How former director general Mark Thompson explained the BBC's £100m digital media fiasco

Last time the former director general flew over for a Hodging the Labour MP became incandescent over outrageous redundancy payments made to former BBC staff. She accused the corporation’s head of HR of lying, laid into the Trust and generally accused all before her of being incompetent with our money.

And that was over just £4m. What had she held back for a £100m and the belief that at an earlier hearing the committee had been misled by Thompson and senior management? Thompson appeared before them in February 2011 and said DMI was working. "There are many programmes that are already being made with DMI and some have gone to air and are going to air," he told MPs. BBC trustee Anthony Fry made similarly upbeat comments.

Just over two years later the project was written off by the new director general Tony Hall, inevitably raising questions about what Thompson, now the chief executive of the New York Times, originally told the committee and if it could possibly have been true.

Yesterday, he came up with a reply that was difficult to beat saying that he believed that he was speaking the truth to the committee at the time and it is with hindsight that he realised the briefings he was getting were too optimistic. In fact all the other mainly former BBC senior executives – Zarin Patel, the former finance officer, Caroline Thompson, the former chief operations officer and Anthony Fry, the former head of the finance committee for the BBC Trust – all relied on the hindsight defence.

The committee room was also awash with apologies with Fry summing it up by saying: "As chair of the [BBC Trust] finance committee this end result is hugely embarrassing. The total project, right the way through the BBC, was an embarrassment." However, he said that the Trust could not have done anything more about the failure of DMI, given the lack of information they were given about the true state of the project – and neither could the BBC executive board, headed by Thompson. "We were all in the dark," Fry said.

Hodge was on simmer during most of the questioning, once reaching full boil when commenting that there were a number of half truths running around.

She occasionally put on a demonic grin to show the witnesses (victims) her astonishment at their replies.

The Tory MP Richard Bacon used the Jeremy Paxman form of interview when questioning Patel about a document that bore her name, just repeating the question until he got the answer he wanted and not listening to any nuances.

What became apparent amid the apologies was the lack of leadership at the BBC, the failure of oversight and the inability to accept that they could get something wrong.

There was never any one person who took responsibility for DMI and no one wanted to own up that the project was going wrong.

Mark Thompson tried and failed to use the defence last heard at the redundancy payment hearing when he said the £4m overpayments were dwarfed by the savings. This time he said there were numerous other BBC technology projects that had gone right and the BBC, under him, should not be demonised for this one IT failure.

He pointed to the iPlayer and the 2012 London Olympics as major projects delivered successfully during his time in charge.

Hodge, in summing up the committee hearing, was more restrained than usual, saying she hoped this would be the last time this BBC saga would come before them.

She accused the BBC of being a jungle of bureaucracy, almost beyond parody and that it was rather sad that the committee had been told a number of half truths.