Dog bites man! Tommo admits BBC “was” massively left-wing

BBC Director General Mark Thompson recently gave that left-wing snoozepaper, the New Statesman,  the hot news that bears poo in the woods. Correction: they used to poo in the woods. Not any more, of course. Oh, dear me, no. Perish the thought!

Here’s what Tommo said:

“In the BBC I joined 30 years ago, there was, in much of current affairs, in terms of people's personal politics, which were quite vocal, a massive bias to the left.

“The organisation did struggle then with impartiality. And journalistically, staff were quite mystified by the early years of Thatcher.

“Now it is a completely different generation. There is much less overt tribalism among the young journalists who work for the BBC.”

I feel like one of those deranged conspiracy-theory nut-jobs I was writing about yesterday in the context of 1950s films. In right-wing movies, they always turned out to be telling the truth – and so, it seems, was I. And my former colleague Robin Aitken, who wrote a book about it. And the whole of the Conservative Party. And the Tory Press. And anyone else with eyes to see and ears to hear. You really didn’t need to work there to grasp that part of a poll tax levied against anyone owning a TV set, of whichever political stripe, was being deliberately used to attack the government of the day – in particular the hated Prime Minister - by churning out left-wing propaganda masquerading as unbiased news and current affairs journalism.

Now that the DG – my old boss at the Nine O’Clock News - has come out and admitted it, they can loosen my restraints and start weaning me off lithium: I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG!

Not that I would ever dream of gloating, of course – that would be vulgar. But far too much fun to resist.

Mind you, you didn’t need to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to figure out that a news organization which employed - at the same time - John Cole, Polly Toynbee and Peter Jay might be ever such a teensy-weensy bit unkeen on Mrs. T, and might be tempted - with no malice aforethought, of course - to, well, nuance the news in a not strictly right-wing direction. 

When I was working with Cole – then the BBC’s Political Editor – at Westminster, his manager (now a well-known left-wing newspaper columnist) told me that the old boy basically believed the unions should be allowed to run the country. No idea if that was true, of course, but it didn’t take George Smiley to discover that Cole was not a Man of The Right, given his distinguished service on the Guardian and the Observer. 

Polly Toynbee, the BBC’s Social Affairs Editor (i.e. Liberal-Bleeding-Heart-in-Chief) was a well-known left-winger (from a privileged background, which evidently ensured her a place at Oxford, despite only gaining one A level. One. No doubt they were waiting for the academic royalty genes to kick in. There’s social justice for you.)

Peter Jay, the BBC’s Economics Editor, was, notoriously, the rubber-lipped son-in-law of the Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, and a man whose economic views, like his family connections, were stuck firmly in that era of unremitting failure, the 1970s. (And who later became the willing creature of former Labour MP and pension-thieving crook, Robert Maxwell.)

I’d love to give a balancing list of right-wing editorial figures of similar seniority from that era – but there were weren’t any. None at all. Not one. Zero.

So an admission that the BBC was massively biased towards the left at that time is equivalent to admitting to doubts about the probity of some current Pakistani cricket players.

So why has Tommo  (no fool, despite being intellectually duffed up by a nonagenarian crime writer on radio earlier this year) chosen now to reveal what we all knew already? 

Well, the hated Tories are back in charge (apart from a smattering of LibDem pipsqueaks). Of course, they aren’t remotely as right-wing as the dreaded She-Devil of liberal mythology - in fact, they’re not right-wing at all - but they’re Tories, nonetheless. They’re the enemy. And they’re in a cost-cutting mood. And the BBC license fee is up for renegotiation.

So the reason for Tommo’s admission that there’s just the glimmer of a chance that the Pope is, after all, of the Catholic persuasion is probably just an excuse to assure Dave and the rest of the lads that it’s all different now – no more tribal politics for BBC employees, no more trumpeting of left-wing views, and absolutely no chance of any overt or covert support for the Labour Party or the left-wing elements of the LibDems (i.e. 98% of that unappealing rabble).

Anyone who is even remotely tempted by Thompson’s protestations of current innocence just needs to tune in to News 24 for, say, half an hour,  -or the Today Programme for two minutes, or simply to read the list of guests on any “topical” BBC comedy programme - to know that nothing whatsoever has changed in thirty years.

Nice try, Mark. But no cigar!