Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The BBC is self-destructing

issue 15 July 2023

There are still 27 people left in the British Isles – at the time of writing – who are unaware of the name of the BBC presenter who allegedly paid a teenager lots of money to look at pictures of their bottom and so on. Some of them are on the remote windswept island of Foula, I believe. The rest are members of the chap’s family.

Its complaints procedure is not designed to discover the truth and adjudicate appropriately

I quite envy those who have not yet been told via that conduit for concentrated human misery, social media. There was a rather wonderful couple of days when the name was unknown and we had to guess, which was done, universally, with a sort of untrammelled, lascivious glee. ‘Please let it be…’ formed the preamble to every stab in the dark. I totted up the names of the (troubled? Vulnerable? Disgraced? Vile? Pick your favourite red-top epithet) presenters other people wanted it to be and while Rylan Clark and Graham Norton got the nod many times, Gary Lineker was way out in front.

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