Lisa Nandy was trying to help the corporation as though she were an outside consultant
“It is not for the Secretary of State to start writing editorial guidelines on the floor of the House of Commons.” Lisa Nandy was reaching the end of more than an hour of questions about what MPs were all agreed was the appalling, dreadful, monstrous behaviour of our national broadcaster. One could only wish that they were so quick to engage with errors of judgement made closer to home.
Quite what Nandy believes the role of the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport actually should be remains mysterious. For the year she’s been in the job, Nandy has maintained a level of silence more usually associated with taking holy orders. Her only contributions have been to declare that she wishes Britain’s media industry was less focused on London. If she’s not careful, she may get her wish, as it disappears from the capital and indeed everywhere else.
Even after watching Nandy speak for an hour it was hard to know what she thought about the BBC. “It is a light on a hill,” she said several times, but generally her statement was comfortable cliché: “It is a national institution that belongs to us all. Every day it tells the story of who we are.” She said she was trying to help the corporation work through its options in this time of trial, as though she were merely some outside consultant.
But beyond that? As MP after MP stood up to say how terrible the BBC was, Nandy more or less agreed with all of them. She increasingly resembled the kind of player in The Traitors who agrees with the last person who spoke. Those people, of course, often make it to the final rounds, and indeed Nandy surprised us all recently by keeping her job in the reshuffle.
Nigel Huddleston spoke for the Conservatives. He’d spent the morning urging the BBC to “grovel” to Donald Trump over the edition of Panorama that wickedly suggested the president might in some way have encouraged his supporters to assault the Capitol on January 6, 2021. It’s understandable, if wearying, that government ministers are reluctant to offend the angry toddler in the White House, but it’s baffling that Tories do it. Things that are popular in Britain include the BBC. Things that are unpopular include the Conservative Party and Donald Trump. If it were me, I’d be trying to ally myself with the generally-liked British thing, rather than the hated American thing.
Perhaps he’d figured this out himself, because by the evening he was simply suggesting a “fulsome” apology. “We all want the BBC to succeed,” he said, though it’s far from clear that everyone does.
Alec Shelbrooke, another Tory, fulminated. “The BBC faked a piece of news,” he said. “You can honestly say they faked the news.” How dare anyone suggest that Trump wanted people to storm the Capitol building? Imagine! Next thing, the BBC would be sharing a fake video of the president dumping excrement on the American people. Oh hang on, he did that himself.
On the Labour and Lib Dem benches, there were plenty of calls for Robbie Gibb, the former Conservative spokesman who now sits on the BBC board, to go. Nandy insisted this was beyond her powers. In any case Gibb is a man practised at adapting to new realities. He was once an advocate of Theresa May’s Brexit, and then became a fan of Boris Johnson. He’s got a few more twists left in him yet. Labour should offer him a peerage and see if that does the trick.
A lot of MPs had their own particular gripes, many of them not obviously connected to recent events. Oliver Dowden was sick of being preached at by dramas. Perhaps he struggles to follow the puzzles in Ludwig. Graham Stringer was furious about a documentary about his constituency that aired a decade ago. Jim Shannon was angry that the BBC was “biased against Brexit”, presumably because it continues to refuse to tell people about the 10 per cent year-on-year growth that Britain has enjoyed since leaving the EU, as well as the free BMWs that have been delivered to every household. Honestly, Jim, not even Nigel Farage thinks Brexit has worked.
Speaking of Farage, where was he? There are few issues closer to the Reform leader’s heart than attacking the BBC and defending the honour of Trump, but there was no sign of him, or anyone else from Reform. We briefly wondered if he’d got lost in the president’s colon, and the rest of them had formed a search party, but then we remembered that it was fast approaching time for his main job, his nightly £2,000-an-hour gig on GB News. You really can’t ask him to skip that to turn up and do something as badly paid as sitting in parliament.
There, by the way, is an issue that a Culture Secretary, if we had one, might want to take a look at: the existence of a “news” channel that seems to have been set up largely to fund and promote the politics of Farage. Nandy keeps muttering about this, but never does anything. She’s the Culture Secretary Who Wasn’t There.
