David Dimbleby turns out to be a bit of a closet republican

In Keep Talking, David Dimbleby takes us through a gentle romp of a stellar, unrivalled broadcasting career spanning, incredibly, 70 years. There are no great revelations (even the name of the BBC boss who tried to fire him from Question Time is withheld), no dramatic insights to make us rethink well-known events, no ponderous thoughts on broadcasting for media studies students to pore over (andthe book is all the better for that).

As the face of the BBC’s coverage of our most important national events over the decades, from general election nights to every major royal ceremony, Dimbleby has been authoritative, well-informed, impartial and appealing. These middling memoirs – more a light recounting of his career’s high (and some low) points than an exhaustive auto-biography – are all that, and more.

Just occasionally we get a glimpse of stocking, but it’s not exactly shocking. Looks like he’s more of the mainstream metropolitan centre-left than the moderate one-nation Tory many suspect him of being – which is hardly surprising, given that moderate metropolitan leftism is the guiding ethos of the BBC. It turns out, for example, he’s a fan of proportional representation (yawn) for all the reasons the Liberal Democrats have been churning out, to no great effect, for generations. He admits it would have destroyed the drama of his election shows (since it’s unlikely there would be an overnight result under PR), but, selflessly, thinks that a price worth paying so that more people’s votes would count. He does not deal with the downside: that PR can result in post-election brokering to form a government over which voters have no say, and whose outcome (as in several European democracies) is the deckchairs being rearranged with the same people still sitting in them.

More interesting, and perhaps surprising, is that Dimbleby is a bit of a closet republican, detesting the ‘bowing and the scraping’ and flummery surrounding royalty.