A last chance to save the BBC

Whoever becomes the next director-general of the BBC should take a close look at last week’s Question Time. It came from Liverpool, which is perhaps the most left-wing city in the country, Brighton excepted. On it, the actor Laurence Fox was making sensible comments about the Harry and Meghan business (which is beginning to bore me into a stupor), when he was upbraided by a third-division academic from a glorified teacher training college. This was Rachel Boyle, a ‘researcher on race and ethnicity’. She trotted out the familiar, learned-by-rote cliché that Fox was possessed of ‘white privilege’ and was therefore, by implication, disqualified to comment on the matter.

It’s what happened next that should register itself in the mind of whatever fragrant bien-pensant is hoisted into the saddle of this doomed behemoth. As soon as the ridiculous woman uttered the words ‘white privilege’ the entire audience let out a groan of ineffable weariness, as if the will to live had suddenly deserted them. And then they booed. This was in Liverpool, remember, a city often unkindly (and unfairly) characterised as a bastion of victimhood wallowing.

The point I would hope the new DG takes from this is that virtually nobody in the country buys into this egregious identitarian rubbish — beyond, that is, the BBC and the lower halls of academia. The largely white, middle-class producers and presenters of the corporation may be obsessed with identity politics and are able to spout all the fashionable shibboleths, but it has no purchase whatsoever beyond Kensal Rise. It is considered idiotic, banal and divisive even by a broad section of the left — which is beginning to realise that it is one important reason why they never win general elections. Almost nobody swallows this guff. It does not matter how many publicly funded bodies are bullied into acceding each and every demand from one or other victim group, it is still nowhere close to persuading the average voter — or licence fee payer — to clamber aboard the woke bandwagon.