A cover-up at the BBC? Periscopes down. Dive, dive, dive!

By QUENTIN LETTS, PARLIAMENTARY SKETCHWRITER

Published: | Updated:

MPs are calling for Patten to be sacked from his position as BBC Chairman

MPs are calling for Patten to be sacked from his position as BBC Chairman

The Book of Proverbs tells us: ‘whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ And thus, dearly beloved, it came to pass. 

For years, top wallahs at the BBC have pooh-poohed Parliament. 

They have refused to let MPs see their accounts. They have waved aside politicians’ unease about mushrooming management and big-spud salaries at the Beeb. They have espoused trendy-Left positions on everything from bad language to European federalism, immigration to metrication (how they love to use kilometres). Screw popular opinion!

Yesterday the Corporation reaped some blowback. Bluuurp. 

MPs called for BBC chairman Chris Patten to be sacked. They wanted an end to mega pay-offs. They believed in the ‘independence of the BBC’ but they wanted that independence to be on their terms. Those terms, as ever with MPs, were grubbily political. It’s about control, one estate of the realm arm-wrestling another for supremacy. The core issue of  cultural excellence – the BBC’s terror of being exceptional – went unexamined. 

Culture Secretary Maria Miller arrived to discuss the departure of BBC director-general George Entwistle. She was responding to an Urgent Question from Labour’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman.

Miss Harman was torn. Having demanded the session, she said ‘we should not trespass on the BBC’s independence’. So why haul in the Minister to talk about the crisis? 

Perhaps Miss Harman remembered only after submitting her question that the militantly egalitarian BBC is a vital ally in her  big-state view of the world. It is largely thanks to the BBC that her pet issue of ‘equalities’ has become political dogma.

Where is he? Tory MPs shouted angrily after Tom Watson after he wrongly pointed at one of Margaret Thatcher's friends as being a pederast

Where is he? Tory MPs shouted angrily after Tom Watson after he wrongly pointed at one of Margaret Thatcher's friends as being a pederast

Two of Labour’s most pious media-standards campaigners were not in the House. Of Chris Bryant (Lab, Rhondda) and Tom Watson (Lab, West Bromwich E) there was no sign. Ha! Give those two the merest nostril-waft of Fleet Street naughtiness and they leap to their Regency heels to demand public floggings. Present them with a sexual abuse cover-up at the BBC, along with a nuclear-sized defamation, and they drop periscopes. Dive, dive, dive.

Mr Watson’s absence was remarked on by Tory MPs who feel that he is partly responsible for the latest BBC catastrophe, having made pointed (and wrong) claims about one of Margaret Thatcher’s friends being a pederast. Tories shouted angrily: ‘Where is he?’

Lord Patten was attacked by the firm Left (Bassetlaw’s John Mann) and the firm Right (Shipley’s Philip Davies, Bolton’s David Nuttall and others). Establishment Centrists, that pod where it really doesn’t do to attack one’s fellow pod-pooh-bahs, defended the BBC chairman. 

 
   

More from Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail...

Mrs Miller, no more unexciting than a corporate lawyer, wanted  ‘a period of calm’ (translation: don’t sack Chris). Huw Irranca-Davies (Lab, Ogmore) hoped the BBC’s ‘detractors’ would ‘not be given rein’.

Stephen Gilbert (Lib Dem, St Austell & Newquay) cited many achievements of the BBC and said: ‘We need to get events in perspective.’ He won nods from certain quarters, as did David Lammy (Lab, Tottenham) who felt that the Beeb’s US election coverage was tip-top. 

There may be something in what Messrs Gilbert and Lammy said but I do not recall them saying similar things about national newspapers during the phone-hacking hoo-hah. 

Sir Gerald Kaufman (Lab, Gorton) said: ‘The BBC needs proper regulation.’ Ah, regulation. Politicians love regulations. Rules mean compliance and compliance means leverage/legal elbow/power over dissenting voices. The BBC will hate the idea and rightly so. But the same, monopolising BBC has happily fuelled the campaign to regulate its competitors in the Press. We’re back to Proverbs.

Beside Mrs Miller sat her colleague Ed Vaizey – vapid Vaizey, the Arts Minister who has failed to project any sense of cultural excellence for the arts. 

Mrs Miller herself trundled through her answers with a metronomic manner, stiff-necked, hunch-shouldered. She looked terrified of saying anything interesting. 

Meanwhile, the same, pink-tinged careerists from the Establishment pod are being talked up as successors to Mr Entwistle. I know I won’t get it but I will blow the dust off my application and put in for it one more time, with vigour.

BBC

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