Bbc

Hello, what’s this I see before me? A blank page; and a pen unencumbered by the heavy weight of BBC News impartiality. I still present University Challenge, it’s true; but having left the Today programme, perhaps I can now asseverate opinions that a fortnight ago would have got me sacked. This feels good! Here goes… Dominic Cummings was right. I’m referring, obviously, to a speech he gave to the IPPR in 2014. It’s on YouTube and, being something of a weirdo and misfit, I have watched it a dozen times at least.

One of the joys of being director of digital at The Spectator, back in 2015, was seeing the magazine proofs before they went to print. Rod Liddle’s column was the first thing I looked for, always the one I was most eager to read. He made me laugh every single time, something very few columnists are able to do. I was annoyed I liked those columns, because I didn’t want to like Rod Liddle. All I knew of his personal life was through the scandal that followed him leaving his wife during the so-called “Sextator” years. I took a dim view of that. Although we both worked for The Spectator, I didn’t actually meet Rod for a long time because, woke snowflake that he was, he only ever worked from home. The first time we met was at a Spectator summer party, years later.

One of the joys of being director of digital at The Spectator, back in 2015, was seeing the magazine proofs before they went to print. Rod Liddle’s column was the first thing I looked for, always the one I was most eager to read. He made me laugh every single time, something very few columnists are able to do. I was annoyed I liked those columns, because I didn’t want to like Rod Liddle. All I knew of his personal life was through the scandal that followed him leaving his wife during the so-called ‘Sextator’ years. I took a dim view of that. Although we both worked for The Spectator, I didn’t actually meet Rod for a long time because, woke snowflake that he was, he only ever worked from home. The first time we met was at a Spectator summer party, years later.

Andy Burnham is right. The cost of living is foremost in people’s minds just now. Naturally his electricity bill VAT holiday and freeze of bus fares find agreement in television news vox pops and focus groups. But he offers no explanation for the causes and concentrates only on the symptoms. Obviously, the removal of the 5 percent VAT will be nice for consumers. But underlying inflation today relates to government debauchery of money and disruptions of supply caused by Donald Trump’s tariffs and his short war, by Vladimir Putin’s long war and Ed Miliband’s net-zero trap, which makes us pay expensive green levies and bans new domestic fossil-fuel production. The remedy does not lie in the 1970s-style pretense that things can be made cheaper by fiat.

Just when you think this government cannot get any madder, it publishes a truly mental green paper. Called ‘Watch this Space’ and produced by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, it suggests forcing social media platforms to make content produced by public-service media providers, like the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, ‘prominent and easily discoverable’. So, if you search for an instructional video on YouTube about how to do the foxtrot, it would steer you towards an episode of Strictly Come Dancing. And the content recommended for you by a platform’s algorithm wouldn’t be based on your personal preferences, but on what DCMS – or possibly Ofcom, the details are vague – thinks you ought to be consuming.

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.

The BBC’s tracking-down of Kardo Ranya as a people-smuggling mastermind is a triumph of investigative journalism. But anyone who thinks this will seriously help ‘smash the gangs’ is deluded. As the drugs trade illustrates, where there is demand there will be supply. What’s to be done? Imagine you were the party leader of a mainstream British political party. Daydreaming, you see a vision – pouffe! A bang and a flash, and there stands the Fairy Queen herself. ‘What, oh party leader,’ she demands, ‘is your heart’s desire?’ Your reply is unhesitating but – you suppose – hopeless. ‘A winning strategy for the next general election,’ you wail. ‘I ask only for that.

What is the greatest threat to British democracy? Zack Polanski’s call for ‘building a society’ that ‘doesn’t include’ people who ‘identify as right-wing’? Labour’s efforts to flood the Upper House with party apparatchiks? Islamist extremism? The correct answer is Reform UK. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new book called What If Reform Wins by the Times reporter Peter Chappell. Before I get to its flaws, I should acknowledge it’s an enjoyable read, with plenty of deft, comic touches. It imagines that Reform wins a majority in June 2029, and then gives a blow-by-blow account of the constitutional crisis that follows, with the informal rules and conventions underpinning our democracy being stress-tested and found wanting.