Leading article: Lese-majesty

Annoying Her Majesty the Queen still seems to be a very bad career move if yesterday's resignation of the BBC1 controller Peter Fincham is anything to go by. However, jettisoning one of its creative leaders feels like an overreaction. Mr Fincham's "crime" was to tell a press conference that a documentary showed footage of the monarch walking out of a photo shoot in a huff. What it in fact showed was the Queen walking into a photo shoot in a huff. It was an embarrassing mistake, but hardly on a par with the phone-in rip-off of viewers on other channels.

It also stuck in the craw somewhat to hear the BBC's director-general Mark Thompson moralising and pointing out that "serious mistakes were made". Maybe so, but it is curious that most of the managers that have paid a price so far for the TV trust crisis have been far down the food chain. What happened to the notion of ultimate responsibility resting at the top?