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The pain of being a Tory at the Beeb

Former Today reporter Robin Aitken tells of a career spent battling the BBC’s pervasive left-wing mindset. "It was Lord Macpherson, in his inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder, who alerted us to the possibility that organisations can develop institutional deformations; in the case of the Metropolitan police it was racism. In the case of the BBC, by precise analogy, it is leftism.

"When I first joined the BBC in the 1970s I accepted all this as the natural order. In BBC Scotland where I worked in the 1980s there was a suffocating antiThatcher consensus. As it happened, I was the business and economics correspondent and I had become convinced that Thatcherite economics were necessary and actually worked.

"These heretical views were looked upon askance; most of my colleagues thought I was just winding them up. 'You don’t really believe that, do you?' they would sometimes ask plaintively. I nearly came to blows with one producer (who later rose to prominence at BBC Westminster) because he would not accept that Thatcherism was a legitimate political creed at all.

"The antiThatcher bias was sometimes jaw-dropping. In 1984 I returned to my office in Scotland having covered the Tory conference in Brighton at which the Grand hotel was bombed by the IRA. 'Pity they missed the bitch,' one of my colleagues commented...."

"In the late 1990s my colleagues had elected me to the BBC forum, designed to improve communication between management and staff. At one meeting in December 2000 I suggested to Greg Dyke, then the director-general, that there should be an internal inquiry into bias. Dyke, a Labour party donor and member, mumbled a muddled reply. As he left the meeting I overheard him demand of his PA: 'Who was that f*****?'"...

"Try making a reasoned argument against abortion, single parenthood or comprehensive education — or in favour of the Iraq war — at the BBC and see how much progress you make."

Full story at Sunday Times.