I gave up on the BBC finally a couple of years ago after yet another betrayal of its standards about impartiality.
20 November 2025
It was the Beeb’s craven surrender to fashionable transmania that finally did for me.
I rang up the kind friend to whom I had given power of attorney if I lost my marbles and said: “I know I said I wanted Radio 4 as the default station of my final days. Scrub that. I want Times Radio.”
It had taken many years and great disillusionment to get to this stage after a lifetime of loyalty.
There were many trigger points that included biased coverage of Israel, blatant hostility to critics of the European Union and domination by the snobby, clever sillies that dominate its cultural elite.
Rod Liddle – once a senior BBC producer on the Today programme – recalls being summoned as early as 2002 by the director of editorial policy to discuss complaints from campaigners about its pro-Europe bias.
“You have to understand, Rod,” he explained, “that these people are all mad.”
And that’s still what most of those who take the decisions in the BBC think about any of their critics.
As I was growing up in Dublin, I had no access to TV and little to the radio. Our ancient set broke down frequently – thus depriving my father of classical music on the Third Programme.
But our household was dominated by reading and my mother didn’t get round to buying a TV until I had married in 1965 and left to set up home in England.
My husband and I gorged on TV – the news, the discussion programmes, the cricket, the brilliant comedy, the drama, and so much else.
We watched ITV as well, but we adored and trusted the BBC.
I loved the flinty standards of the institution. It cared, above all, about truth.
I have lived much of my professional life by the injunction from George Orwell in his preface to Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what do they do not wish to hear.”
I don’t see much point in journalism if we don’t do that.
You’ll see the quote by Orwell’s statue outside Broadcasting House in London.
The other week I read in full the leaked internal memorandum sent to the BBC board in 2025 by Michael Prescott, one of its former independent external advisers.
I recommend it to anyone who fears that the BBC may have been captured by dodgy pressure groups.
Read it and weep for the demise of a great national institution murdered by morons and its own self-regard (read it in full here)
It’s not just that someone disgracefully doctored a Trump speech to imply he incited the Capitol Riot.
It’s the pro-Palestinian bias that, for instance, twisted news stories and presented Hamas sympathisers as impartial reporters.
And Prescott’s evidence bore out the truth expressed last month by Helen Joyce, that brilliant campaigner for sanity on trans issues, that literally no man was deranged enough that the BBC baulked at his demand to be called a woman and she/her.
BBC self-delusion and censorship helped campaigners for the mutilation of children in the name of an ideology with no basis in science.
And that’s the truth.
