A last chance to save the BBC

Whoever becomes the next director-general of the BBC should take a close look at last week’s Question Time. It came from Liverpool, which is perhaps the most left-wing city in the country, Brighton excepted. On it, the actor Laurence Fox was making sensible comments about the Harry and Meghan business (which is beginning to bore me into a stupor), when he was upbraided by a third-division academic from a glorified teacher training college. This was Rachel Boyle, a ‘researcher on race and ethnicity’. She trotted out the familiar, learned-by-rote cliché that Fox was possessed of ‘white privilege’ and was therefore, by implication, disqualified to comment on the matter.

It’s what happened next that should register itself in the mind of whatever fragrant bien-pensant is hoisted into the saddle of this doomed behemoth. As soon as the ridiculous woman uttered the words ‘white privilege’ the entire audience let out a groan of ineffable weariness, as if the will to live had suddenly deserted them.