I won’t be applying to be director-general of the BBC

Despite huge public pressure, I shall not be applying to be director-general of the BBC. It was kind of Tony Hall to stand down early, forgoing next year’s centenary plaudits, so that I could rise on the wave of post-Brexit fervour. But no: I am not a woman and have no plans to become one and, under the BBC’s diversity rules, uniformity of gender is required. If I did, per impossibile, get the job, I would ensure that Nick Robinson, who has such a feel for excluded northerners, would relocate to Manchester, thus counteracting the London bias of the political coverage, but even that would not be enough. The truth is that no director-general, not even the ticks-all-boxes Sharon White, can lead the BBC’s monopoly through to its second century. The technology no longer works; nor does the concept. Bureaucracy is the enemy of creativity. The BBC can only be a bureaucracy.

When my aunt Meriel was a devout little girl, she used to say that when the rector preached: ‘I keep my mind on higher things.’ In that spirit, I have ‘listened’ to Thought for the Day for 50 years, occasionally picking up some wisp of an idea, but usually just brushing my teeth. So it was with a real sense of shock this week that I heard the Revd Giles Fraser’s Thought. After praising online the late Roger Scruton’s love of wine, Mr Fraser said, he had received an anonymous gift of Chateau Trotanoy. He decided such a treasure should be shared, so it was Pomerol for his parishioners’ communion the following Sunday. The meditation was about what was and was not valuable about the wine, a Thought which got close to the heart of the eucharist. How did such a deep and specifically Christian Thought get past the programme’s editors?

Until recently, those expressing scepticism about climate-change catastrophe have been hauled over the coals (or the renewables equivalent) for not understanding the difference between ‘climate’ and ‘weather’.