Roger Hardy's dillema: Working for Foreign Office or the British public

Roger Hardy was at SOAS last week. He has been a Middle East expert and analyst for the BBC for the past two decades. (So either he has started with the BBC when he was a teenager, or he is actually older than what appears.)

I wanted to ask a question that I didn't get a chance for and I'm raising it here now.

A lot of stuff that Hardy and many other journalists at the BBC doing is also being used by the BBC World Service. In other words, their salary must come from both entities as their service is used by the both.

Now, given that the BBC World Service is wholly funded by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, unlike the rest of the BBC that is funded directly by the British citizen's license fees, How can Roger Hardy and other journalists in the same situation reconcile these two sources of funding and thereby control? What are their mechanisms to guarantee their indepndence, while they are actually on the payroll of the UK government?

The other side of the question, which is even more important, would be that how this question of independence from the government is perceived by the world wide BBC audiences? What effect such perception, right or wrong, would have on they way the people see the BBC journalists?

I would suggest to rethink and review the kidnapping of Alan Johnston a while ago in this light. Maybe things would look a bit differently.