Why didn’t more MPs complain about BBC bias?

There’s one thing that bothers me a lot about the letter sent by ‘more than 70’ MPs to the director-general of the BBC complaining about bias in its coverage of the Brexit debate. There are 650 MPs in the House of Commons, of whom 330 are Conservative. So does this mean that more than 570 of our elected representatives, including the vast majority of Tories, think the BBC is doing a bloody good job and is an exemplar of impartial reporting? If so, I suspect they have been secretly lobotomised — perhaps by members of the BBC’s impeccably fair and impartial editorial board. In the dead of night. Silently, without remorse. Chloroform, a hacksaw, a scalpel.

My guess is that the DG, Sir Tony Hall, will not give a monkey’s about the letter, for the reasons I’ve outlined above. But even if it had been signed by all 650 MPs, he would also be sanguine, hunkered down behind that familiar defence of: ‘If all sides think we’re biased then we must be getting it right’ — a self-justifying falsehood if ever there was one. We live in an age of fatuous petitions and round robins and most of these are best ignored. Especially those which come from a very small minority indeed of our politicians. Hall will probably dispatch some overpaid, half-witted, oleaginous middle-managing BBC gimp to placate the complainants while assuring them that they are wrong in every respect and that, within the BBC, everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. As it always is.

And yet the complainants are right, surely. Even the pre-referendum coverage, generally praised for its lack of bias, occasionally betrayed the BBC’s pro-EU mindset and its astonishment that anyone might contemplate voting Leave. After the referendum, Radio 4’s PM programme ran a regular feature called ‘Brexit Street’, in which a reporter was dispatched to sound utterly nonplussed by the troglodytic inhabitants of a road in Stockton-on-Tees that had been firmly for ‘out’.