He dared speak the truth about the BBC

2 September 2006

The BBC had very few right-wing journalists when I joined it in 1989. It has scarcely more now. I have no objection to left-wing points of view and still consider myself of the Left, sort of; but it is that suffocating, moronic, politically-correct, anti-liberal leftism at the BBC which both revolted Michael and, in the end, did for him. The standpoint which insists not that alternative views may be mistaken, even though held in good faith, but are clearly, objectively wrong — no argument — and therefore cannot possibly be countenanced.

Michael rocked the boat, first and foremost, on Europe. He had this suspicion, back in the early 1990s, that the EU was heading towards a federal superstate, regardless of what the politicians might be telling us, and that monetary union and greater powers ceded to Brussels were per se a bad thing. Pretty much everyone believes this now — Vestey, and a handful of others within the BBC, were absolutely right. But at the time his view was regarded as quite outrageous, the snarling voice of the little-Englander, petty-minded, far right.

For eight years he worked as a reporter on the excellent but historically extremely left-of-centre late-evening current affairs programme, The World Tonight. In some senses it was a position to which he was ideally suited; The World Tonight at least allowed room for thought and discussion and was pitched well above mid-market. But when he told them he wished to go to Denmark to cover the vote on monetary union, he was predictably derided. Why would anybody be interested in a plebiscite in an obscure part of Scandinavia, especially when we know what the result is going to be? But Michael Vestey suspected that the rest of Europe did not necessarily share the BBC’s conviction that the EU was per se a good thing. He went — and scooped the corporation when the Danes did as he suspected they would and voted a resolute ‘No’. That Danish vote was, in a way, the first indication that the progression to a federal European superstate would be met with the opposition of ordinary voters. To an extent, it changed even the way the BBC reported Europe, although not quite as much as it should have done.

Michael left the BBC in 1996, a little dis-illusioned, a little bored and certainly weary. He wrote a humorous novel, which he published himself, that subjected the BBC — and his nemesis, the appalling John Birt — to a bloody good kicking. And he took up his duties at The Spectator, where each week he told us about radio, all the while enraging his former bosses with his clear understanding of why certain programmes were failures, a standpoint built upon his knowledge of the corporation and what went on within it. His was a voice which championed an old-fashioned view of journalism, of a trade which challenged the established shibboleths and did not much care whom it offended along the way. A voice replete with both intelligence and elegance.

He retains an awful lot of respect and affection among the workers at the BBC, those who knew him, and here at The Spectator. On a personal note, I wish I had known him better. But in the corporate centre at the BBC tonight, I don’t suppose they’ll be handing out the black armbands.

Michael Vestey’s last radio review, page 46.