“Charlie Walsham” is the pseudonym of a BBC journalist who offers us rare glimpses of life inside the bubble-cum-echo-chamber for lefty elites that is the BBC. As you might expect, it’s a world very far from the one the rest of us inhabit, especially the long-suffering Brits who are forced to pay for its propaganda.
Like when drugged-up criminals are shot dead for trying to kill police officers when disturbed mid-robbery and the BBC journalists insist they wuz good boys ’n’ dindu nuffin’.
As I watched Tim Davie and Samir Shah’s all-staff call on Tuesday, I became increasingly bemused and frustrated. It was impossible to tell from watching that the BBC is facing one of the greatest crises in its history. The fact that the call was hosted by an in-house spin doctor set the tone for softball questions and unchallenged responses.
Despite quitting in disgrace over the impartiality row, Davie seemed remarkably buoyant, babbling a word-salad eulogy to the corporation he has steered to the very edge of a precipice. It was insufferable.
Even more astonishing is Davie’s insistence that the lyin’, defamin’ BBC is “the very best of what I think we should be as a society. And that, that will never change.” Well, the last sentence is probably true: it’s hard to imagine anything, short of wholesale bulldozing, which could prick the BBC’s intolerable shield of smug.
The people forced to pay for this sanctimonious bullshit might think very differently.
I call bull on this. I’m not the only licence fee payer who genuinely believes the BBC has harmed society in recent years by propagating one-sided narratives on serious issues. I fervently hope the wholesale changes required to undo the damage are only just beginning.
To borrow from Winston Churchill, though, they seem barely at the beginning of the beginning.
I was painfully aware, as I made my way to my desk, that many of my colleagues would not see things the same way. One intercepted me, pulling me aside and confiding their belief that it was all a witch-hunt. I listened uncomfortably, feeling a bit like one of the prisoners wrongly released by the government, expecting at any moment for someone to shout, ‘He’s here! He’s here! Grab him!’ […]
Even on this day of all days – the morning after the resignations the night before – the cock-ups continued. Turness’s statement to the press pack as she made her way into Broadcasting House was somehow broadcast on Sky News minutes before the BBC News Channel managed to air her words.
The curses of frustration and sighs of dejection at this gaffe gave way shortly afterwards to an eruption of noise from the floor above the main newsroom. Rather than being met with a chorus of boos for overseeing a series of calamitous editorial lapses, Turness was being applauded with North Korean-style sycophancy inside the newsroom.
This complete detachment from reality is par for the course at the BBC. Who else, after all, can sternly finger-wag about ‘disinformation’ at the same time as peddling the wildest conspiracies, to the effect that the BBC’s calamitous failure of standards was all part of a wicked plot by sinister outside forces.
You might have seen the 90-second film, narrated by Clive Myrie and played ad nauseam on BBC outlets, that highlights the corporation’s mission to fight disinformation and the dangers of ‘unleashed conspiracies’. Despite this warning, an outlandish conspiracy was unleashed on Radio 4’s Today programme when the former editor of the Sun, David Yelland, claimed Davie’s departure was a ‘victory for populists, for a cabal of toxic plotters with links to the BBC board – who designed and executed a coup.’
And no less a vaunted BBC veteran than the World Affairs editor, John Simpson, was peddling conspiracies too. ‘The BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack,’ he wrote on X on Sunday evening, linking to an article in the Guardian, naturally.
Some BBC insiders can actually see it. Writer Gareth Roberts, a long-time contributor to Doctor Who, points out:
The minds of too many BBC staffers ‘simply do not register as valid anything that does not tally with the progressive suite of opinions’, and as a result, ‘they really do believe they are impartial and above politics… and thus any criticism is malicious.’
The only class more out of touch with reality than the BBC are the political elite at Westminster.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy made a statement by the government this evening on the ongoing crisis, which is fortunate given the Starmer administration are known as bywords for probity, competence and even-handedness: ‘Same Teir for Everyone Keir’ as the PM is popularly known.
That, at least, is meant to be a joke. Nandy actually expect us to take this seriously:
The BBC, said Nandy, ‘stands apart’ when it comes to the quality of its news and is a ‘light on a hill in times of darkness’ […] She then made the insane claim that ‘high quality programming is essential to our democratic and cultural life’. I mean I like a costume drama as much as the next woman but the end of Lark Rise to Candleford wasn’t the Fall of Rome.
Yet Nandy was nowhere near the maddest person in the chamber. Sarah Owen gave a deranged conspiratorial rant that hit all the obvious boxes – this wasn’t actually about the BBC at all but about Donald Trump, GB News, the Russians, Farage and Robbie Gibb. None of it was related, none of it was joined up, none of it made any sense. I’ve said it before, if some of the rants which middle-class liberals get away with as ‘informed opinion’ were delivered by someone at a bus stop, the individual in question would be gently ushered into the care of a local mental health professional.
Or given a job at the BBC’s comedy department. They’d certainly be funnier than anything the Beeb has vomited out since The IT Crowd finished.
