Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The future of Today

Plus: the joy of hammering one’s children in a game of Risk and the sexual life of guillemots

I wonder what Sarah Sands will do to Radio 4’s Today programme? She is the first editor in more than 30 years to come from outside the BBC, having previously run Evgeny Lebedev’s London Evening Standard. One assumes, then, that the BBC feels that the old war horse needs a bit of shaking up, and perhaps a slight tilting on the political rudder. Sands is, almost uniquely for the boss class of the BBC, Conservative inclined, even if she was a Remainer and is of a somewhat liberal disposition. I was rather cheered by her appointment — and said so in print — as I think she is an excellent journalist. However, one former staffer, reading these comments of mine, remarked: ‘But isn’t she exactly the sort of London-centred metropolitan liberal you so despise?’ Ah well, maybe, but they were never going to give the job to Marine Le Pen, were they?

Being from outside the corporation is at least a start. Some of the failed candidates for the post rang me up for advice, which may well be why they failed. I said that the programme had to get to grips with the new political realities — as John Birt once pointed out, it took the BBC a very long time to understand that the majority of the country rather approved of Margaret Thatcher and did not want her to fall under a bus and die, as the BBC seemed to think at the time. So it would be nice if, right now, Today did not squeal like a transgressed kitten every time a populist politician hove into view.

Besides that, I also suggested that Today needed to be more journalistically acute and ‘set the agenda’ as it once did; get Andrew Neil in as a main presenter; become a little more mischievous and cut the length of those famous 8.10

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