My speech to the Young Britons Foundation in the Commons the other day went quite well, especially the bit where I said that the current batch of Tories were a bunch of something beginning with “C” (and it wasn’t “Conservatives.”) Afterwards one of the bright young things asked me whether the first step to restoring Britain’s fortunes might be the abolition of the BBC. My answer went something like: “Duh!”
It would have been even more of a “Duh!” had I known about the appointment of Vladimir Stalin – or “Nicolai Gentchev” to give him his current SPECTRE agent name – as Question Time’s new editor. I appreciate that BBC hadn’t got too much leeway in the matter: once they’d decided to base the programme in Glasgow, they were hardly going to recruit a member of the Monday Club for the job. Even so, Agent Gentchev’s past scribblings for International Socialism Journal and Socialist Review hardly suggests that the BBC’s political discussion flagship is about to head in a rightward direction.
Whenever you talk to anyone from the BBC about Question Time, they always boast about how incredibly balanced it is. “You realise David Dimbleby is actually a Tory, you know?” they say. And they tell you about all the efforts the programme makes to ensure scrupulous neutrality. How each prospective audience member has to submit a DNA sample, a 10,000-word thesis and a Rorschach test which is then assessed for five years by a team of expert experts to ensure that they accurately reflect the national demography and voting patterns.
It’s absolute tosh, though. BBC Question Time is “balanced” in the same way that the new chairman of the BBC Trust Chris Patten is “Conservative”.
