My response to the appointment of Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian, to the editorship of BBC2’s Newsnight has been one of disbelief and amusement. Of course there’s nothing new in the Beeb hiring a paid-up Guardian-ista. It’s what we have come to expect. But one might have expected its new director-general, Tony Hall, to tread a little more carefully. Newsnight has a long history of Tory-bashing, and it disgraced itself last November with an orgy of false accusations against Alistair McAlpine, claiming without any evidence that he was a paedophile. Can one doubt that the programme threw caution to the wind at least in part because Lord McAlpine was once a friend and champion of Margaret Thatcher, and a hated Tory?
Lord Hall’s hiring of Mr Katz follows his recruitment of the former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell as the BBC’s ‘director of strategy and digital’ on a salary of £295,000 a year. Both are doubtless able men, and their appointments would be unobjectionable were there a level playing field. But there isn’t. We only have to ask ourselves whether we could imagine a former Tory cabinet minister becoming a very senior BBC executive, or a deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph becoming editor of Newsnight. Of course we couldn’t. The chairman of the BBC, Lord Patten, may once have served in a Conservative cabinet, but he is hardly a traditional Tory.
Mr Katz seems a pleasant chap, though some colleagues accuse him of arrogance. Until quite recently he was thought the most likely successor to the long-serving, and seemingly immovable, Alan Rusbridger as editor of the Guardian, but two female candidates have pulled ahead of him — hence his willingness to accept the lesser, though not contemptible, crown of editor of Newsnight.
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