Why does the BBC so love lefty journalists?

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.