The big revelation in Lord Ashcroft’s forthcoming biography of Nigel Farage is that he’s been banned from Desert Island Discs. According to Ashcroft’s sources, an appearance by the Reform UK leader would make some BBC employees feel ‘unsafe’ and might lead to other high-profile figures boycotting the long-running show.
‘I have come to expect nothing less from the BBC,’ Farage told the Mail on Sunday. ‘Their blatant bias has been obvious for years.’
The BBC has categorically denied the story and, in fairness, its ‘blatant bias’ doesn’t extend to Question Time, which Farage has appeared on about 40 times in the past 26 years. On the other hand, being a guest on Desert Island Discs is a lot more prestigious and it does seem odd that Farage has never been asked, given that Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer have done it, as well as countless other politicians, including Margaret Thatcher, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, Tony Benn, Neil Kinnock, Paddy Ashdown, Dennis Skinner, Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon.
If you exclude the prime ministers from that list, Farage is in the same ballpark – according to Vernon Bodganor, he was ‘in large part responsible for the most consequential foreign policy decision Britain has taken since the war’ – and he’s no more politically contentious than, say, Arthur Scargill, who appeared in 1988.
Farage told The Spectator this week that he would opt for Right Said Fred, his favourite fishing tackle and the works of P.G. Wodehouse. I sympathise. I too have been fantasising about being on the show since before Roy Plomley died in 1985. Interestingly, the eight records haven’t changed much in the past 40 years, with my taste in music having become set in stone by the mid-1980s. All I listen to is classic British rock, with ‘London Calling’ by The Clash being the one exception because it’s played before every QPR game at Loftus Road. That would be the sole record on my Desert Island Discs playlist recorded after 1975, but only so I could talk about my beloved Hoops for a few minutes.
My luxury item, by contrast, has evolved over the years. In my twenties it would have been a jet ski, but now it would be a humanoid robot that could take care of me in my dotage. For my book, I’d be tempted to choose War and Peace because it’s very long and I haven’t read it, but I recently got bogged down in Anna Karenina and wasn’t able to finish it. Maybe Anthony Powell’s 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time, assuming that’s allowed? No, I think it would have to be The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a work I feel I ought to read but won’t unless I have nothing else to do.
These days I don’t just worry about never getting the call, but about the declining status of the show, so if I do get asked it won’t mean very much. Fifty or so years ago, if you sat in the studio opposite Roy Plomley, you wouldn’t be able to move for weeks afterwards without someone coming up to you and saying they’d heard you on Desert Island Discs. Being invited to appear didn’t just mean you’d arrived; it meant you were firmly established in the firmament of public life. It was the equivalent of being given a knighthood. Today, you’d be lucky if half a dozen of your acquaintances heard you. It’s less like a gong and more like a gold watch handed to you on your retirement.
I’ve been fantasising about being on the show since before Roy Plomley died in 1985
That was the truly shocking thing about Ashcroft’s scoop – the fact that Farage seemed to care so much. ‘The BBC will have a rude awakening under a Reform government,’ he vowed, as if the party’s policy towards the broadcaster would be entirely dictated by this unforgivable snub. I daresay he was hamming it up a bit, knowing it would make a better story if he struck an aggrieved pose, but the fact that it made the front page of Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday newspaper was still a surprise. If that’s the biggest scandal in Ashcroft’s tell-all biography, Britain’s most colourful politician will be mightily relieved.
I’ve been trying to think what today’s equivalent of receiving this ‘honour’ would be and the sad thing is nothing comes to mind. The era in which the British people had a shared sense of what constituted life’s glittering prizes and who deserved them is behind us, with the nation splintering into numerous different tribes, each with their own laurels. For some, no doubt, Desert Island Discs still possesses that old school magic. But the majority have probably never heard of it.
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