The Today programme ended, and John Humphrys walked out of the studio yawning and stretching. The phone was ringing in the empty programme office, and he picked it up. A spin-doctor’s foul-mouthed rant about how rotten and biased and stupid the programme had been came pouring out of it. Humphrys asked after a couple of minutes, ‘Can I just make a point?’ ‘Yes?’ said the spin-doctor warily. ‘Fuck off,’ said Humphrys, and slammed the phone down.
Lord Reith wouldn’t have liked the language, but he would have approved of the instinct. And when Boris Johnson told the Daily Telegraph on Monday that the next BBC director-general ought to be a Conservative, and that the BBC was ‘statist, corporatist, defeatist, anti-business, Europhile and overwhelmingly biased to the left’, there was only one proper response for people at the BBC to make: the Humphrys one.
The bosses of French state-owned television and radio are chosen for their political allegiance; they’ll be clearing out their offices quite soon now.
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