: World Service posts were generally graded lower than their domestic counterparts. But lower pay than in the commercial sector was generally accepted as a price for security, good pensions and, yes, a certain civility.

Gracie’s problem – and the gender disparity exposed last year at the BBC – reflects the elements of discretion and individual pay-bargaining that have since become the norm, especially for on-air journalists, at the Corporation. And given this, I wonder how much support Gracie’s demarche will have attracted beyond female colleagues in the national media. For all the outrage expressed, I strongly suspect that pursuit of gender fairness is not the main message the wider public has taken from it. I bet, rather, that their response has been astonishment, indignation even, at how much she is paid – let alone what her male colleagues are – from their licence fee, plus a feeling that the equal pay battle might more usefully be fought on behalf of those millions of women paid much, much less. You can argue that if those at the top do not insist on fairness, then injustice will persist throughout the ranks, but will the elite really embrace a return to pay scales?

And so to Toby Young. As a bumptious controversialist, Young pushed his juvenile offensiveness pretty far, well before the advent of the Twittersphere. How far this should cast a permanent shadow can perhaps be debated. So, too, can the extent to which his appointment was – unjustly – blighted by his politics. As someone of the right, who has not just supported, but founded, free schools, he was always going to incur the wrath of an education establishment whose sympathies lean more to the left.

For me, though, it was not his past history or his politics that condemned his appointment to the strangely named Office for Students, or any lack of expertise in higher education. There are good arguments for appointing interesting people who offer an outsider’s view. The difficulty was that he was not an outsider, but an insider, long close to the ubiquitous Johnson clan. It was, after all, Higher Education Minister Jo Johnson who announced his appointment.

You can object that it is equally unfair to exclude someone solely because of their name or associations. But it reflects poorly on the way the UK works – and helps explain our poor social mobility – that the net for exerting influence at a national level, whether as pundit or public board member, often seems so narrowly cast. A charmed circle protects and promotes its own – pet mavericks included.

And this I suspect will be the message the wider public drew, in so far as they were interested at all. It was not Young’s offensive utterances or his political incorrectness, or his politics or his lack of expertise that concerned them. It was that his appointment – to a public body – confirmed their view of London and the establishment as a self-perpetuating closed shop.

So while the metropolitan media elite – OK, myself included – were sniping and gossiping and retweeting the rights and wrongs of Gracie and Young, and editors were filling their space with the furores, the overall message heard further afield may have been rather different. That the London media world is as privileged, self-obsessed and far from our reality as ever. No wonder the spotlight has swung back so smartly to the NHS.