Does anyone actually like Reform?

‘Alastair, it’s been absolutely fascinating talking to you. Thank you for your honesty.’ And thus ended Kirsty Young’s interview with Alastair Campbell, broadcast to the nation on BBC Radio 4 on Monday. This was part of the series Young Again, in which Kirsty interviews left-of-centre people, agrees with them and makes them feel better about themselves.

It is difficult to know how she could have been more fawning in this particular episode, short of performing what the Daily Telegraph used to refer to as ‘an obscene act’ on the psychotic former spin doctor. Later, Campbell tweeted his agreement with the analysis that Young was a ‘brilliant’ interviewer. The aforementioned ‘honesty’ to which we were privileged consisted of Campbell admitting, quite openly and without caveat, that given his time working for Tony Blair again, he really wouldn’t do anything very different. Not the Iraq stuff, nope. Not lying to the press every day – although Kirsty did not actually suggest, at any point in this soft-focus smugfest, that Campbell may ever have lied to anyone about anything. Remarkable.

I listened to this broadcast shortly after reading through the Reform UK party manifesto, which includes a commitment to reform the ‘bloated BBC’. This is a policy with which I would be in full agreement if the reformation were to be carried out with an array of ice-picks, or perhaps a pistol in a basement as per Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. The corporation’s distance from the values of the people who pay for the licence fee is now measurable only in astronomical units and seen in red shift as it spins further and further beyond the reach of even the most powerful reflector telescopes.