Another enemy within: Thatcher (and Wilson) vs the BBC

In a ‘Dear Bill’ letter in Private Eye, an imaginary Denis Thatcher wrote off the BBC as a nest of ‘pinkoes and traitors’. That drollery points to the corporation’s paradoxical place in British life: an essential part of the establishment (‘Auntie’) yet sometimes its most daring critic, willing to put impartiality above patriotism. Jean Seaton makes one wonder at this impressive balancing act in a book that continues Asa Briggs’s magisterial history of the BBC up to 1987.

After the war many from newly liberated Europe thanked the BBC Overseas Service for keeping hope alive during the Occupation; this was reprised after the Berlin wall fell. Yet one British government after another from 1974 to 1987 attacked the BBC and the licensing system that guarantees its independence. A saga of excellence under siege.

Suspicion and threats came from both main parties. After plotting to abolish the licence fee, Harold Wilson moved the Beeb from the Post Office to the Home Office to keep it on a shorter leash. From 1976 — despite Cold War exigencies — Labour made the World Service renegotiate its funding year by debilitating year.

The Tories were even worse. Margaret Thatcher treated the BBC as yet another ‘enemy vested interest’, not wholly unlike the miners. Newscasters during the Falklands war spoke of ‘British’, rather than ‘our’ troops: well-established usage agreed during the second world war. But Thatcher ignorantly misread this as ‘rank treachery’. She threatened to replace the licensing fee with advertising revenue, turned down 27 invitations to appear on the Today programme, and sought Rupert Murdoch’s approval for her suggested new BBC chairman.

The BBC produced each hour of television more cheaply than any other European broadcaster and was leaching staff whose training it had financed to ITV.