When, exactly, did the term “national treasure” come to mean persons rather than things? In its bald sense it refers simply to the state finances: there is a government ministry called the Treasury, and it stands to reason that the Treasury controlled the “national treasure”. But Jane Austen’s ring has also been proclaimed a national treasure. The status can carry an official meaning: these items are deemed to be of such value that they are not to be removed from our soil. It is only natural now to stretch the term to any item, tangible or not, liable to kindle some feeling of patriotic warmth: if Austen’s ring can be called a national treasure, then why not each of her novels? From there, in turn, it’s only a small step towards asking: why not Austen herself?

To be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church, one first has to be dead. We used to hold our national treasures to a similar standard. In a speech of 1984, a close ally of Margaret Thatcher’s, Lord McAlpine, made the case for the rights of the living. “If we were in Japan,” he declared — a country famous for its culture of deference — “many of our artists would, even in their own lifetimes, be called living national treasures.” But, he lamented, in Britain we are “more timid about rushing to such judgments”.

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Lord McAlpine got his way in the end: that timidity no longer afflicts us. Our national treasures don’t need to be dead — though it helps if they aren’t far off. The 2000s and 2010s spawned an entire pantheon of “national treasures”, spurred on by the twee sentimentalism that suffused popular culture around that time. The gray and gritty Daniel Craig-era of James Bond gave us, as a sop, Dame Judi Dench; The Great British Bake-Off treated us to the whimsically innuendo-prone Mary Berry; the Harry Potter films brought international stardom to the wizened sages of the British stage. To console the nation through the drab stretches of lockdown, Captain Sir Tom was summoned back from our Finest Hour.

No one was safe. Not even Tony Benn — once described as the “most dangerous man in Britain” — could escape “national treasure” status when it called out to him in his final years. Benn still thought of himself still as a firebrand and chafed against it. “If I’m a national treasure in the Telegraph,” he said, “something’s gone wrong.” To be designated a national treasure, as Benn recognized, carries an air of condescension: it turns complex people into Paddington Bear. National treasures exist in order to give us nostalgic comfort: their task is to serve as “living links” with better times. Many other cultures have “community elders”: in Britain we like to think that they are under collective ownership. A national treasure is a public good. He or she belongs to us.

At the head of the pantheon, surpassing even the late Queen, Attenborough presides. In the run-up to his 100th birthday tomorrow, the homages have already been coming in thick and fast; there has been suggestion in parliament of building a “permanent public monument” in his honor. There is a sense, as there was with the late Queen, that the public needs to take a deep breath in preparation for the inevitable. In the first episode of the British SNL, Attenborough sits as Christ at a Last Supper of “history’s greatest Britons”. “I’m David Attenborough,” the sketch begins, “and it can’t be long now.”

Attenborough is the safe pick for those boring questions about whom you would invite to your dream dinner party; the people who give him as their answer are the equivalents of men who say Margot Robbie is their celebrity crush. Who ought to replace Churchill on the £5 note? Knowing now that they wouldn’t be allowed “Money McMoneyface”, the British public opts for Paddington Bear, the Sycamore Gap tree (†), or, of all the human options, Sir David Attenborough.

For his part, Attenborough is bemused by all the veneration. Asked on Desert Island Discs whether he feels any pressure being one of those “public figures with that rare unimpeachable quality”, he wittily retorts, “I’m very peachable, if people know how to peach”. It can seem at times that he alone has inherited all the positive feelings that once attached to his lifetime employer, the BBC. The BBC is still riding on the coattails of its mid-century highpoint, and Attenborough has helped to stretch it into the present. The mere existence of a state broadcaster is predicated on the notion that there remains such a thing as a coherent “national life”. David Attenborough is the old BBC made flesh — gentle, informative, and above all, unifying.

He is also a relic of a time which was at once comfy and exciting, when English boys in khaki shorts cycled around the countryside collecting ammonites and inspecting slow worms. He is an unmistakably conservative figure, conjured up from our mythical past. His Britain was an imperial Britain, in that Scouting for Boys kind of way; his BBC, likewise, was in its Reithian pomp, before the brand had been blighted by controversy and scandal. He is the last in Britain’s storied tradition of natural history, going back to Darwin; he is that familiar figure, the eccentric collector, driven through life by a childlike curiosity about the world. What people liked to say of his exact contemporary, the Queen — that she somehow embodied an entire chapter of British life — has always been much truer of him.

Attenborough sums up the trajectory and aspirations of Britain’s intellectual middle classes in the 20th century. His mother was a suffragette and campaigner for the rights and welfare of refugee children; they welcomed in two Jewish girls during War. His father went from being a Cambridge don to administering one of the newly sprung semi-universities, University College, Leicester. David, the middle son, continued his father’s project of democratizing education — bringing knowledge now not just to the provinces, but into the homes of ordinary people through the new medium of television. Attenborough embodies a certain reverence for television, and for the BBC, as a truly national institution, above all. As controller of BBC Two, he brought to the screens such milestones as Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. Remove all his nature programs, and he still would have made a profound imprint on British culture.

The BBC must be relieved that Attenborough tends to avoid sensitive subject-matter. The issue on which he is most outspoken, the environment, seems somehow to befit a national treasure: we British, after all, pride ourselves on our love of nature and animals. When Attenborough does wade in on such issues as immigration, as in 2016, he does not always toe the line: part of his success might owe to the fact that he is more aligned than other “national treasures” with the sentiments of the British public. But in all his career he has only ever had one small brush with controversy, and a rather minor one at that. It came in 2013, in an interview with the Telegraph. “What are all these famines in Ethiopia?”, he asked, “what are they about? They’re about too many people for too little land.” As such, it was “barmy” for the UN to send bags of flour as humanitarian aid: better to let them starve, to let the Malthusian process take its course. He knows that such a position can seem callous and unpopular. But overpopulation is, in his view, at the root of all the world’s problems, and so it is important to “just keep on about it”.

And so he has. A Life on Our Planet begins each part with statistics showing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the percentage of the planet still covered by wilderness — and then the total human population, as though this is also an obvious index of the brewing catastrophe. In 2018 he declared before the World Economic Forum that the planet “can’t cope” with overpopulation. The “cure” would either be meted out by nature, through famine or disease, or else we shall have to take matters into our own hands.

Attenborough is faithful to an old sort of environmentalism, the environmentalism of the late Paul Ehrlich. He shares it, in fact, with the Royal Family. Prince Philip infamously hoped to be reincarnated as a deadly virus, “to contribute something to the problem of overpopulation”. His son thought similarly. In 1970, Charles, freshly minted as Prince of Wales, delivered a speech in his principality concerning the environment. Fifty years later, in 2020, he reflected on it in a video posted to the official Royal Family YouTube channel. That video was intended as a kind of “I told you so”, a means of showing how much he had always been ahead of the curve. It is telling, though, what Charles chose not to revisit. In 1970, he had said “in many places the number of people is increasing faster than the resources of the local environment can cope”, and referred ominously to two possible solutions to the problem. “One is that nothing need be done about population because nature is bound to react by producing a particularly virulent plague or virus” — nature, here, is imagined as a particularly vindictive god. The other is that “something certainly needs to be done by man to prevent his overpopulation”. Such sentiments have been cautiously omitted from his more recent public musings.

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That entire line of thinking has gone out of fashion now. What, after all, can man do to prevent his overpopulation? One thinks immediately of Indira Gandhi’s vicious program of mass sterilization, or China’s disastrous one-child policy. The argument also, especially when departing royal mouths, has an unsettlingly aristocratic ring to it, as though one is speaking about culling deer on the Balmoral estate. Most importantly, though, it has simply been proved wrong by events. The extraordinary rise in the world population has not brought the catastrophe which Ehrlich confidently predicted. On the contrary: living standards across the world have improved. The problem facing us now, it is widely agreed — especially in the West, with our low fertility rates — is depopulation, not overpopulation. Even in poorer parts of the world, the size of the population is expected to plateau.

Still Attenborough cleaves to the old doctrine, if now he is careful to express himself in a circumspect manner. In his dotage, the BBC has done its best to massage his ideas about the environment, to try to co-opt them and tailor them to the fashionable green politics of the present. They play his earnest and long-held beliefs to their own advantage; it does not matter, in the end, that his environmentalism is of a fundamentally different nature from the kind that prevails among young people today. Before she embarked on her new life on the high seas, the BBC made a documentary about Greta Thunberg, A Year to Change the World. The crucial moment involves Thunberg meeting Attenborough. It is presented as the passing of a baton from the old to the young, a jedi training up his padawan. The set-piece also allowed the BBC to pat itself on the back — to claim, like the Royal Family, that on the hot-button and cutting-edge issue of the environment, they have always been one step ahead. Would Thunberg support withholding aid from starving populations, in order to let nature take its course? It strikes me as doubtful. But no matter. The point was to make Attenborough some kind of national prophet. It was to put him at the very center of Britain’s moral and national life, through all its fluctuations and upheavals. That might always have been too much weight for any mortal man to bear. And the BBC’s own claim to its centrality in British life, once unchallenged, now hangs by a thin, 100-year-old thread.

While not keen on any of the above, Jenni was a classical liberal, and wondered whether, after decades of feminism, women could now be sexually liberated. She was thinking of writing a book on the theme. “After all,” she said, “there’s even a lap dance club solely for women these days.” She meant a place called Caesars, which was a dive on Streatham High Road that gave over one night a month to a women’s night: “Lap-Attack”.

We agreed to visit Lap-Attack together. It was horrific. The male performers appeared exploited and unhappy, while the female punters were mostly blind drunk and trying their best to pretend they were having fun. In the toilets, I encountered a group of lively black women in their twenties. One of them asked me, “Is that Jenni Murray out there? She’s my heroine”. I told Jenni, who was thrilled at the idea that a working-class woman in a lap-dance club would love what she was doing.

Jenni and I, both working-class feminists, remained friends for the rest of her life. She was a titan, presenting Woman’s Hour until she was 70. She would have done it longer, I believe, had she not been dogged by critics who believed her to be “transphobic”. Her beloved BBC let her down, leading to her resignation. Now that Jenni has died, aged 75, the corporation is giving her the recognition she deserved as a broadcaster — but I remember her bravery, too.

On 20 January 2017, years after our trip to Caesars, I was walking from the Tube to march against Donald Trump’s presidency when my phone rang. It was Jenni. My first thought was that she was at the demonstration and wanted to meet up. But what she actually wanted was my advice. We had spoken only a few weeks earlier, after her interview with the trans activist India Willoughby. During the interview, Jenni had faced a barrage of hostile sexism from this man who claims to be female. It goes without saying that Jenni had handled the conversation extremely professionally — but she was aghast at some of the things Willoughby had said.

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“What would have been your reaction,” Jenni asked Willoughby, “to being required to shave your legs when you lived as a man?” she asked.

“What a bizarre question, Jenni. Why would I shave my legs when I was living as a man?” replied Willoughby.

Jenni then asked how Willoughby — as a newcomer to such trials of “womanhood” — felt about women being held to a higher standard than men. Willoughby snapped. “I’m not really sure what your stance is on trans. But it seems quite hostile, quite honestly.”

Dealing with such a response was well within Jenni’s everyday repertoire. I had been a guest on Woman’s Hour many times, almost always with Jenni at the helm, and she had rigorously challenged some of my opinions, as her job required. And of course, if it was a debate-type format, she did the same to my opponent.

Jenni had called because she felt she needed to speak out about the misogyny of trans ideology. Years ago, Jenni had been infuriated by the Rev Peter Stone, who had undergone surgery, was now known as Carol, and seemed concerned about little other than clothing. This was a caricature of womanhood from a man who was ignorant of centuries of feminist struggle. Willoughby had induced similar fury in Jenni — so much so that she felt she had to act. She said that while she had always instinctively known that trans culture was bad for women, she had been worried about stirring the hornets’ nest. She told me that she had decided to write a big piece for The Sunday Times Magazine, in which she would set out her stall.

“How bad is it going to be if I do that?” she asked. I told her that she should be prepared for the worst. The mother of all hostility would be coming down on her. There would be calls for her cancellation. But despite the warnings I’d given her, Jenni didn’t waver.

Her piece, “Be trans, be proud – but don’t call yourself a ‘real woman’” was published in March 2017. In it, she made it clear that her concern was to hold on to women’s hard-won rights, and not anti-trans prejudice. She wrote:

“I’m appalled at the repulsive misogyny evident in the response of trans activists who have accused Nimko Ali, a Somali and a courageous campaigner against female genital mutilation, of ‘practising white feminism’ or who have demanded the ‘no platforming’ (banning from speaking in public) of women, such as the lesbian feminist Julie Bindel, who have questioned the claims of trans women to be real women.”

As I feared, Jenni was subjected to endless abuse: not just scathing commentary in the press, but insults, calls for her sacking, and worse. She later recalled being issued “endless promises that I would be raped or murdered, leaving me genuinely worried for my safety. I had no assistance from the police — not that I asked for it, as I knew they would do nothing.”

What about the BBC, the institution to which Jenni had devoted decades? Rather than offer its unequivocal support, the corporation gave Jenni a warning, she said, and banned her from leading any Woman’s Hour discussion on the topic of transgenderism.

Throughout, Jenni remained an exceptional journalist. Her long-time producer, Innes Bowen, worked with Jenni between 1998 and 2002 and describes Jenni as “incredibly impressive with her open-mindedness about issues, and her genuine desire to explore all sides of any debate.

“She didn’t want the same old issues being presented time and time again, and if that’s what the producers came up with, she would say: ‘Sorry, we can’t do that. This is not balanced, or it’s not fair.’ She only threw her toys out of her pram about twice a year. Mainly, she was protecting us from our own stupidity.”

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Jenni would rail against a certain type of middle-class feminist who adopts whichever position they feel is going to give them the greatest social acceptability. She was not one of those women herself.

“She was genuinely a national treasure,” Bowen says. “Many ex-BBC people believe that they are, but really, they fade into obscurity once they leave their role. For Jenni, the phone never stopped ringing. She was in demand. The country did love her.”

I realized quite how traumatic the Willoughby episode had been for Jenni in 2021, at FiLiA, a grassroots feminist conference. Jenni had been invited to speak on the main stage. When asked about what happened after she wrote the piece for The Sunday Times, she gave a response that left many of us in tears.

She had presented Woman’s Hour for 33 years, she said. “I’d never been perceived as someone who couldn’t be trusted. And suddenly, I had a manager coming into my office saying, ‘Oh, God, Jenni. Have you seen all the shouting on Twitter? I don’t think we can let you discuss this question anymore’.

“Three years later, I decided to quit. I can’t do what I love if I am not being trusted. But I made that excuse: ‘I’ve done it for 33 years, I’m coming up to my 70th birthday, I need to do something different.’ That was bullshit. I did not want to leave Woman’s Hour; I absolutely loved it. But I couldn’t stay in that atmosphere.”

It seems that little has changed. Just this week, the BBC rejected all initial complaints about the decision by Woman’s Hour to interview Raewyn Connell, a man who says he’s a woman, about misogyny. Woman’s Hour barely lives up to its name these days.

In 2006, shortly after Jenni’s breast cancer diagnosis, I was asked by a newspaper how important a voice she was. My answer was that Jenni was irreplaceable. “I honestly think the show will die with her. She is an era — along with the program — and it can’t be reproduced.” It would appear I was right.

“Bob always took care of people who cooperated with him,” Screvane told Moses’s legendary biographer, Robert A. Caro. But only the people who cooperated, as Caro notes in his biography of Moses. “If you didn’t there would be no consulting jobs, no authority make-work, and you would find your pension was less than you had believed you were entitled to.” 

Not long ago, Caro turned 90. In a short recent book on his writing career, he reflected how he came to write his biography of Moses after realizing what he was doing as a journalist was “bullshit”. In contrast, people like Moses wielded powers of patronage that startled politicians like Screvane who stood to benefit from them. Caro recalled: “Here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he’s had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power.” 

The book that he eventually completed, The Power Broker, has passed into legend along with its author, becoming widely recognized as one of the greatest biographies ever written. It offers many lessons, from how a new road or housing development can generate blight in a neighborhood to how the Tammany Hall system of political corruption worked in New York. However, its main subject matter is how Moses effectively deployed a new, technocratic, form of corruption.

Most importantly for us perhaps, The Power Broker sheds light on how democracies are fragile and open to erosion and exploitation, casually handing away their crown jewels without realizing it — and with hardly anyone noticing. For the Britain of 2026, it helps clarify how a trusted and even loved institution like the BBC has lost its way, getting carried away on its own hubris and — crucially — remaining detached from public accountability thanks to the license fee. 

Moses’s hubris arose not just from natural arrogance but a deep well of achievement. He studied at Yales, Oxford and Columbia, where he wrote an admiring PhD on the British Civil Service, before he sought to apply his learnings to the state government of New York. His goal in this work, he explained in a later report, was “[to] press for progress toward responsive, responsible, efficient and democratic government in the state.”

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But he got to advance in his career only by accepting the compromises and accommodations of politics. As assistant to New York State Democratic governor Al Smith, Moses became an expert in drafting bills to conceal their real content. He got himself appointed to various independent Commissions and built parks, playgrounds, parkways (i.e. roads) and even beaches for families to flee to in the hot summer months. He built up a reputation as someone who Got Things Done — things which helped people. 

As Caro writes, the prevailing image of Moses in the pre-Second World War years “was of the totally unselfish and altruistic public servant who wanted nothing for himself but the chance to serve… The image was of the fearless independent above politics. The public believed authorities — entities outside the normal government setup, entities whose members were unsalaried and appointed to terms long enough in theory to ensure their independence from politicians — to be ‘nonpolitical.’”

This image helped Moses to get away with his greatest power grab. This was to turn the Triborough Bridge Authority, which built what is now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge linking the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, from an instrument of the city into an independent, permanent entity insulated from interference by city and state officials.

Using the drafting prowess he had obtained while working for Al Smith, Moses had concealed the power-grab in the financing documents of the bill that established the Authority. Once the bridge itself was complete (1936) and had paid off its bonds, its toll revenue flowed into the Authority’s coffers, rather than going to the city that had commissioned it.

With the end of the Second World War, the volume of car traffic soared. The Triborough Bridge went from carrying 11 million vehicles in 1941 to 23 million in 1949 and 46 million in 1960. Meanwhile, the Authority’s income from this and other infrastructure swelled from $8 million in 1941 to $26 million in 1951, $37million in 1960 and $75 million in 1967. The money allowed Moses to attract extra financing through bond issues, giving him an extra  $750 million to spend on public works in New York City in the 15 years after the Second World War. All this money also allowed him to grease the wheels of New York politics whenever resistance arose to his projects from citizens and their representatives. 

The Triborough Bridge Authority acquired some of the powers of a sovereign state, including the power of eminent domain, permitting the seizure of private property. The bill Moses drafted gave it power not just over bridges and their approaches but roads, streets, and parkways connecting with those approaches. And so Moses started hacking through highly populated areas of the city to build expressways to connect to his bridges. One of the most stunning chapters in The Power Broker, “One Mile”, details the consequences of this in a one-mile stretch of the Bronx where a community was torn apart and destroyed.

Altogether, around half a million city residents were forced to leave their homes to make way for Moses’s projects. He built 627 miles of major road infrastructure and much more besides. The justification he used for his road-building was that it would reduce traffic congestion on existing thoroughfares. But his projects only ended up creating more traffic. Within a few years of them being built, the new roads were as congested as those they were meant to relieve. Meanwhile, the New York City Subway’s infrastructure was decaying. Moses successfully blocked any new track being laid.

“In road-building in and around New York, he had a dictator’s powers,” Caro writes. “And he used them. He enjoyed using them — for using them gave him what was his greatest pleasure: the imposition of his will on other people.” But all along, Moses maintained that he was not political, that he was the antithesis of the politician and never let political considerations influence his projects. Compromise was what politicians did, he said. He saw himself as above politics: concerned with right and wrong, where he was right and anyone who objected was wrong. 

Of course, these ideas of “independence”, of “independent expertise” and being “above politics” retain a powerful currency today. Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestine Territories, describes herself as a “UN Independent Expert”, despite her evident sympathy towards Palestine. In Britain, whole swathes of government functions are farmed out to supposedly independent bodies. One of the most high-profile is The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which provides authoritative and easily-available predictions which, in practice, work to heap pressure on the government of the day. Never mind that those predictions have proved consistently wrong.

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But perhaps the most egregious examples appear in the non-economic sphere; see the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which sometimes appears vulnerable to activist exploitation. There is a distinct tendency for “quangos” to start acting like mini, alternative governments. This tendency is exacerbated when the quango is expected to have an impact, not just in its own particular areas of concern but on society as a whole. Arts Council England (ACE), for example, has broadened its remit from funding artistic work to supporting “creative practitioners” which it describes as “an umbrella term for all those who work to create new, or reshape existing, cultural content.” This has pulled in all sorts of groups and people who would not previously benefit from arts funding, including a BAME-only organization called Rising Arts Agency, which plastered the billboards of Bristol in 2020 with messaging including “The blood is on your hands” repeated three times accompanied with the message: “So, Mr White Man… What are your plans?” As the ACE chief executive Darren Henley has said, “Together, let’s create better lives.”

However, perhaps the best match to Moses in Britain, in terms of scope, style and impact, is the BBC. It is a carved-out part of the British state, but with independent income. In this respect, the license fee mirrors the tolls Moses collected from users of his bridges and tunnels — tolls that were almost compulsory for those living in the suburbs. Like Moses, with his manic road- and bridge-building, the BBC has magnified itself over time, intruding into ever more areas of life with a proliferation of channels, platforms and activities, while giving us news high on interpretation and promotion — from Israel-Gaza to Trump, the latest celebrity clickbait and puff pieces on drag queens. Moreover, the corporation’s ability to do this without advertising or charging extra has deterred any competitors, similar to how Moses deterred competition from railroad and subway.

Like Moses, the BBC has exploited its previous reputation as a trustworthy, broadly impartial and high-quality broadcaster to push in the opposite direction. Its commitment to “due impartiality” has become heavy on what it has thought is “due” and lighter on “impartiality”. If Donald Trump is a bad man, so the logic runs, then it is appropriate to emphasize that rather than report accurately on his ongoing activities. The approach could cost the BBC dearly, with a vengeful Trump suing it for $10 billion in a Florida court over Panorama doctoring his January 6 speech — a case that has already led to the resignations of both the Director-General and Head of News.

In truth, the very idea of being independent of politics, or “anti-” or “above” politics, is another kind of politics. The activists who heap pressure institutions like the Beeb, from inside and outside, have a point. All are sites of power; and the BBC is no exception. Politicians from Ed Davey to Harriet Harman want the BBC to be a bulwark against right-wing populism, but in doing so they point to how this idea goes wrong. They treat the BBC as an arbiter, promoting what is right — basically liberal-left progressivism — rather than serving in a more modest fashion as a reporter, mediator and facilitator for discussion. Theirs is the logic of the dictatorship rather than democracy, of Pravda against the old BBC. If a national broadcaster becomes a voice for some, in opposition to others, it does not deserve to survive while taking the money of both groups.

William Exton, a reformer and critic of Moses’ West Side Improvement project, told Caro: “His only reply to everything we had proposed was an ad hominem attack on us, and it was all a lie, a goddamed lie.” Cut to the reactions of BBC supporters to its present crisis and you hear talk of “right-wing” conspiracies and even “coups”, of nefarious “political” forces that are trying to destroy the noble Corporation. These could come straight out of a Moses playbook; except that Moses used accusations of Communism.

Moses ultimately fell victim to a ruse of the kind that got him his power in the first place. He was eased out of Triborough by New York Mayor John D. Rockefeller while he wasn’t paying attention. It may be that this sort of ruse, of an intensely political kind, is the only way the BBC can be reformed and restored to anything like the entity that built its reputation. Maybe the insiders and outriders are right. Maybe the leaking of the Prescott memo was a political act. And maybe it will prove to be the beginning of the end of an activist BBC, provoking a return to the rigor, trustworthiness and restraint that made the BBC worth exploiting in the first place.

But, like the formidable Robert Moses, the Corporation shows few signs of turning and few signs of regret.

The new series of The Traitors has done something similar, but — spoiler alert — the producers have put a mischievous Welsh lady called Fiona in the Jesus position. On Wednesday night, the bubbly sexagenarian was revealed to her fellow traitors as the “secret traitor”: the person who had been pulling their strings for several episodes previously.

Out of all the contestants, she alone had known the identities of both traitors and faithfuls from the start. In this role, she had been anonymously producing a shortlist of murder victims for her three becloaked minions to choose from each week — much to the latter’s resentment at the time. “I am so annoyed about this … I do not require middle management,” complained self-styled “psychopathic teddy bear”, barrister Hugo, shortly before Fiona planted some well-timed seeds of doubt about him in the back of a car.

Presumably, Hugo and his fellow traitors were unsettled by the revelation of a secret traitor amongst contestants partly because — as so often for harassed middle managers, getting it from both ends — the goals associated with this new leadership role were very unclear. Were they to be helped or hindered? For Hugo at least, the answer would prove a negative one. But the presence of an uber-traitor also meant that the other traitors no longer counted as the apex knowers in the game: a fact which automatically made them far less effective at their job.

In previous series, existing baddies could be confident they knew the player identities of everyone else — all faithful — and could plan their chicanery accordingly. But with the new announcement, suddenly nothing was certain. Even the most unlikely suspects — manic James with his wild scattergun theories, or Amanda the worryingly overconfident ex-copper, apparently obsessed with pinning the blame on innocent Jade — might secretly turn out to be a criminal mastermind after all. So when the secret traitor’s existence was announced, but not her name, those in the tower immediately became much more like the faithfuls outside of it. Under those monk’s cowls, heads that had previously contained confident declarative sentences were now overwhelmed with tentative hypotheticals.

In past seasons, traitors have held nearly all the knowledge cards and so have had nearly all of the fun. Much less enticing has been the hapless lot of faithful know-nothings, wandering about aimlessly waiting to be picked off. This is presumably why, in early interviews with Claudia this time around, nearly every contestant was desperately twirling an invisible sinister mustache, covertly auditioning for the more attractive role. (A sample statement from Sam, an account manager from North Yorkshire, apparently unconcerned about meeting work colleagues later: “I’m a fantastic liar to people who don’t know me. I will throw whoever under the bus to make sure I win.”)

Granted, occasionally there have been odd things that particular faithfuls have known in the game that traitors didn’t — usually, about family relationships, like that of mother and daughter contestants Judy and Roxy, revealed early on this season. But even then, the rules of the game do not permit these private facts to pass into what Steven Pinker has called “common knowledge”: things that other faithfuls in the game know too, and know that you know, and you know that they know that you know, and so on. For that reason, they aren’t particularly useful for the group.

Sometimes, as Pinker also relates, a social convention develops that certain pieces of common knowledge may not be mentioned in polite society: for instance, that cameras are in the room with Traitors contestants, or that Claudia’s foundation makes her look like she has jaundice. But for our purposes, the more interesting point is that there is precious little reliable and relevant common information shared amongst faithfuls — and also now amongst traitors, given the new format — yet its presence is essential to good interpretation and effective strategizing.

For if you are unsure, both about what other players believe and what they believe that you believe (and so on), then you can’t make accurate predictions about their likely actions, nor even properly understand the actions that you witness. Human behavior is not just a collection of self-evident facial and bodily movements, accompanied by sounds; it depends on a background mental context to give it meaningful shape. To take just one example: when Jade took off her blindfold after traitor selection, Amanda became convinced that she looked “shifty” as a result of having just been tapped on the shoulder by Claudia, while Jade insisted (correctly, as it happened) that she had simply felt anxious and hot.

This scarcity of common beliefs amongst faithfuls, in particular, means that the game they are officially supposed to be playing is not the one they are playing at all. On paper, as a faithful you are supposed to be trying to work with others, identifying traitors and voting them out. In practice, for most of the episodes you haven’t a hope in hell of doing this. Every spoken utterance, gesture, movement of every fellow player, no matter how bizarre, is equally compatible with theories of guilt and innocence. A pompous speech about a murdered contestant at the breakfast table could be evidence of noble intent (see Kas, series three); or of fiendish malevolence (see Hugo, series four.) And your fellow players are likely to fumble any real intelligence you pass on to them anyway, since they have no idea whether to trust you. In the absence of jointly available firm evidence, radical mistrust disrupts the laborious process of getting several people on the same epistemic page at once.

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A faithful’s real job for most of the game is to avoid arousing suspicions that will lead either to their personal banishment or murder. At the same time, it is in their interests to get rid of any fellow contestants that aren’t serving them in some way, whether these be traitors or otherwise. For another piece of common knowledge too impolite to mention out loud is that fellow faithfuls are your direct competitors too.

The best way to achieve these things is to appear brainless and easily swayed by the herd: to get behind whatever convenient theory some fellow player has just spouted, and look convincingly stupid in repeating it. (This, essentially, was the key to Kate Garraway’s longevity in Celebrity Traitors last year, though it was unclear whether this was by design.) To such ends, players need to make the most of what Pinker calls “focal points”: points of salience judged likely to loom large enough in the consciousness of fellow players, around which some kind of maneuver can be attempted.

For instance: key to the traitorous Hugo’s demise in episode three was a roundtable moment when Harriet, herself secretly a former barrister, confidently aired a theory. Had Hugo really been a faithful, she suggested, he would surely have been murdered already, because barristers are commonly perceived as very clever. Since he hadn’t, in fact, been murdered, he must surely be a traitor.

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This is an extremely slim evidential reed upon which to hang someone, possibly saying more about Harriet’s regard for her former profession than any grasp of the facts. Still, along with a bit of odd behavior at breakfast, it was enough to empower a majority of contestants to vote Hugo out. Here, thanks to the focal point of his supposedly intimidating employment status, faithfuls’ beliefs about other people’s beliefs were able to work together for once. For Harriet’s theory to be taken up by fellow players, no particular player had to find Hugo threateningly clever in person — which is probably just as well, since he manifestly wasn’t. It was sufficient for faithfuls to believe that other people — namely, traitors — would have believed him to be threateningly clever, had he been a faithful and not one of their own. And if faithfuls couldn’t even muster that last belief sincerely, they could at least believe that nobody else would notice they were only pretending to have it.

Perhaps there are some life lessons from The Traitors here, though not the banalities we often read about “building trust” or “effective teamwork”. Such deathly boring activities are intentionally absent from the format, and otherwise it wouldn’t be half as much fun to watch. Instead, the main thing to be learned about reality from The Traitors — apart that is, from finding out about the terrifyingly fixed ideas of detective inspectors — comes via the negative comparison. Unless the circumstances are highly contrived, beliefs about other people’s beliefs about our own beliefs are usually nested in our minds like Russian dolls, and we usefully call upon them all the time to accurately interpret the social world.

Yet equally, on those occasions when you don’t really know what another person believes — including what they believe about what others believe, or even about what others believe that they believe — then you cannot reliably tell what it is that they are doing or saying, even as you watch their faces and bodies move or hear certain words. It’s almost as if there was a message here about overconfident interpretations of strangers we already suspect to be malicious or badly-intentioned; or even of those we assume must be benevolent and friendly. I myself refrain from applying this point to the current news cycle, for I believe that you are already aware of some of its possible applications — and I trust that you can bring them to mind if you try. Sometimes a kiss is a signal to passing Romans, and a terrible betrayal. And sometimes, a kiss is just a kiss.

Swift was, no doubt, inspired by his native Ireland, until now the historical benchmark for poor British governance mismanaging a nation under its purview, and inspiring spasms of inchoate anger among its benighted people that led eventually to revolution. Yet the portrait of a distant governing class obsessed with extracting solar energy from cucumbers as the cities they rule fall into squalid ruination, trying and failing to make reality conform to their ideal theories, is an uncomfortably apposite one for the British mainland today. British politics now looks less like the collapse of a party than of an entire regime.

If Keir Starmer did not exist, the governing caste he represents would have had to invent him. Indeed, so rigid and robotic are Starmer’s certainties, so unwilling to face reality and so strangely devoid of interior life is he, that we half-suspect they did: the Prime Minister seems less a person than a tulpa collectively dreamed up by this class at its moment of terminal trial. An idealist of a failed Utopia, a technocrat who cannot govern, a manager who cannot control the underlings who despise him, his failings are those of his caste as a whole; he is, it increasingly seems, the final incarnation of the old regime. Over just the past couple of years, the British electorate has eviscerated both parties of its two-party democracy: historic landslides have immediately crumbled into electoral extinction, rendering power illusory and the country ungovernable. Five prime ministers in a decade have tried and failed to impose some order to the chaos. And what is surely now the most revolutionary electorate in the Western world is drumming yet another leader to the scaffold.

It is useless, in these circumstances, for Starmer to remind his rebellious party that he won power barely a year ago with a landslide mandate; that he is, as his allies desperately brief the press, just one of two living persons to have ever won an election for Labour. Starmer’s devious and sharp-elbowed internal climb to power, then, reveals him as probably the most competent and successful politician that the modern Labour movement can produce. That he is already so weak, so luckless and so widely despised highlights the essential problem neither he nor any Labour successor can overcome: he is the incarnation not so much of a party as of an entire cohort about to be swept from the stage.

In a democracy — we are told often enough, anyway — governments win and hold power by giving voters what they want. Yet British democracy works in quite other ways: those who hold power are fearful of what the voters want, repelled by it on moral grounds, and instead see their role, like a stern Victorian nanny, as forcing down the bitter and improving medicine it is their duty to administer to its ungrateful charge. That the voters may grumble, sulk and spit it out is all, for them, an expected part of the process. The very existence of British democracy is, we may say, a testable proposition: in its greatest test so far, the Brexit referendum, our governing caste entirely failed. Viewing the result as a tantrum to be ridden out, rather than a demand for total reform, every element of our governing caste congealed together in a single mass to frustrate and subvert the vote. Brexit’s winning voters were, they told themselves, merely deluded and misinformed.

There is a pleasing synchrony, then, in the collapse of the Starmer project, and of the BBC’s latest and perhaps last great scandal: they are both, after all, the death pangs of an elite that has lost its legitimacy. When we see the BBC’s defenders mobilizing, like worker ants scurrying to defend their threatened queen, we see revealed an entire class struggling to maintain its grasp on power. The narrow sweep of those who, in declaring the BBC’s non-partisan nature, reveal how precisely partisan the organization has become, underlines the scale of the problem. From the Sixties onwards, through to winning power in the Nineties, a set of ideological assumptions became dominant within the Westminster State and its class allies in what we euphemistically term “the professions”. The BBC transmits the worldview of this class, whether those who pay for it wish to watch it or not. Gleefully adopting a role as combaters of “disinformation” — that is to say, opinions conflicting with this worldview — the Corporation has veered ever more tightly to its own narrowing set of approved beliefs.

As its latest scandal shows, what is objectively true is now of less importance to the BBC’s tastemakers than what ought to be true, or simply feels true to them. From history documentaries to morning pabulum to the tired, court satire of Have I Got News For You, whose doddering panelists still trot out flaccid jibes at their caste enemies, it is now impossible to watch the BBC’s content without wading through its intrusive ideology at every step. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”, Keats wrote: yet having long foregone any pretensions to artistry, all that is left of the BBC’s output is the designs its makers wish to impose on those who fund them. Like the rest of their caste, in Westminster or in Whitehall, within the BBC’s management there is not the slightest hint of self-doubt or wavering, even out of self-preservation, in the face of the nation’s growing contempt.

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How to revive mythic Britain

By Aris Roussinos

This caste, when expressing the righteousness of its beliefs, likes to think of itself as the Sensible Ones, setting itself against the base enthusiasms of the British public. We may instead call them, as the ancient Greeks euphemistically did the Furies, the Kindly Ones. For the early results of their imposed ideological project are in, and their punishing regime of self-regarding kindliness has brought both daily horrors and petty humiliations into the routine of British life. Indeed, the collapse in wealth, liberty, public safety and basic capacity to govern that has so rapidly ensued is so dramatic that Britain has become, to America’s reigning Right, the whipping boy for an entire failed ideology — the cautionary Ruritanian end state, as Hungary once was to its liberals, of the opposing domestic faction’s worldview. From the American government’s perspective, a narrow ideological and cultural class has seized control of the entire British state, and the mismanagement that has ensued may yet be fatal. With all the unsentimental precision of an imperial bureaucrat taking stock of a failing colony, it is a more accurate assessment than anything in lobby commentary.

That Reform will come to power now seems increasingly certain. That the party is capable of governing Britain now — or that anyone can — is doubtful in the extreme. For Reform to win power, it must transition into a middle-class as well as working-class party, a process that is already well under way. After all, the Epping homeowners protesting migrant accommodation beneath their sea of flags are surely a more affluent demographic than the average Leftist wavering between the Greens and Your Party. Yet as Starmer’s fate reveals, winning power is not the same thing, in modern Britain, as wielding it. Reform’s ability to actually govern rests on either inspiring mass defections among the current professional class, or in the total personnel renewal of the entire British state. The BBC’s fate, under the incoming regime, will serve as a useful benchmark for their progress: does Reform intend to disestablish the Corporation, and all the other lavishly funded, senile and corrupted monasteries of the British state, or does it wish to reshape it in its own image? Will the crisis of the British state be resolved by the renewal of its failing institutions, or in starting afresh?

Yet unseating, or replacing, an entrenched and unelected shadow state, firmly convinced of its moral right to eternal rule, is not a simple task. Let us imagine that, in assuming power, Reform were to embark upon a great rolling series of referendums on the questions dividing the nation from its rulers: on immigration, on crime and punishment, on the headlong rush to Net Zero. Would the governing class, spread across all its perches in the British state, accept the likely results, or would it seek to frustrate and undermine them? Would the democratically expressed will of the British people be respected, whatever the nation decides, or would it be delegitimized as the populism of the base urges, with the establishment’s role being to protect the British people from their own desires? We already know the answer.

British politics now resembles, rather than a crown in the gutter, an ancient sword of great power asking to be drawn from its calcified and rusting matrix, with the current establishment preferring instability and collapse than deigning to touch it. As long as their grasp on power lies beyond the reach of British democracy, the worst is yet to come. Just like Swift’s Laputans, “instead of being discouraged” by their failure, those who rule us “are Fifty Times more violently bent upon prosecuting their Schemes, driven equally on by Hope and Despair”. The nation has not yet escaped Laputa’s burdensome shadow. If the failure of the Starmer project was an inevitability, the failure of Farage’s last-ditch attempt at reform presents a far more worrying prospect.

This is not the BBC of today. Pleading for its very existence, the Corporation now plies TikTok and Facebook with behind-the-scenes-style ads to industriously promote arms such as BBC Verify. In one example — a hot mess of jump cuts and zooms to prod drooling scrollers awake — a young reporter holds up the kind of mic used by two-bit beauty influencers and gets real with us: “I know there’s a lot of mistrust in the news.” She tells us how “we piece together clues and get to the truth… examining videos frame by frame and even zooming in from space with satellite images”. A real humdinger, then, that this crack team of digital detectives didn’t catch the 50-minute splice in a video of Trump which has, just weeks after these ads went online, tanked the organization’s credibility.

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My Corbynista shame

By Poppy Sowerby

By now we are familiar with the facts. The 19-page death note from adviser Michael Prescott had raised existential concerns about not only the Capitol calamity but hopelessly biased reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict by BBC Arabic: journalists who called for Israelis to have their “throats cut” or to shoot and burn Jews “as Hitler did” had appeared on the channel hundreds of times.

But nowhere has the public’s delicate contract with our state broadcaster been so relentlessly tested as in its coverage of gender identity. At the best of times, the BBC website is an obsessive compendium of drag queens. Take, for example, a round-up of top Wearside and County Durham stories from last month, which included “Family of murdered toddler plead for law change”. But heading the page is not the two-year-old Maya Chappell but the 27-year-old “Sally TM” from South Shields, who “slays” in a bodice and tutu in the colors of the Tyne and Wear Metro. This corker was not the result of a single push, but rather 1,000 nudges — misguided appointments, blinkered inclusivity training and, most of all, the privileging of what Prescott called a “small group of staff promoting the Stonewall view”.

It is these young ideologues who have fed the rot of the BBC’s queasy cultural revolution. These are politically intolerant grads who have somehow picked up the idea that the reporting of straight news by a state broadcaster must in itself work towards what they perceive to be “good”. One envisions them commanding standing desks at Broadcasting House in Lucy and Yak dungarees, spending many days and taxpayer pounds on the noble task of reporting Boomer colleagues to “People Services” for misgendering Sock at the front desk. Their laptops and lapels are festooned with stickers and pins which cry “Allyship is a verb”; “Nevertheless, she persisted”. And she does persist, in pestering bosses to pillory sex-realist colleagues like Martine Croxall for a roll of the eyes, in polluting work WhatsApp groups with tripe like “Shouldn’t trans women qualify for maternity leave though?”, and in being so aggressively “nice” about what she perceives as a marginalized cohort that she cocks up the fundamental accuracy of her own newsroom.

The deranged, flailing tail is wagging an old slumbering dog. This is how we ended up with seasoned reporters cowed into using the preferred pronouns of sex offenders so as not to upset non-binary striplings fresh out of Bristol Uni. Many managerial Boomers reared on Reithian principles are, in the words of one insider invective, “too cowardly to stand up to the DEI hires, woke warriors and sectarian antisemites on the staff”. And it can only result in repeated embarrassments.

Last month, before the latest debacle, the BBC falsely accused Euan Blair’s company Multiverse of nabbing a contract to roll out digital IDs (a policy long lobbied for by his father) in a script for Have I Got News for You. The production company’s founder Jimmy Mulville blamed “generations of younger producers who are coming into the business, and they are digital natives… they’re marinated in social media”. So marinated, it seems, that they take everything on there at face value. These bright-eyed dullards found the story on a freelancer’s X page and reported it — ventriloquized by the presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell — without any other verification. That this is the same cohort aggressively promoting a political agenda alien to the people the Corporation serves is no coincidence. Despite Monday’s spluttering protestations by the chairman Samir Shah on the Today programme, the problem does indeed seem to be cultural. Is it such a leap to imagine that the BBC’s hiring practices might be to blame, guidelines which see off wrongthink before staff even sign a contract? These guidelines oblige recruiters to quiz candidates on “what diversity and inclusion means to you” and explicitly bar those with “lack of interest in learning more where no evidence of education and understanding of [DEI] was given”. Diversity is our strength — except diversity of thought. Any sign of that and you’re sent packing off to GBeebies with the other cretins.

And so critics — cynically painted this week as the hostile Right-wing press — are left asking: who on earth is the BBC for? Despite constant advertisements reassuring us that the Corporation is “for everyone”, they cannot possibly mean the general public, whose skepticism about transgender rights, for instance, has ballooned since 2022. They cannot mean the dwindling segment of that public that still faithfully listens to its generally excellent radio output, or watches its terrestrial television — that is, the older generations rubbing their necks from the past decade of doctrinal whiplash. And they certainly can’t mean those who tune in to The Archers, baffled by a buffet of open relationships and Christian characters inexplicably fasting for Ramadan. There is still great love for the BBC, but an organization that sees itself as reaching down to re-educate those with low-status beliefs from some progressive pulpit, the gleaming God to the British public’s decrepit, smelly Adam, does not deserve to last long.

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Nor will it. Expecting a public whose views are so baldly despised by activist producers to cough up for a license fee is a tough sell: at its heart, the BBC scandal is fatal precisely because we all pay for it. There is much to salvage in this cherished institution, much to protect. But choppy waters are ahead, and continued poor stewardship might just see the unthinkable — that “Sailing By” will play for one last time, diminished to a lovely dirge for a BBC dashed on the rocks by its own mariners.

To many Right-wingers, including Trump himself, the edit was propaganda designed to portray him as a riot-inciting demagogue. To Trump haters, even if it’s not an accurate representation of what he said in that particular speech it’s a fair distillation of Trumpishness, and as such true in spirit. So who is right? It’s not even a debate about the facts, but about what the facts mean.

And this is precisely the larger issue at stake for the BBC, too: not so much whether, or in which direction, the BBC is “biased”, but whether we still have any faith in the possibility of neutral, authoritative arbiters of information as such. And if the answer is “no”, what does the future look like for our supposedly neutral and impartial national broadcaster?

The fallout from the leaked dossier which drew attention to the clip, along with evidence of other editorial bias at the BBC, has triggered the resignation of the Director-General, Tim Davie along with the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Furness. It has even drawn comment from the White House, with Trump threatening legal action against the corporation and his press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling it a “propaganda machine”.

Supporters of the BBC allege that the dossier is in fact a nefarious Right-wing plot to destroy the institution. Conversely, those same Right-wingers might retort that the fact these insinuations are mostly published by The Guardian supports the suspicion that the Beeb may only appear “neutral” to people whose idea of sensible centrism is Polly Toynbee. This aside, I think it’s fair to say there is an unmistakable progressive tilt to the issues listed in the dossier, and the imputation of Left-wing bias is not totally baseless. But the problem goes deeper than bias in one direction. It is structural.

If the BBC is struggling today, it’s because, for a growing number of political issues, there is no “neutral”. All three of the dossier’s flashpoints — Trump, Gaza and gender ideology — have this quality. Trump is an archetypal case, and nowhere more divisively than in how you interpret the events that occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. For one camp, this was a peaceful turnout by patriots in defense of an election they believed stolen; to the other, it was an attempted insurrection. There’s no way both interpretations can be true.

The same goes for the conflict in Gaza, which – depending on your worldview – is either justified retaliation for an unprovoked act of mass terrorism, or genocide thinly legitimized by the actions of freedom fighters. Again, there’s no way both of these things can be true. The trans issue has the same Rorschach quality: either a person’s sex is determined by what they are, or it’s determined by what they say they are. They can’t both be true, and there’s no “both sides” compromise.

This isn’t happening because there’s something uniquely polarizing about contemporary politics. The decisive change is the internet. Avant-garde commentators such as Clay Shirky were predicting back in the 2000s that people could use the internet to do away with institutional gatekeepers, unleashing a new era of popular democracy and cultural dynamism. And this did sort of happen, but not quite in the way the utopians anticipated.

The BBC is (or was) a paradigmatic example of this kind of gatekeeper. It has always been both in the business of representing what’s out there, and also of seeking to shape it. From its foundation, its remit was always patrician: to “inform, educate, and entertain”, including through the provision of (aspirationally) impartial news. Karoline Leavitt was perhaps not wholly off-piste: a pithier term for a state-owned, taxpayer-funded media giant with this improving remit might well be “propaganda machine”, for all that (as for example during the Second World War) this duty has generally been discharged in cooperation with the British people. Especially after the war, the BBC came to occupy a role contiguous with the Church of England: as diffident but still mostly trustworthy repository and delivery-mechanism for such collective morals as post-imperial Britain was able still to agree on.

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Tony Blair’s Strava governance

By Mary Harrington

Even if the rise of commercial radio and TV dented the BBC’s crown, it still stayed more or less in place — until the internet. Now, though, everything is different. The internet poses an existential threat not just to the BBC as a body, but more fundamentally to the worldview within which having a national broadcaster makes sense at all.

For one thing, internet politics has stripped geography from political debate, which is now divided much more by language than geography. This means Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia, and other Anglophone communities worldwide all inhabit functionally the same public square. How, in this context, should a national broadcaster judge what counts as national news? But more important still, the internet has done as Shirky promised and “disintermediated” journalism. That is: it’s significantly reduced the power of institutional gatekeepers.

The result has been cultural dynamism, after a fashion. But it’s also revealed that the post-structuralists were actually right about “truth” being to some extent an effect of institutional power. That is: when you don’t have a powerful single arbiter of The Narrative, what you end up with may not necessarily be more truth. You might just get a Babel of competing narratives. And like market traders hawking their wares on a busy square, the incentive structures of such an information economy tend to reward the loudest voices and simplest, most vivid offers.

Lest anyone be tempted to comfort themselves with the idea that this is only a problem for “low-information voters”, think again: what the philosopher Dan Williams calls “elite misinformation” is just as rampant, and studies have shown education level to have no effect on how susceptible people are to misinformation. By way of illustration, we need only remember the bizarre assertions that came and went, week by week, during Covid-19, while at every stage the chattering classes enjoined us to “follow the science”.

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Indeed it was Covid-19 that provided the inflection point in this trajectory, for the simple reason that lockdowns forced everyone online. If it feels since then that the world has gone mad, it’s not that social isolation sent us crazy. It’s that the internet ate reality. In the resulting cacophony, everyone now assembles themselves a bespoke version of reality, from a near-infinite supply of media channels, podcasts, influencers, and the like.

And because humans are mimetic — that is, we decide what we want based on what those around us want — these realities have begun to agglomerate in affinity groups. In turn, these clusters have begun to define themselves in opposition to one another, and to mount information-war maneuvers against one another. One notable result of these skirmishes, for example, is the progressive capture of Wikipedia, which was founded as a neutral, crowdsourced online encyclopedia but has become bitterly politicized.

This dissolution of “truth” into tribal trench warfare is now the basic structure of what we used to call “the public conversation”. Huge amounts of money, status, and political influence are already at stake in this new environment; one the BBC, which was designed as a one-to-many vehicle for transmitting respectable establishment consensus, is hopelessly ill-equipped to navigate. For as in each of the flashpoint issues in the Prescott dossier, what’s at stake is often not the facts, so much as what the facts mean. And, for a national broadcaster tasked with impartial reporting, this presents an often impossible dilemma. There’s often no way to report on an issue this bitterly contested without effectively picking a “side”, which is to say an interpretation of those facts, even if only in choosing what to omit. For example (according to Prescott’s dossier) the BBC’s transgender reporting routinely centered trans experience, but omitted the voices of detransitioners.

But what is the BBC to do? The internet replaced one-to-many with many-to-many communication, and institutional gatekeepers with platform plutocrats. Now Auntie is just one voice in an increasingly noisy attention economy, and everyone just dismisses competing interpretations as lies and propaganda. The Panorama furor itself is already grist to the same disorienting mill: former Sky political editor Adam Boulton said of the edited clip that at worst the BBC was guilty of “sharp practice”, and in any case it was justified because the edit was morally accurate even if it was factually misleading. So much so, in fact, that it was “fake news to suggest Donald Trump did not egg on what happened on 6 January”. For his part, Trump’s press secretary has now declared the entire BBC to be “fake news”.

There is, in other words, nowhere to stand that isn’t someone else’s fake news. Pity the poor Beeb: when you can now search up 10 conspiratorial interpretations of every factual report, from every conceivable angle, in the time it takes to boil the kettle, how long is anyone going to go on believing in impartiality as such? You can be sure that any effort to “correct” the perceived existing Left-liberal BBC bias would simply elicit fresh accusations of “fake news” and “bias” from somewhere else. Under the circumstances, I don’t entirely blame the Director General, Tim Davie, for throwing in the towel.

More than one thing can be true simultaneously. It is surely true that many will be delighted by the opportunity these events have afforded, to put the boot into the BBC. It’s surely also true that the institution’s well-documented middle-class staffing skew exposes its employees to the blind spots and groupthink of that social milieu, and that this is often visible in editorial decisions. But it’s also true that comparatively speaking, the BBC is fighting a heroic last stand for neutrality, against perhaps insuperable has arguably already held out longer than any of its commercial counterparts, and indeed such utopian digital enterprises as Wikipedia.

As well as noting its lapses into bias, then, we might also acknowledge how very much worse this already is, almost everywhere else. But this is faint praise. “It’s not as woke as Wikipedia” may not be enough to save the BBC, as an institution, from the sucking void of Choose Your Own Reality. If it isn’t, then flawed and middle-class and sometimes irritatingly sanctimonious as it is, I suspect we will all come to regret its passing.

This is not a coincidence, or bad luck, or the work of the Corporation’s enemies. Rather, it is the clearest possible evidence that there is something rotten in the very core of the organization. Davies says he’s going to hang on to ensure a smooth succession; someone else will have to rescue an Auntie in distress. But unless there is now root-and-branch reform at the Corporation, it is difficult to see how this damaging cycle of failure can be broken.

The dossier that triggered Davie’s resignation, along with that of Deborah Turness, BBC News’s chief executive, was put together by Michael Prescott for the Editorial Standards and Guidelines Committee. Prescott was an independent advisor to the committee; he resigned earlier this year after presenting his damning evidence of journalistic malfeasance.

As the BBC never tires of telling us, it is devoted entirely to truth-telling, even setting up a special unit — BBC Verify — to establish the veracity of claims. Prescott’s dossier mocks those pretensions, showing the BBC to be a whited sepulchre: proclaiming its virtue while churning out propaganda. A more thoroughgoing betrayal of the BBC’s journalistic credo would be hard to imagine.

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Given all this, Tim Davie’s resignation was probably inevitable. After days of silence, he was at some point going to have to break cover and explain himself. But in light of Prescott’s dossier, his position was indefensible. How, after all, can you defend your organization when it’s been caught out so badly? The doctoring of quotes, which Panorama was revealed to have done to Donald Trump, was exactly the kind of thing that was routine in the Soviet Union; every honest BBC journalist (and there are plenty) should feel soiled by association with that kind of technique.

Even so, Davie and Turness might have survived had they acted quickly. Both of them, along with some other senior figures, had been in possession of the facts since May. Why was no action taken? Prescott himself says that when he presented his evidence he was met with defensive indifference. Presumably they hoped and believed his dossier would never see the light of day. When, last week, it did, in the pages of The Daily Telegraph, the BBC’s response was calamitously stupid. Its first comment was “we do not comment on leaks”; can you imagine what the BBC’s response would be if a government tried that line out? However, when Trump himself stepped into the fray, there was surely no alternative: Davie had to go.

There will be no shortage of applicants to replace him — leading the BBC is one of the glittering prizes in British public life — but no one will succeed in the job unless there is radical change. This crisis should be viewed as an opportunity to put things right. Now is the moment to begin a long-overdue process of reform. Firstly, the Corporation must come clean about the problem it faces; it cannot go on repeating, ad nauseam, that “we are independent, impartial and truthful” — how can we believe them? In 2007, I wrote Can We Trust the BBC?, based on my 25 years as a BBC reporter. My answer then, as it is now, is that you cannot trust the BBC to be impartial because it is staffed, overwhelmingly, by young-ish people who are liberal-Left in outlook. They are highly educated, and many are hyper-political and hyper-sensitive, quite happy to activate complaints on the basis of micro-aggressions, trigger warnings and cultural appropriation.

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The BBC has nothing to Bragg about

By Giles Fraser

The new DG (very possibly a woman) will get nowhere with reform until that bias in BBC newsrooms is admitted. If this first, difficult step is taken, then the hard work can start. Proper reform must overcome the BBC’s extreme reluctance to submit to outside scrutiny; it is very jealous of its prerogatives. A common feature of all the recent scandals is that they have all been handled internally. Complaints from outsiders go through a bureaucratic grinder, complainants rarely get satisfaction, and most find the process utterly frustrating. Dismantling this mechanism and letting outsiders sit in judgment would go some way to restoring trust.

When there are major journalistic lapses, meanwhile, it would be much better if a panel of tough, independent people — preferably a mix of journalists, lay people and perhaps a lawyer or two — got to assess the evidence. If there has been wrongdoing, it would be admitted quickly and openly, and those responsible would be disciplined, or indeed sacked in the most serious instances. If such a process had been employed in response to the Prescott dossier, the BBC would now be in a very different place.

Then there is the question of recruitment. The Corporation’s newsrooms are largely Left-liberal mono-cultures. “Impartiality”, if it can ever be achieved, will certainly never be realized in an organization where there is no proper diversity of opinion — or at the very least an open-minded curiosity, rather than suffocating group-think. This needs to be addressed.

None of this is easy, and the steps I suggest would meet fierce and determined resistance. That resistance is already in full voice, as Today program presenter Nick Robinson encouraged another BBC presenter, David Yelland, to hammer home the message that Davie’s resignation was evidence of a “coup” at the BBC, and that sinister Right-wing forces were meddling in Corporation matters. Mark Damazer, a former controller of Radio Four, was also wheeled out to tell us that the BBC is staffed by journalistic paragons who, day-in-day-out, reflect the world with pristine impartiality. This first reaction to Davie’s resignation is discouraging: once again the BBC is rejecting, even in the face of hard evidence, that it has any problem with impartiality. Instead, it attacks its critics.

The latest irritating BBC promo — the one that bigs-up the bravery and resourcefulness of its journalists — contains the line, “This is our BBC”. I think this is meant to sound inclusive. But it sounds more like the BBC is saying it belongs to its staff: which is exactly the nub of the problem. To succeed, rather, the BBC needs to think and sound more like the country it serves, not like the progressive bully-pulpit it has become. And if this opportunity for meaningful reform is ignored once again, the 18th Director-General risks being the last.

A million viewers would tune in to watch Bryan Magee deep in conversation with a different distinguished philosopher each week. The two would be perched at opposite ends of a beige leatherette sofa, furrowing their brows over such matters as “the Frankfurt school” or “logical positivism and its legacy”. Magee’s idea of diversity was inviting Iris Murdoch to be an honorary man of ideas for one episode. No quarter was given to short attention spans either: ADHD was apparently not a big thing in the Seventies. Anyone in search of visual excitement had to make do with the sight of Charles Taylor’s blue velour suit, Noam Chomsky’s expansive hand gestures, or the elegant way A.J. Ayer puffed on his fag.

In 1987, and by then no longer an MP, Magee made another series: The Great Philosophers. This week it became available to watch on BBC4 and iPlayer. Magee’s specs have grown comically large and Ayer seems to have given up smoking, but otherwise the series format is similar to that of a decade earlier. Contemporary luminaries of Anglo-American philosophy are each given an intellectual titan or two as their specialist subject; and so we get Anthony Kenny on medieval philosophy, Hubert Dreyfus on Husserl and Heidegger, and Ayer on Frege and Russell, for instance.

With Magee’s skillful promptings, the viewer is treated to a fascinating tour of the cathedral of information nestling within each guest’s mind. Arguments and theories are treated not as historical curiosities but as live cognitive possibilities, and are taken very seriously. In an abstract world, the tense is always the present, even when you are talking about concepts from the past.

My favorite episodes from The Great Philosophers involve, respectively, Aristotle as illuminated by Martha Nussbaum — the only female guest in the series — and Bernard Williams on Descartes. Nussbaum’s mannered, queenly delivery and vice-like grasp of her subject matter is exactly what you might expect from a person who once revealed that she didn’t listen to music when she went running, preferring to memorize an opera score from start to finish, then mentally rehearse it as she jogged along. In her episode, she also spends quite some time distinguishing between “wearing brown” as a contingent property of Magee, and “being human” as a necessary one.

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Williams, meanwhile, is a picture of relaxation in corduroy. Eyes crinkling and a smile perpetually hovering on his lips, the urbane Essex native and former RAF pilot is clearly having a whale of a time explaining the Cartesian method of doubt, why wax doesn’t lose its identity even when melted, and why the soul absolutely does not interact with the body through the pineal gland. As an undergraduate a few years after this was filmed, I would sometimes go to hear Williams give lectures on similar themes. Entranced, I’d watch as he would pace about the room, stare at the ground, or look out through the diamond leaded windows behind him, all the while uttering complicated sentences fluently without any notes. Rarely having done the reading beforehand, I had only the scarcest idea what he was on about, but the towering intellect and huge charisma were perfectly obvious.

Nussbaum apparently also found Williams mesmerizing. When he died in 2003, she wrote a lengthy, emotional tribute in the Boston Review. In this extraordinary piece, she confesses feelings of admiration and love for her former teacher, but of rivalrous anger too. She remembers the first time she ever heard him lecture: “It will tell you a great deal about that moment that I remember both his dark green sports jacket and precisely what I myself was wearing: a pink minidress from Bergdorf Goodman and black fishnet stockings.” She also says that their friendship eventually became strained due to his developing interest in “Nietzschean anti-rationalism and pessimism”, and her inability to hold back criticism because of it. Another thing that appears to make her angry is remembering once going running in “orange running shorts with a pink top”, then being told afterwards by Williams, who had seen her in motion, that “the primary qualities were acceptable, but the secondary qualities rather off”. To this, she complains that “women live in objectification the way fish live in water” — a point which seems slightly disingenuous, given all that previous sartorial detail.

Williams died in 2003, far too early; but at least he missed the vituperative hellhole the philosophy profession would become a decade later. Cheered on by a pitiless online mob, harsh, career-wrecking punishments were meted out for what had been treated as mild and forgivable infractions only a few years before. A question, already artlessly foreshadowed in Nussbaum’s memorial for Williams, became prominent for many women philosophers in the 2010s: is my fellow male philosopher my colleague, friend, lover, or deadly enemy? Several prominent thinkers discovered the narrative could switch from one answer to another overnight; and that if it did, the world you thought you knew would melt around you like Descartes’ wax.

One famous case involved John Searle, author of the famous “Chinese room” test for machine consciousness. Searle can also be seen in The Great Philosophers, talking with lucid brilliance about Wittgenstein. Thirty years later, he would be presented with a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment at Berkeley, where he had taught for most of his life. A petition, signed by thousands of alumnae, would see him stripped of his emeritus professor status. He died last month in a care home. According to a former colleague, Searle “never recovered” from the reputational loss.

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In this respect then, The Great Philosophers puts us in mind of a simpler, more innocent time. We are invited not just to thrill at the originality and ingenuity of giants in the history of philosophy, but also to admire the improbably gifted, marvelously eccentric people on screen talking about them. What these people get up to in their personal lives is irrelevant; indeed, as one watches one can barely imagine them having any personal lives at all. And as we enjoy them showing off their prodigious discursive talents, we are also invited to try to understand complicated abstract ideas — for no useful or self-interested reason, but simply as a valuable goal in itself.

All of this is very old-fashioned, and not just because nobody has the requisite powers of concentration anymore. The concept of a “great philosopher” has been suspect for years, a bit too male and hierarchical for comfort. These days, it always has to come with lots of caveats. In the short film which accompanied the broadcasting of The Great Philosophers on BBC4 this week, public philosopher Professor Angie Hobbs rushes depressingly quickly to the cliché that, as young female philosopher watching the show in the Eighties, “it was really important for me to see a woman on that sofa”. She also tries to justify the value of philosophy in the present day in instrumental terms, claiming that it helps people discern “the fake news and the conspiracy theories and the snake oil merchants out there”. This is a point I’m surprised any member of the philosophy profession can make with a straight face, given ongoing mass delusions therein.

But the truth is that the vast majority of the millions of viewers enthusiastically watching Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers in the Seventies and Eighties were not at university, and had no desire whatsoever to be professional philosophers themselves. Fretting over equality issues, worrying about the latent prejudice of Thomas Aquinas or David Hume, or selfishly looking for inspiring “representation” was very far down the list of their priorities. And nor were they watching in order to improve their falsehood detection skills in ordinary life. Their aim was just to understand these enjoyable, fascinating, unusual ideas, as articulated by these enjoyable, fascinating, unusual people — for no motive other than sheer curiosity. I hear that corduroy is coming back into fashion. Perhaps we might also allow philosophers to be unreservedly great again too.

At its best, which is often, it’s like eavesdropping on an idealized high table at Oxford, where the mathematician explains to the geographer the basic outlines of string theory. Here, Bragg is a master, constantly deploying that most valuable of radio virtues: curiosity. And when professor so-and-so drops into frustratingly academic equivocation, Bragg is there to return things to the big picture. Without being argumentative or patronizing, he takes the ordinary listener on a journey of discovery into worlds too often confined to upper reaches of the Bodleian Library.

In that, he has been the perfect expression Reith, and his unashamedly moral mission for the BBC. “And they pray that good seed sown may bring forth good harvest,” as a 1931 Latin inscription in Old Broadcasting House proclaims, ”and that the people inclining their ear to whatsoever things are lovely and honest, whatsoever things are of good report, may tread the path of virtue and wisdom.” Over at BBC television, certainly, the seed increasingly seems cast onto shallow ground. It’s hard to see Reith in Mrs Brown’s Boys.

Why does television fail where radio can succeed? No, not just because the pictures are better. But because it can be on whilst you are doing other things – the washing up, the ironing, driving – in a way that the television cannot. And it’s more intimate, a part of the general hubbub of the house. I probably would not deliberately tune into a program about Xenaphon, but catching it unexpectedly, it can be just magical. That’s the joy of radio.

Yet amid the grim fare offered by TV, Radio 4 sticks close to the original purpose of the BBC. Today, the glorious Shipping Forecast, Front Row, Moral Maze (I would say that) the new Whats up Docs, they are great radio. More to the point, and despite those who predict or actively seek its demise, Radio 4 remains the nation’s most popular non-music network, with well over nine million dedicated listeners. And it is growing: notwithstanding explosive competition, Radio 4 enjoyed 2% growth over Q2 2025.

There is an interesting compare and contrast here with another semi-nationalized industry that claims a nationwide moral mission: the Church of England. Both have an audience that averages in the mid-50s; both are (too) middle class; and both have an understandable obsession with reaching a younger crowd. But this is a tricky balancing act, because many of the things that are perceived to work for a younger audience may alienate a more mature crowd. And without the mature crowd, both Radio 4 and the C of E are doomed.

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What Radio 4 has learned, and what In Our Time exemplifies, is that punters, whatever their age, are eager for high-brow content. In 2023, Bragg’s program enjoyed two million live listeners, while In Our Time remains one of the BBC’s most-downloaded weekly podcasts. Nor is it alone. Call Her Daddy, for instance, has an average audience of 10 million. OK, it’s got its raunchy side, but also proper interviews with psychologists, psychotherapists, and then Vice President Kamala Harris. This is not down-with-the-kids patronizing nonsense. Rather, it suggests the attention economy is changing. “Big social is dead. X a cesspit. Facebook has been taken over by boomers,” generation historian Eliza Filby explains to me. “Gen Z want something different. Smaller communities. Belonging. They are not put off by more demanding content but they also want their say.”

The challenge for Reithianism, and for C of E, is to be less top down — but not less challenging. If In Our Time is to live up to its name, it will have to factor in this new mood. Bragg was old school, and it worked, both on its own terms and in how it inspired others. You cannot imagine something like The Rest is History without In Our Time. Neither the growing popularity of academic posts that style themselves “the public understanding of”.

Who can replace Bragg? Tempting as it is to think that the answer to every one of the BBC’s new presenter challenges is Amol Rajan, he can only do so much. How about Mary Beard, she’d be great. With a younger crowd in mind, the new-look In Our Time will perhaps need to find a way to be a little less Olympian, more open to challenge, somehow more interactive, without losing that sense that, when it comes to Plutarch or Rosa Luxemburg, there are such things as experts, and they have something to teach us. Whoever succeeds Bragg will need to have his natural curiosity. And perhaps, if I am being hyper-critical, a little less of the grandee. And I do sometimes wish the guests were challenged more. But these are niggles.

In an age where cheap populism is still too often the lazy default option — in broadcasting as well as politics — being a bridge between the academy and the public realm has never been so critical. The Latin inscription in Old Broadcasting House takes its inspiration from the Parable of the Sower in the Gospels. The farmer sows his seed, some of it on stony ground where there is no depth of soil. Here the seed sprouts quickly, and grows impressively fast, but soon it withers and dies because of the shallowness of the soil. Those who chase only ratings and bums on seats in churches may be tempted by this quick return, but it doesn’t last. Bragg has presented well over 1,000 episodes of real depth, surprising many of us that we have a hunger for this kind of seriousness. It was only intended to be a six-month run. Long may it continue.

Back then, in the early Seventies, both the school and Briggs himself comfily inhabited parallel worlds. The school bussed suburban kids from semis in Finchley or Edgware to its rolling acres (much used for TV shoots) not far from the Elstree Studios. As for Briggs, the great popular historian and tireless educational entrepreneur trailed a discreetly glorious military past as a backroom war winner. A code-breaker in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, he had become the youngest warrant officer in the British army and once held (improbably enough) the rank of Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM). When, in 1945, the fellows of Worcester College, Oxford learned that their incoming young colleague was an RSM, some feared a roaring moustachioed martinet. What they got was a short, rather tubby and affable Yorkshireman.

Briggs, and a handful of other figures of his kind, loomed over my youth like secular divinities. Thanks to him and his influence, in the sixth form I scrutinized the prospectus for Sussex as if studying a tourist guide to Shangri-La. Although other, equally glamorous, citadels of the “plateglass” sector that Briggs championed appealed almost as much (York! Kent! East Anglia!), my teachers put an end to such fancies and sent me briskly down the “ancient university” track. I still have twinges of regret about missing Sussex and its boundary busting, interdisciplinary studies in its almost-prime — although, with 20 applicants then vying for each arts place, it might well have found me wanting. Those pangs hint at the charismatic spell that Briggs and his ideas, for a while, could cast.

At that time, Asa Briggs from Keighley, via Bletchley Park, Oxford and Leeds Universities, embodied the postwar Great and Good with a bumptious confidence and charm. Historian David Cannadine called him “the Macaulay of the Welfare State” and Tristram Hunt (now director of the V&A) “the last great Victorian improver”. Around the time that he descended on my school to bless a parade of boy soldiers, he was not just running Sussex and juggling (as usual) half a dozen books. He had recently chaired the Briggs Committee on nursing and midwifery. Enacted from 1979, its proposals transformed nursing education more thoroughly than any changes since the age of Florence Nightingale.

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Committed to Sussex, he was batting away juicily prestigious job offers — Oxbridge college headships, an assistant directorship at UNESCO in Paris (Richard Hoggart, fêted author of The Uses of Literacy, got that), the inaugural direction of the European University Institute in Florence — as lesser mortals swot flies. Meanwhile, the BBC not only paid him a hefty annual stipend to trudge through his multi-volume History of Broadcasting in Britain (five parts, 1961-1995) but funded an entire research unit to support it. He wielded, it seemed, an almost-occult power not only to refresh the past — in widely-read and enjoyed books such as The Age of Improvement, Victorian Cities and Victorian People — but to reform the present. No wonder the slightly rotund scholarship boy from the West Riding inspired not simply respect but a kind of awe. Even Iris Murdoch had once fallen in love with Briggs. “You rational romantic,” the novelist purred. “Without your cool head nearby, how can I see the world properly?”

An entire generation, or two, came to feel that way. Adam Sisman’s new biography, The Indefatigable Asa Briggs, has a title that makes him sound like a Victorian battleship (how apt!) but otherwise supplies a full, fair, if kind, account of life and work. Sisman, whose past subjects include John le Carré and AJP Taylor, rightly dubs him a “progressive modernizer”. Ennobled in 1976 (along with his friend Benjamin Britten), he sat as a crossbencher; it was thought that the avid firstclass seminar goer and lecture giver should have taken the title “Lord Briggs of Heathrow”. In a confidential testimonial, an Oxford friend once wrote that “He is not at all a dottily radical figure but he does believe in a fair society”. But his moderately left-of-center stance never stopped him from fronting a cross-party post-1945 program of educational and cultural expansion built on the solid rocks of full employment and the welfare state. Those rocks began to erode in the Seventies, and with it the world that Asa and his bustling fellow improvers made. In a 1985 assessment, written in the heyday of Thatcherism, Cannadine noted that “the march of events has transformed Briggs from being a conformist into being a dissenter”.

In the Eighties, after he had returned to Worcester as Provost (he retired in 1991), Briggs had added to his bulging portfolio of trusteeships a post as chair of the Church of England’s Advisory Committee on Redundant Churches. By that point, he looked in danger of becoming a Redundant Church himself: his congregation dwindling, his monuments in disrepair. The meritocratic liberal mandarin class he embodied had run out of road, and of puff. The consensus they had nurtured — a conviction that high tax revenues should fund both robust public services and ever wider opportunities for the next generation — frayed or crumbled. Their national story of social and cultural uplift for the many (but not that many, by 21st-century standards) now faced challenge by critics who saw it as a sentimental fable to mask long-term economic stasis. Noel Annan — a far more patrician figure than Briggs, but one who shared the Yorkshireman’s institutional values and skills — rounds off his terrific 1990 elegy for this generation, Our Age, with a plaintive chapter entitled “Our vision of life rejected”. A whole generation further on, Sisman’s life of Briggs lets us see whether that rejection actually happened — and whether it would have been correct.

I had expected Sisman to confirm a familiar narrative: that the more-or-less centrist, “Butskellite”, overlords of the postwar welfare-and-education state found themselves humbled by Thatcherites and free-marketeers, red in tooth and claw. To a degree, that did occur. By 1992, even ever-supportive Auntie BBC — with John Birt its cost-cutting director-general — had shut down Briggs’s research office. When he had published a digested single-volume history of the Corporation, alpha columnist Peter Jay mocked its author in The Times as “the Venerable Briggs”, “meticulous, uncritical, unilluminating, shy of issues, and immensely boring”. The times, and The Times, had changed. But Sisman shows as well that Briggs and his critics in the final decades of the 20th century had more in common than they often suspected. In 1990, Annan could see only rupture and rejection. In 2025, the “liberal elite” of the time and their conservative detractors look more like fractious cousins than warring tribes.

Nothing illuminates this kinship better than the extraordinary history of Briggs’s six decades of association with Rupert Murdoch. With Briggs a junior history don at Worcester, and Murdoch the low achieving undergraduate son of an Australian newspaper boss, the pair and other friends drove around Turkey in 1951 in Murdoch’s new Ford Zephyr. Briggs then coached Murdoch so that the Australian scraped a Third, after his father’s sudden death had wrenched him from his studies. Thus a “permanent bond” formed. After all, the lad from Keighley Trades and Grammar School had no more time for upper-crust “snobbery and condescension” than the upstart Antipodean.

The pair kept loyally in touch: Murdoch came to Briggs’s landmark parties, and flew in for his memorial service in 2016. Amazingly, for those who like to picture British society in comforting binary diagrams, Murdoch actually negotiated his purchase of the News of the World — his crucial breakthrough into UK newspaper ownership — while staying with Asa and Susan Briggs in Lewes. The current proprietor lived nearby. Briggs’s daughter, Katharine, started to worry about the phone bill the wannabe tycoon was running up. Within months, Murdoch had added The Sun to his nascent empire. Historians with a taste for hyperbole might argue that the foremost intellectual advocate of the postwar progressive state had nurtured its principal mass-media gravedigger.

But then Briggs, like many of his coevals, pursued reform more as a spirit than a doctrine. That spirit certainly never ruled out commercial ambition. His erudite interest in Victorian entrepreneurship — above all, in relatively egalitarian Birmingham — made him the house historian of choice for companies who sought a scholarly but sympathetic record of their past. Marks & Spencer, Longmans publishers, Lewis’s department stores, Victoria Wines: Briggs picked up generous fees for these projects (up to £200,000 each, in 2025 values) even if he missed the deadlines for years on end. He had himself grown up a grocer’s son who served behind the counter, although Willie Briggs’s Keighley store went bust and ruined the family’s finances. And when another grocer’s child took power, in 1979, his political distance from her was modified by a kind of temperamental affinity.

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In 1985, when Oxford dons rejected the award of an honorary degree to Margaret Thatcher, the Provost of Worcester privately called the vote a “terrible mistake”. Each may have defined “Victorian values” in different ways; for Briggs, they mandated a proud public sector and social solidarity. Still, four decades later, their generational bonds make the political opponents of this cohort look increasingly alike. The admirers who gathered at Briggs’s retirement parties in 1991 included not only Rupert Murdoch but Isaiah Berlin, Richard Attenborough, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Roger Bannister and John Sainsbury — the grandest grocer of all, and a close friend since undergraduate days.

It could be that Murdoch and his fellow-disrupters of the Thatcher and post-Thatcher period needed the world that Briggs and his peers had built; just as young Rupert needed Asa to steer him through exams to a degree. They kicked against the institutions the Briggsians had labored to edify, from Sussex University itself to the BBC, the NHS, and every cultural pillar of the age. Yet their critique tacitly assumed that the walls would hold against the onslaught. Thatcher herself never “dismantled” the post-1945 welfare state; as a journalist who covered the public sector in the Eighties, I can testify that economic de-industrialization made it busier than ever. As for The Sun, and even The Times, without the resilience of the Venerable Briggs and his kind, they would have shot their barbs of scorn into thin air. It is a moot point whether the supposedly radical conservatives of the pre-millennial decades really wished to wreck the system Briggs did so much to create, or whether their heirs want to do so now. If so, they would have to own the consequences. When universities of the sort that Briggs fostered start to close, we’ll begin to know.

For now, much of his legacy endures. If Sussex has lost its luster (although even in the Sixties he had to defend controversial speakers against “deplatforming”), the Open University — which he helped plan, and served as Chancellor for 16 years — faces few calls for abolition. At the BBC, the entirely Briggsian figure of David Attenborough (brother of Asa’s good mate Dickie) commands oceans-deep public esteem. Briggs aimed to fling open the doors of knowledge, and he did. Forever in transit, perpetually overcommitted, the “Galloping Professor” sometimes emerges as a figure of fun in Sisman’s able hands. “What is the difference between the Lord and Lord Briggs?” Trevor-Roper quipped at Oxford. “The Lord is always with us.” Malcolm Bradbury guyed him as the trendy trimmer Millington Harsent, vice-chancellor of the “University of Watermouth”, in his campus satire The History Man. But he helped huge numbers to travel further, and reach higher, than ever before. If that model of “improvement” is kaputt, Briggs and his crew did not smash it.

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The show put six young men in competition for a $10,000 prize, which would be awarded to whoever won the affections of a 21-year-old Mexican model, Miriam Rivera. It was only at the end of the series that Miriam revealed to the unsuspecting contestants, and the one “lucky” winner, that “she” was in fact, in the modern idiom, a transwoman. The shell-shocked lover was then invited to either reject Miriam or collect his prize money: the latter of which, to twist the knife, required the happy couple to embark on what one assumes would have been an unusually frosty romantic Mediterranean boat trip together.

After weighing up his options, our lucky winner creatively chose secret option C: joining his fellow contestants in a multi-party lawsuit against the creators of the show, whom they accused of conspiracy to commit sexual assault, defamation, breach of contract and personal injury in the form of psychological and emotional damage. Which seems about right.

Of course, some will be quick to identify There’s Something about Miriam as a disturbing cultural artifact of the morally benighted age sometimes referred to as the recent past. The most aging thing about it, though, to my eye — admittedly only after watching the final “reveal” on YouTube a couple of times — is not that it is morally bankrupt trash. (That doesn’t really distinguish it from modern TV, after all.) Instead, it is how utterly pre-woke the sensibility underlying the show is. You cannot begin to properly grasp the central manipulation of the format, or how captivatingly unethical it is, without taking sex-realist assumptions for granted. Miriam was born a man; he, and the makers of the show, are pretending he is a woman; the hapless contestants are having their heterosexual dispositions systematically deceived by a series of deliberate tricks. The reaction of the young contestants when they find out is artlessly relatable, and equally unfamiliar to the current age: a mixture of undisguised astonishment, horror, and sniggering mutual-mockery as they attempt to collectivize the dawning embarrassment.

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Still, there is rather less than progressives might like to think to distinguish There’s Something about Miriam from I Kissed a Boy, the BBC’s present-day, Love-Island style (at least nominally) gay dating show, which has been criticized recently for including a trans man among its gay male contestants. Whereas Miriam involved the calculated deception of its unwitting contestants by the program makers, I Kissed a Boy is able instead to rely in 2025 on socially-engineered self-deception: both on the part of its contestants and one assumes some large portion of the viewing public, all of whom are prepared to engage the pretense that there is nothing odd about the fact that one of the “gay men” taking part isn’t actually a man.

To do the makers of I Kissed a Boy justice in criticizing their unwise choices, it is important to hold fixed just how bad the show would be anyway, without the odd intrusion of a trans contestant. Though it is possible that the sexual majority of mankind likewise feels demeaned by what unfolds on heterosexual dating shows, somehow in the gay case, the veiled insult feels more personal. All that the show’s contestants are depicted as knowing how to do is shriek, dress up, speculate inanely about their various sexual predilections, and shout things like “slay” whenever they spot the show’s host, Dannii Minogue, herself something of a loud counterexample to the theory that no sound travels through a vacuum.

Annoyingly, because of the creators’ earnest sense of the program’s social progressiveness, the show doesn’t fully cooperate with the viewer’s desire to dislike any of the contestants (a bit of a breach from the norm when it comes to reality TV, as I understand the genre). Instead, as if to insist that we find them sympathetic, we are offered a series of one-on-one, sometimes teary-eyed, teachable moments about the struggles of the contestants in their pursuit of true love, after which the camera carelessly cuts back to whatever lurid discussion of butt plugs or threesomes is taking place around the pool.

As one might expect, it is in the heavy-handed didactic mode that the trans-identified woman, Lars, is deployed to greatest effect. In one bizarre moment, she attempts to correct the alleged misconception that women are physiologically unable to “top” (i.e. genitally penetrate their partner). None of the fellow contestants presses her for details. Instead, they simply shout and cheer affirmingly, before moving on to more important things.

As everyone knows, the contrivances of the genre make the “reality” bit of reality TV something of a misnomer. If the fantasy of cross-sex identification can be sustained anywhere in life, you might have thought, it could surely be sustained here. Yet, in a way quite contrary to its presumably inclusion-driven agenda, I Kissed a Boy unwittingly presents viewers with a vivid demonstration of the shallow confusions of its own theory of sexual reality. Most noticeable of all is the superficial quality of the other contestants’ subscription to trans-inclusive political dogma. Though they mindlessly affirm the claim that Lars is a man, none of them seems disposed to act on that expressed belief: for the most part, Lars is not perceived as an object of attraction or even a potential source of intrasexual competition by the men. They pay lip service to the mantra, but little lip service of other kinds to the person. Two episodes in, the man Lars has been forcibly paired up with nervously exits the relationship, making impressively dubious use of “it’s not you, it’s me” style reasoning. Economists often talk of “revealed preferences” as a more reliable indicator of an agent’s state than self-reported desires; in this case, the contestants’ sexual choices subvert their collective claim to take their female co-contestant to be a man.

The capricious dynamic of the show parallels the broader reception trans-affirming politics has received among homosexual men, where the response has often been an unstable mixture of apathy and dogmatism. A good number of gay men seem to have mistakenly judged that what is principally on the line in the terf-wars is a general right to sexual libertinism and various permissive norms of sexual self-expression, the critique of trans rights being merely the thin end of a threatening political wedge. Many have been willing to join the debate with gusto on the basis of that inadequate understanding. That they themselves wouldn’t dream of actually having sex with a female, trans or otherwise, registers with them not as a possible source of tension in their beliefs, but a mere good use of the very general right to untrammeled sexual autonomy that they see as under contestation in the first place. It often doesn’t occur to these self-described allies of the trans movement that the view (implicit in much of what they say) that gay rights can only be bought at the price of a complete sexual free-for-all is a very pessimistic view of the justificatory standing of homosexual rights.

Of course many other people, including gay men, have noticed how regressive I Kissed a Boy is. Though it may be an excessively polemical gloss on the show, there is an uncomfortable degree of truth in the provocative claim here that the show places its contestants in a situation akin to that of conversion therapy: an environment in which they are invited to feel sexual attraction towards someone who is female. Though they wouldn’t put it in these terms, the makers of the show are in a very literal sense committed to the old bromide that some of its gay male contestants may just not have met the right woman yet. In response to such claims, the programme’s defenders have pointed out that all of I Kissed a Boy’s contestants appear to have consented to the set-up, woman and all — ignoring, in doing so, the awkward truth that those seeking conversion therapy often consent to the process too, a fact in spite of which many still see clear reason to proscribe it.

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What leads well-meaning BBC executives to insert a trans contestant into a gay male dating show, all the while presumably thinking they are doing something laudable? Perhaps they operate with a faulty, but oddly widespread, heuristic to the effect that gay men, in virtue of their androphilia, must in some obscure way be non-standard women. Another subliminal temptation on the part of self described progressives is often to simply chunk all non-standard sexual identities into a category that could be labelled “sexual miscellaneous”: no doubt because they view any internal differences among these people as less important than their shared deviation from the norm.

But whatever the more eccentric features of the programme makers’ mistakes, the more damning underlying error is their failure to understand one of their show’s central concerns: the romantic and sexual dispositions of the gay men on it. These sexual dispositions track biological features, not social ones. Sex, not gender identity.

Though there remain interesting evolutionary questions about the origins of homosexual desire in humans, there is little evidence to think it less stable or fundamentally different in kind to the standing sexual dispositions of, for example, heterosexuals. There is no reason to think a gay man might be successfully “turned” by a woman, whether she thinks of herself as a man or not. Despite what the creators of I Kissed a Boy seem to think, a gay man’s sexual disposition is a robust psychological fact about him.

Why is that simple and informative account of sexual orientation, arguably the default view, so widely rejected? One obstacle to its acceptance is that it can often appear to clash with people’s introspective reports about their own inner sexual lives, a subject about which they are often tacitly assumed to be infallible informants.

But that incautious way of handling the evidence of psychological testimony is a serious error. Unlike sexual orientation itself, one thing that is often not robust (as many cognitive scientists and philosophers working today recognize) is an individual’s access to their own fleeting mental states, about which they can often be mistaken. However counter-intuitive it may seem, that includes reflective access to their own sexual desires and beliefs. Indeed, that people can often be painfully or comically confused about what they want, who they are attracted to, or what they really think of other people, is one of the basic leitmotifs of reality TV.

In spite of the obvious truth that people are capable of gross failures of self-understanding, what might be termed the “Cartesian myth” that each individual enjoys transparent access to his or her own mental life remains ubiquitous and seductive. It has certainly been of great rhetorical help to trans activists in recent debates over the nature of sex and gender, where it has invested individuals’ claims to self-knowledge of their innately sexed identities with an unearned epistemic authority. Because those reports are often so muddled, the Cartesian paradigm also has the further downstream effect of making the underlying nature of sex seem messy, “fluid”, and complicated. People’s psychological self-assessments are often a highly faulty source of data.

Less often noticed is that once the robust, simple account of sex has been obscured by so much Cartesian graffiti, the same quickly happens to sexuality. Because sexuality must ultimately be understood in terms of sex, it too must be fluid, complicated and messy. One terminally frustrating feature of the way this dialectic plays out is that many boomerish heterosexuals, perhaps flattered by the unfamiliar attribution of sexual adventurism, often collude in the confused thought that sexual dispositions are inherently unprincipled and mysterious. The rich, tumultuous and sometimes surprising character of one’s sexual experiences can help to lend credibility to that picture. But psychologically, the “messy” theory of sexuality gets things completely backwards: modeling shaky access to a relatively robust phenomenon as robust access to a relatively shaky one. It is the conclusions we draw about our own sexual natures that can be confused or inconsistent, not the underlying natures themselves.

Were a gay man to kid himself that he fancied a woman, the default explanations should be that it is just that: a flight of fancy. Even if the show’s contestants, bullied by the format of the show and strongly internalized social expectations, are able to work themselves into that regressive frame of mind, it would establish nothing of importance. For a TV show to nudge a bunch of men into misperceiving their own sexual desires is no great political accomplishment, nor a particularly clever psychological trick either, as There’s Something about Miriam testified to many years ago.

Though the creators of I Kissed a Boy think of themselves as moved by considerations of political kindness, kind motivations, a bit like sexual desires, are the sort of thing one can be mistaken about possessing. If There’s Something about Miriam now looks eccentric to modern eyes, I Kissed a Boy may to future eyes look significantly weirder: a remnant of an age in which large swathes of society engaged the complicated pretense that they had forgotten the differences between men and women. It is silly enough to claim that the differences between men and women are of no social, legal or political importance; to insist, further, that they are of no sexual importance is barely coherent.

Of the tortuous and tragic conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Lineker has chosen to see neither the tortuousness nor the tragedy. “People say it’s a complex issue,” he has declared, “but I don’t think it is.”

What then does Lineker see that others don’t? Or is it a question of what Lineker doesn’t see that others do? Either way, he has consistently promulgated an unwaveringly unsubtle pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist position, for which he has doughtily refused to apologize. Why should he? Wherein has he sinned? It is not as though he is an antisemite. Has not truth alone — truth at its most simple and unvarnished — been his guide?

But to go to war armed only with simplicity is to go to war naked. Not everyone will notice. Those whose nakedness you retweet certainly won’t. And in your own eyes, there is no knowing what richly-attired heroism you see. But in the eyes of those who believe, with the poet Donne, that on a huge hill, cragged and steep, truth stands, and he that will reach her about must and about must go — the once prolific goalscorer looks ill-equipped to be a traveler among the rocky uplands of veracity.

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A year of hatred

By Howard Jacobson

“A rat, a rat!” Not a real rat, but an emoji. There, unashamedly wagging its tail for all to see, in the body of another of Lineker’s retweeted pro-Palestinian posts. “An antisemitic trope so brazen,” in the words of The Sunday Times commentator Matthew Syed, “that I shan’t insult your intelligence by explaining why this is so.”

Brazen it might be, but Lineker misses it. Doesn’t see it. Doesn’t get it. Knows nothing of the long history of the rat in the iconography of Jew-loathing, a motif of particular appeal to the Nazis who could depict their ambition to wipe out the Jews as hygienic, since rats, as we all know, spread disease.

Which matters in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict why? Because whoever would talk of Zionism should know a little of what it was invented to save Jews from.

It isn’t difficult to see why the post in question initially excited Lineker’s interest. “Zionism explained in two minutes,” it promised. A bit long, given Lineker’s refusal to see complexity, but the explanation when it comes takes only two seconds. “They take the land claim that it’s theirs.”

Gross enough as history without the rat emoji, with it there can hardly be any doubt, unless you’re Lineker, about the status of this two-second “explanation”. The rat, so potent a symbol for the Nazis, has a new home in Arab propaganda. The Jew is once again the object of exterminationist ambition.

Whatever causes Lineker to realize at last what he’s put his name to — he a man, remember, with no malice against the Jews — he deletes the post and apologizes. Bish, bash, bosh. No harm done. He didn’t know, that was all. Maybe all he saw was a cute mouse, wagging its tail. Credit where credit’s due. He acted. And said sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

But sorry for what exactly?

For being found out? For not recognizing one of the Nazis’ most infamous images? For briefly seconding the words of a Palestinian with whom the idea of the Jew as vermin sits easily.

None of us are as educated as we should be. And Lineker’s ignorance matters only because he charges into the fray of a bitter conflict without knowing, or wanting to know, anything of it apart from what can be gleaned from a two-second video produced by a party to one side whose only aim is to debase the other.

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Lineker shouldn’t have needed the rat to tell him that the thing he “shared” was odious. But you never know what form enlightenment is going to take. So listen to the rat, Gary. This is what it was trying to tell you. Dislike Zionism in its present iteration all you like, but to comment on what or why it is when you have scant knowledge of the murderous hatred that made it necessary — the desperation of exile and longing for home that finally brought it about — is like passing judgment on Black Lives Matter unaware there was a slave trade. You feel for the agony of the Palestinians, you say. Your compassion is admirable. Though compassion with understanding would be more admirable still. To be silent is to be complicit, you say. That is not a free pass to froth and fulminate all you like. To be ignorant is to be complicit too.

And now that you have admitted and apologized for what you were unaware of on this occasion, what about an apology for all those earlier know-nothing interventions you have made? Close your eyes and imagine a rat waving its tail at the bottom of every page you’ve posted. That’s a thousand sorries you owe us, Gary.

Oh, and put some clothes on.

***

A version of this piece first appeared on Howard Jacobson’s Substack, Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.

On December 1, 2022, the Taliban issued a decree closing down the two local stations run by the BBC’s rivals: Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. According to a Taliban spokesman, they were being silenced for their “non-compliance with journalistic principles and one-sided broadcasts”. Remarkably, though, the militants are happy to indulge their British counterpart, which broadcasts from Afghanistan in Dari and Pashto, while also hosting local variants of the BBC news website.

But while the Corporation clearly enjoys its unusual role, is editorial independence really maintained? For as UnHerd has discovered, BBC funds frequently end up Taliban coffers, channeled via organisations led by extremists at the very heart of government. More worrying still, these relationships seemingly shape the Corporations coverage in Afghanistan.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that just two weeks before the Corporation’s rivals were banned, its South Asia bureau chief, Jacky Martens, met with Sirajuddin Haqqani: the Taliban’s deputy leader and Afghanistan’s interior minister. The notorious jihadi, proscribed on both sides of the Atlantic for terrorism, clearly enjoyed his encounter with Martens. According to a statement from Haqqani’s ministry, the BBC was “an important media outlet at the international level” and could rely on the Taliban’s “cooperation”. While others had been hostile when reporting the country’s “internal” issues, the BBC was “impartial”.

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How, then, to explain such enthusiasm?

One answer is likely financial. The BBC refuses to disclose exactly how much it pays the Taliban, but the Corporation sends considerable sums to Radio and Television of Afghanistan (RTA), the group’s propaganda network. As a BBC spokesperson confirmed, these figures cover items including the use of transmitters, power and maintenance: but also “security”. BBC Afghan service sources say this last service is provided by Taliban fighters, led by Haqqani from his office in Kabul.

As for BBC Media Action, the Corporation’s charitable wing, we have obtained a copy of a “memorandum of understanding” between the organisation and RTA covering health education projects worth $1.9 million. The organisation has also confirmed that Media Action has paid both “fees” demanded by the Taliban and income tax on staff salaries — money that feeds the Taliban’s exchequer. Until early February, when President Trump and Elon Musk effectively shut down USAID, the agency was one of BBC Media Action’s biggest sources of income, financing its scheme to train Afghan journalists.

And if that chimes with other foreign organizations in Afghanistan — which pay levies as high as 60% of a project’s total budget to secure the Taliban’s blessing — the BBC’s situation is complicated further by who, exactly, its money goes to.

Aside from his avowed extremism, Haqqani is also the former head of the so-called Haqqani Network, a group responsible for kidnapping American citizens and conducting deadly suicide bombings. Since Haqqani remains on Britain’s sanctions list, it is a criminal offense under UK law to have any financial dealings with him. Qari Mohammad Yousef Ahmadi, head of RTA, is on the sanctions list too, not least for writing articles glorifying attacks on Western troops.

When asked about these links, the BBC said the Corporation is sure its dealings with Ahmadi and Haqqani don’t breach UK law, citing FCDO guidance that suggest that “a public body in which a designated person holds a leadership position is not automatically subject to sanctions”. 

For its part, BBC Media Action also insisted it wasn’t in breach of sanctions, stating that “we have no reason to believe that any benefit has been provided to any person or entity who or which has been sanctioned” and that the FCDO was “fully sighted” on all Media Action’s work. 

But a London-based sanctions expert we spoke to was less convinced. The risk sanctions had been breached would be considerable if it could be shown that Haqqani or Ahmadi exercised a “high degree of control” over the bodies that deal with the BBC or its charity — and derived direct benefit from their funding.

To listen in, you might think that the BBC has paid a high price for the privilege of remaining in Afghanistan. For one thing, it no longer broadcasts programs showcasing Western music, nor the once-popular songs of local pop stars. Condemned by the Taliban as un-Islamic, they used to be mainstays of the BBC’s Afghan schedule. Asked about this, the BBC said it had recently used part of a track by an Afghan female singer to accompany a news story, and that it sometimes broadcast “traditional” Afghan music. 

Anti-Taliban stories found elsewhere on the BBC are also absent from the Afghan service — and sometimes aren’t broadcast at all. One example was a powerful TV report on the collapse of female education under the Islamists. Covering Afghanistan’s last female schools, it showed students wearing burkas and reciting the Quran. These places were starkly contrasted with shots of the now-empty schools that thrived before 2021, when girls were taught a full secular curriculum. 

In the end, though, the BBC decided not to run the film. Staff who worked on it were told by their editors that it was “too sensitive” to broadcast. 

Such compromises predictably frustrate the Corporation’s female staff. One BBC Afghan service journalist, speaking anonymously, says it was “incredibly difficult” to persuade editors to cover women’s rights and freedom of speech. She continues: “People call and beg us to play more music on air, but we don’t — because if we do, our operations inside Afghanistan could be shut down.” Women themselves are being purged too. There used to be several female presenters on the BBC station broadcasting in Dari, one of Afghanistan’s two official languages. Now only one remains. On its sister Pashto station, women presenters are totally absent. 

The same journalist adds that Taliban complaints have sometimes led to internal investigations of BBC staff — as Ali Hamedani, the co-author of this article, learnt first-hand. 

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An experienced BBC journalist, Hamedani is gay and had often reported on anti-LGBT discrimination in Afghanistan. In October 2022, the month before Martens met Haqqani, Hamedani covered the killing of a local gay student. Forces answerable to Haqqani detained Hamed Sabour at a Kabul checkpoint, before torturing and shooting him dead. His killers then made a video of Sabour’s execution and sent it to his family.

Before broadcasting his story, Hamedani interviewed Sabouri’s relatives and friends. Yet after the Taliban submitted a complaint, he was forced to undergo an internal disciplinary investigation that lasted almost a year, requiring him to prove his story was accurate — including providing a photograph of the murder victim’s body. He was only cleared 11 months after his initial report.

Yet, it seems that not everyone at the BBC was up to speed, for when we asked last week why Hamedani had been investigated, its spokesperson said his report “contained an image of a living man who wasn’t Hamed Sabouri. It therefore did not comply with the BBC’s editorial guidelines.” This is simply false: Hamedani’s report, though made for TV and radio, clearly contained no images of the victim. The incorrect photo appeared in The Guardian, which later acknowledged its mistake, and on a BBC Instagram feed — for which Hamedani had no responsibility. 

Despite all this, the BBC has defended its work in Afghanistan. The Corporation says it’s proud to be “the only international news media organization still broadcasting” in the country. Media Action defends its actions too, stating it “plays a critical role supporting local journalists to provide life-saving information on matters including health, nutrition and food security”. It’s also “proud of our work with local radio stations to support some of the last remaining women journalists working in radio in the country”. 

Yet perhaps the most telling statement comes from the Taliban itself. “The BBC is a credible source of news for Afghanistan,” says its official government spokesperson. “[The Corporation] collaborates constructively with the Islamic Emirate.” With praise like that, it’s hard to see how the Corporation can truly wave the flag for journalistic impartiality.

Audiences invest passionately in soap operas. While film stars are Olympian gods or aristocrats, soap characters are family. So much so, the woman careering towards Kemp was greeting his onscreen alter ego in the hugely successful EastEnders. Yet as the London-set soap celebrates its 40th anniversary, the primacy of such drama is no more. Its decline is the result not only of shifts in our media appetites but also tectonic changes in society, and the dread hand of politics shaping who we are and how we see ourselves.

Soap operas are — or, rather, were — one of the great working-class cultural forms: a result of untapped creative experience, authenticity and imagination finally allowed to flourish unobstructed. They came into being alongside rock music, Mod culture, the Angry Young Men and kitchen-sink realism. The cultural roots of these soaps run deep — radio plays, whodunnits, yellow-back novels, and penny dreadfuls. There were echoes of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Victorian serial cliffhangers were the doof doof endings of their day.

But what separates soap from other proletarian culture is that it was always deemed unworthy of serious critical attention. This was not just myopic snobbery but also misogyny, given that the core audience for soaps has always been women — the name coming from demographic-targeting adverts that ran alongside early radio plays by the “Queen of the Soaps”, Irna Phillips.

Essentially, soaps weren’t taken seriously because working-class life wasn’t. Snobbery meant that accents, fashion, and even honesty were regarded as weaknesses rather than strengths. Accusations of philistinism usually amounted to projection or petty moralism. After all, it’s worth remembering which class stood in the pit directly in front of Shakespeare’s plays. And it’s also worth remembering the burst of energy and ideas theatre received when the likes of Joan Littlewood and Stella Linden helped bring the working-class voices of Shelagh Delaney, Brendan Behan and John Osborne to the stage. Their honesty may have been provocatively uncouth for the time, but it was revitalizing and re-established theatre’s relevance in the modern age.

When George Orwell wrote “If there is hope, it lies in the proles”, he wasn’t pointing to the innate virtue of the working classes, but instead their lack of insulation from reality and its consequences — meaning they couldn’t afford to be as delusional as the chattering classes. Rather than the passive-aggressive choreographies of the elite, there’s a different form of nobility and a liberating disreputable vérité in lines such as “Get out of my pub… you cheap peroxide old bag!”

Thanks to its head start in 1960, Coronation Street had long mastered wit, camp, and glamour (more effective in feminist terms than any academic tract). EastEnders, playing catch-up, needed a USP. It went for edge, set up as an authentic slice of East End life, rooted in the simultaneously grounded and turbulent Beale/Fowler family. Without the commercial imperative, and with the ghost of Lord Reith whispering, EastEnders could sell reality.

Knowing authenticity can rarely be staged or imposed, the programme’s creators Julia Smith and Tony Holland had trawled the East End to find characters and stories. Gretchen Franklin played Ethel Skinner — the pug-wielding, gin-drinking, flirtatious widow whose family had been wiped out by a V-1 rocket. Peter Dean, who played market trader Pete Beale, had himself been a market trader. Meanwhile, Bill Treacher, who played Arthur Fowler, had worked at sea saving money to put himself through acting school.

Considering the punishing production demands, it’s forgivable if some episodes are lackluster. Yet the finest episodes are worthy of comparison with high-end theatre. Tropes abound — necessarily as soap is partly routine, domesticity and comfort — but they also add to the camp appeal, especially the regularity of “Thought I was dead, did’ya?” resurrection. Characters walk off brain injuries; others end up as statistics in a murder rate more akin to a low-level civil war.

Soap may be life turned up to 11, realism rendered as melodrama, but it has to be recognizably lifelike. If that’s lost, so is its credibility. It should be close enough to relate to, but all that’s restrained must be cathartically unleashed — revenge, affairs, schadenfreude, feuds and, above all, secrets. There’s recognizable dysfunction in Pete Beale’s statement, “Family? We’re not family, Gran. We’re a bunch of misfits that’s sharing DNA.” And there are few among us holy enough never to have thought: “I have had it with you, you cheap little slapper!” Not least about ourselves.

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Say Nothing's empty empathy

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There are few things less acceptable than reality, and nothing more vital. Social conscience was always a factor in soaps, and EastEnders managed this subtly but profoundly. Screened at the time of the AIDS crisis and Section 28, the first gay kiss on a British soap exposed those engaged in moral panic as cruel, fragile, hysterical puritans. Mary Whitehouse, a persistent mosquito at the time, specifically called out “its atmosphere of physical violence, its homosexuals, its blackmailing pimp and its prostitute, its lies and deceits and its bad language”.

But when watched cross-generationally in the past, issues such as AIDS could be approached empathetically. This ameliorating approach put soaps at odds with tabloid culture, which thrived on polarized extremes. Both now struggle because there’s no longer the monoculture that once existed, where large swathes of the population watched the same thing.

Back in 1996, when Peggy Mitchell publicly ostracized Mark Fowler for being HIV-positive, the sympathy it aroused for real-life sufferers of the illness was pivotal in changing attitudes. Such an approach feels unthinkable now, ironically given the constraints of political correctness. Yet it’s also a problem with the eclipse of fiction by nonfiction and the all-round fucked-upness of the world. Any reproduction of, say, gangs which falls short of actual drill videos will appear absurd, cringeworthy and alienating to even remotely streetwise viewers.

At the heart of the problem, though, is the BBC itself. Talking to producers who’ve worked there, the same complaint arises: “the BBC wash”. Fresh, dynamic ideas from hungry writers come in, pass through the bureaucratic machinery, and emerge an anemic mockery of what could have been. Class is central to this problem. Any truthful depiction of the contemporary East End is difficult, if not impossible, because it would evade or conflict with the paternalistic pseudo-liberalism that permeates the institution. It very effectively robs places and people of their voices, and is closer to Mary Whitehouse’s sanitized view of the world than they’d ever admit.

The East End and EastEnders have long been multicultural, being connected to the docks and waves of migrants, yet the scale of change there — through gentrification, development and population change — has been transformative since the show’s heyday. Throughout London, markets have closed or been corporatized. Pubs and clubs have been shuttered. But watching EastEnders, you’d think nothing much had altered, because it’s now a depiction of how the BBC nostalgically imagines the East End to be.

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Transformation should be a gift for storytellers to explore, yet today they are either terrified of change or terrified of admitting that it’s happening, depending on where they place themselves on the political spectrum. Meanwhile, outside their echo chambers, reality flows on like the river. Deprivation and the cost of living, shadow economies, capsizing services, drugs, people-trafficking and sexual abuse are underrepresented or unconvincing. Any depictions of homelessness and addiction are bathetic to the point of becoming online comic memes. Crime is depicted as if the Krays are still walking the streets. It’s no longer a mirror but a mirage.

Two factors are at work here which illustrate wider problems. The first is that the valve that was opened between the Fifties and the late-Nineties, allowing the brilliance of working-class culture to have a fair shot, has been firmly welded shut. The result has been a moribund mainstream culture across the arts, dominated by the 7% of the population who went to private school and the less than 1% who went to Oxbridge. In television, only 8% of the workforce are working class.

The second is that in its place, culture, even depictions of working-class life, has become tepid, cliched bourgeois fantasy. The actor Stephen Graham recently pointed out the “condescending” humorless, greyscale scenes which pass for depictions of working-class life. It goes beyond the hoarding of opportunities into a callous misrepresentation of reality, burying or distorting the issues that impact lives. In this sense, perhaps, the BBC does reflect contemporary Britain, which feels increasingly like China Miéville’s 2009 novel The City & the City, in which the citizens of two overlapping metropolises live without acknowledging the other’s existence. If they notice, they’re punished. Once science fiction, now the book is practically documentary.

There is a solution. Return to the roots to understand why the soaps exist in the first place, and renew it. In the case of EastEnders, go, as the first producers did, and find out what the East End is now. Allow those from the area to write and act their own stories. Set aside ideology, and opt for unflinching honesty. The Queen Vic might be transformed, filled with hipsters or boarded up. Half the Cockneys might’ve moved to Essex, fortunate enough to be early on the London property Ponzi scheme. Truths can be inconvenient, but that’s why they’re truths, especially when facing issues such as poverty, crime, violence, intra-community tensions and state neglect. The everyday resistance and transcendence of all of these is evident on street-level.

The pride and realities of the East End have been continually asserted, from the Battle of Cable Street to the campaign after the murder of Altab Ali. Yet, every day, the deficit grows between the way London presents to the world and to itself, and the way London actually is for those of us who live here.

For now, though, the show, like the political class, seems no longer concerned with or worthy of recognizable social realism. This is a betrayal of storytelling itself. Drama needs friction and adversity, doubt and conflict rather than false hectoring certainty, to have catharsis or resolution. Without this, EastEnders exists as a pantomime whose detachment from reality is increasingly difficult to stomach. It will only continue to drift further and further away from the actual East End, and the lives lived there.

The Verify team deployed its OSINT (open source intelligence) skills and facial recognition software to compare images from the scene with social media profiles. Soon enough, they’d identified and named two of the alleged attackers. Yet despite having no less than four writers on the story — just one of many Verify articles to boast multiple bylines — this gaggle of reporters initially failed to spot the most important fact of all. 

That only became clear later, in a note added at the bottom of the BBC website once the story had been published. “An earlier version of this article identified the men in the car as of Asian heritage,” it said. “Humberside Police has since told the BBC they are Eastern European.” To put it differently, the victims on Humberside were as white as their attackers. Whatever else the incident was, then, it certainly wasn’t a straightforward case of white racism against non-white targets. Later, the BBC also changed the headline.

If journalism is the first draft of history, often produced at speed, it’s inevitable that reporters sometimes get things wrong. But just as the 6 August story suffered from a glaring and arguably story-ending error, BBC Verify seems to suffer more mistakes than most. Having examined more than 200 stories listed on BBC Verify’s website, and produced between its launch in May 2023 and 5 October this year, we found 12 that were later corrected, clarified or withdrawn. That’s about one in 20.

For an outfit like BBC Verify, an expensive new unit established to combat disinformation, that’s awkward enough. That’s doubly true when journalists elsewhere in the corporation face redundancy, with £24 million annual cuts to the BBC News budget forcing executives to axe well-regarded programmes and shed 130 staff. Yet beyond these individual embarrassments, or the strange focus on Verify to the detriment of other reporting, the real story here is what BBC Verify says about the contemporary BBC’s approach to journalism — and how it often seems to put shallow, memeable newsgathering ahead of the facts. 

BBC Verify was born in an age of disinformation, in which “fake news” spread by platforms such as TikTok has eroded trust in “legacy media” — and diminished its audience. A high-level BBC insider says that from the moment Deborah Turness was appointed chief executive of BBC News in 2022, she tried to persuade her senior colleagues that the way to restore both was to set up a unit to challenge the spread of disinformation and report the facts. She got her way, and BBC Verify was the result. 

Despite being founded around 18 months ago, Verify has quickly come to dominate BBC News output. Boasting over 60 dedicated journalists, it enjoys a special corner of the BBC website, with each story it publishes highlighted by a BBC Verify logo. Covering everything from war (“What satellite images reveal about Israel’s strikes on Iran”) to climate change (“No, Hurricane Milton was not ‘engineered’”), online content is dovetailed by Verified Live, which airs weekdays on BBC News. No less striking, Verify has also made stars of several BBC journalists. One example is Ros Atkins, the BBC’s analysis editor. Another is Marianna Spring, a disinformation correspondent who’s appeared everywhere from Breakfast to Radio 4, and so become one of the corporation’s most recognisable faces.

Given all this coverage, at any rate, it’s unsurprising that Verify should also enjoy praise from executives. “BBC Verify is transparency in action — fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analysing data and explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth,” is how Turness put it. As Verify’s creator has added, its staff aren’t just ordinary journalists. Rather, they’re “a highly specialised team with a range of forensic and OSINT capabilities that enable them to go beyond conventional newsroom techniques”. 

Last month Turness sent a message to every BBC journalist making further grandiose claims. In the note, seen by UnHerd, she said Verify was “on the front line” of the corporation’s “fight for truth”, and its “forensic teams” were “setting the standard for transparent journalism”. Such enthusiasm is clearly echoed in the accounting department too: the BBC has said the salary bill for Verify’s 63 staff is £3.2 million a year.

Yet amid the plaudits and the paychecks, just how accurate is Verify’s reporting? 

Certainly, that the unit has had to correct, clarify or withdraw about one in 20 stories isn’t a good start. “The BBC claims that BBC Verify is on the frontline of the ‘fight for truth’ — but the fact it has been forced to correct 5% of its stories suggests otherwise,” explains Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television. “That is a very high number for any news organisation, and the BBC should be upholding the highest of standards.” 

Nor do things look much better once you dig a little deeper. Like the Humberside story, after all, some mistakes involve that most sensitive of subjects: race. On 25 February, for instance, BBC Verify published a troubling exposé. Its author, Maryam Ahmed, had used advanced statistical techniques to compare thousands of car insurance quotes, finding that drivers in racially diverse areas were having to pay much higher premiums — an average of 33% more than people from places that were mainly white.

It seemed the motor insurance industry was racist, for behind the disparity lay what the BBC called an “ethnicity penalty”. Even if differing levels of accidents, crime and economic prosperity were taken into account, “areas with a high number of people from ethnic minorities saw higher prices”, the article said. It went on to quote a demand from Citizens Advice that the Financial Conduct Authority “get off the sidelines and investigate why people of colour are being charged so much more”.

Seven months later, the BBC quietly replaced the article with an embarrassing statement. It now transpired there was no “ethnicity penalty” after all. The BBC “had not established why premiums were higher”, because it had failed to see “the limitations of the data we used”. The story “did not meet our normal editorial standards” and was therefore being deleted.

And if that’s echoed by errors in other domestic stories — among other things, that includes a muddle over high speed railways — the unit has arguably faced its biggest problems very far from Britain. Since the Hamas attack of October 2023, indeed, the Middle East has proved something of a theme for the unit: our analysis shows that in the year since the attack, about a fifth of the stories listed on its website have focused on the region. 

And if Cohen says this suggests an “unhealthy obsession” with events in Israel, some of Verify’s claims on this most controversial of conflicts don’t stand up.

Early in the war, on 17 October last year, an explosion at the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza triggered furious controversy, after the BBC correspondent Jon Donnison said on air that it was “hard to see” what could have caused it other than an Israeli airstrike. 

Israel insisted that the blast was caused by a Palestinian rocket, but according to Donnison, these might kill “half a dozen — maybe a few more”, and “when we’ve seen rockets being fired out of Gaza, we never see explosions of this scale”. In its reports that evening, the BBC echoed a claim by Hamas that it had killed 500 people. In fact, the hospital itself had not been hit: the blast was in the car park outside, and the death toll, according to both Western governments and Human Rights Watch, was far lower than 500.  

BBC Verify published three successive items on the event, culminating in a lengthy article on 26 October that carried the bylines of no fewer than 12 of its staff. 

By this time, the Biden administration and numerous independent experts had concluded that the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket, launched from inside Gaza. Rishi Sunak, the then-prime minister, had told Parliament this was likely true, based on the “deep knowledge and analysis of our intelligence and weapons experts”. Yet BBC Verify continued to maintain the cause of the blast was still “contested” — and that, as Hamas still claims, it might have been an Israeli strike. 

Verify’s assertion relied on analysis by an organisation called Forensic Architecture, which the BBC somewhat obliquely described as a “UK-based organisation which investigates human rights abuses”. 

What it failed to mention was that Forensic Architecture’s advisory board includes Ryvka Barnard, the deputy director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign; and that it has a long record of issuing reports critical of Israel. At the same time, Forensic Architecture has often worked with Al Haq, a Palestinian group designated a terrorist organisation by Israel. After the October 7 attacks, meanwhile, Al Haq staff issued numerous statements describing them as legitimate acts of resistance. One of its leaders urged his social media followers to support the “jihad”. 

Despite all this, Verify’s initial story is still online — complete with the claim that the origin of the hospital blast remains “contested”. That’s even as the story now includes a clarification at the bottom conceding that Forensic Architecture itself now admits “they had been wrong” about the specifics of the attack.

Nor is this Verify’s only Gaza story to be based on dubious sources. On 1 March, it published a report into the deaths of 112 Gazans, who’d died the previous day while food was being distributed from a convoy of aid trucks. Hamas claimed most of the dead had been shot by the IDF; Israel that they’d been crushed in a stampede.

The six named Verify staff accredited in its report analysed satellite photos, videos and drone footage. It seems OSINT wasn’t much help, as they still weren’t able to draw any definitive conclusions. In the end, Verify relied on an old-fashioned human source. A Palestinian named Mahmoud Awadeyah told the reporters he’d seen what happened: a deliberate attack on desperate civilians by Israeli soldiers.

Beyond Awadeyah’s testimony, Verify’s story contained no other evidence this was true. More to the point, other research suggests that he may not be a reliable source for such serious allegations. For one thing, he has worked for Tasnim, a news agency controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. On the same day as the murder of seven Jews outside a Jerusalem synagogue, meanwhile, Awadeyah tweeted about “A state of rejoicing, exuberance, and mosques confirmed with exuberance.” The same message included an emoji of a contented-looking face with a halo. He’s also posted photos of himself with Khalil Al Bahtini, a leader of the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and mourned his “sincerity and loyalty” when the latter was killed in an Israeli airstrike.

Twelve days after the Verify piece was published, the BBC appended yet another “clarification” — noting that “this piece has been amended to make clear Mahmoud Awadeyah’s current employment” for a Lebanese news station called Al Mayadeen. For its part, Verify also noted Al Mayadeen’s sympathies to groups fighting Israel. But even that’s not the full story: Al Mayadeen openly supports Iran, Hezbollah and the murderous Assad regime in Syria. 

Suggested reading

How to weaponise the BBC

By Aris Roussinos

Cohen, for his part, is amazed that the BBC didn’t feel the need to explain that an eyewitness source was employed by a pro-Iranian outlet. “This is a good example of bias by omission,” he says. “Without all the facts and context clearly presented, the BBC is misleading audiences.”

And if Verify has been caught out by its sources in other areas too — an expert quoted in support of a wealth tax has campaigned for just such a policy, even as his background wasn’t made clear — reporting on riots or war at least feels worthy in principle. 

Elsewhere, though, the unit seems content paddling in distinctly shallow waters. On 7 May, for instance, Spring presented a filmed segment describing a fake picture on Instagram. This was significant, she said, because AI-generated forgeries often involved politicians, and so could potentially influence elections. In the event, though, the picture she highlighted wasn’t of Donald Trump or Joe Biden — but rather of the singer Katy Perry, doing nothing more than standing in a floral dress she hadn’t actually worn. Undaunted, Spring justified her prime time report by saying it was “a reminder to put our social media sleuthing to the test”.

Nor is this the only story that feels like it could have been left to the tabloids. On 17 October, BBC Verify published a story about a supposed “wave of cases” involving an alleged drug called Devil’s Breath. The article explained that it was apparently a travel sickness remedy, which could “be administered to victims in the street, without them realising they have been drugged”. Perhaps it can. Yet Verify admitted there was “no evidence” it had been administered in the cases it examined, though it “has been used in robberies in Ecuador, France and Vietnam”. Even if it had been used in Britain, meanwhile, this would have been “difficult to establish”.

Sometimes, Verify even “proves” things that no one seriously disputes. One example came on 7 September, when it published images showing Israel had been building a new road along the border between Gaza and Egypt. Three weeks later, it analysed videos of the airstrike that killed Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut. The fact that solar panels were seen facing away from the bombed building suggested that the attack had come from the south: in other words from Israel. Who knew?

Combined with those monumental bylines — even a straightforward story about flooding in Libya involved a dozen staff — and that £3.2 million wage bill begins to feel oddly high. Indeed, Verify might cost the BBC even more than that. Notwithstanding the unit’s focus on transparency, when we asked the corporation about the rest of its budget, for costs such as travel and OSINT software, a spokeswoman said they weren’t available because they’re “accounted for as part of the overall BBC News budget”. 

Such munificence might matter less if the BBC was rolling in money. As it is, the corporation is seriously cash-strapped, a situation that’s obliged managers to cancel some of its most respected shows. Newsnight, for one, is now a shadow of its former self, shorn of filmed reports and investigations. HARDtalk, an in-depth interview programme, is vanishing too, despite first going on air back in 1997. Together with those 130 redundancies, and the high-level BBC insider is unsurprisingly upset about the corporation’s apparent focus on BBC Verify, especially when they suspect it’s indulged as Deborah Turness’s baby. “Because she is the head of news, it can only ever be declared a success,” he explains. “Its triumph is pre-ordained.” It hardly helps, the insider adds, that other sections of BBC News actually have to correct stories far less often than Verify — even as they “they don’t presume to be more truthful than anyone else”. 

Nor do things seem likely to change going forward. In late October, mere days after BBC director-general Tim Davie made a speech about the growing threat of “misinformation” from foreign powers, the corporation had ordered four of its most seasoned foreign correspondents back to Britain to save money. All had years of experience, backed by foreign language skills, of reporting on authoritarian regimes including China, Russia and North Korea. Now, though, they’d been told to cover news in Britain.

Within the BBC, the news was received with dismay. The Times quoted a staffer saying they had been “told to return at a time when the amount of propaganda we are up against is astounding. None of them costs very much money and strategically, it doesn’t make sense when you look at the big, looming stories.” But in the new BBC, it seems that on-the-ground reporting, battling to get at the truth, is destined to be replaced by analysis of videos shot by amateurs on mobile phones — all carried out by BBC Verify in London.

Certainly, the corporation clearly remains optimistic about the unit. 

More from this author

The Miliband files

By David Rose

We asked the BBC to comment on everything in this article. Its spokeswoman told us: “By their very nature, BBC Verify stories are heavy in facts and detail on contentious topics which can sometimes require clarifications and updates, and occasionally corrections, which we do in an openly transparent way. Often pieces are updated to show our workings to audiences — showing them how stories develop as new information comes to light. We do not recognise the flawed calculations that attempt to describe updated pieces with transparent workings as corrected articles.

“We are proud of the vital work that BBC Verify is doing, and our audience research shows that people value this offering and are actively seeking out BBC Verify stories to help them understand events.”

Regarding the false claim that the victims of the attack on the car during the riots were of Asian heritage, the spokesperson said: “The story used a range of technology, on the ground reports and social media to piece together how the violence escalated in Humberside that day. When we became aware of the new information we amended the story swiftly and transparently. We stand by the story as an accurate account of what happened.”

As for the now-deleted article about “racist” car insurance, the spokeswoman said that “we have been transparent in saying this story did not meet our normal editorial guidelines and why we withdrew the article”. She also defended the report claiming Israel had massacred Gazans when they tried to get food, despite relying on a single source who’d worked for a pro-Iran TV channel. “The fact,” she said, “that someone has expressed an opinion on social media doesn’t automatically disqualify them from giving eye-witness testimony.” 

Not everyone at the corporation is so bullish. Our BBC insider was unimpressed by these comments, saying he was dismayed that even when Verify had admitted that fundamental elements of major stories were wrong, they’d nonetheless stayed online. As he puts it: “This is misleading and dishonest.” 

Beyond the finances, questions about the unit surely remain. Scanning our analysis of the stories on BBC Verify’s website, it’s hard to avoid the impression that it’s selective with its targets: evidence, perhaps, of a certain Left-leaning bias. It doesn’t, for instance, examine claims made by Hamas with anything like the frequency and rigour it applies to Israel. During the UK election, meanwhile, it dismissed Reform UK’s manifesto by saying its promises had been described as impossible by “experts”, “economists” and “analysts” — without naming or quoting any of them. As was noted last week, meanwhile, it failed to measure the Budget, and the tax increases it contained, against Labour’s pledges during the election. 

Especially when the corporation is tightening its belt elsewhere, it’s little wonder Cohen remains sceptical. “At a time when the BBC is having to cut jobs and save a lot of money,” he concludes, “the track record of BBC Verify seems very hard to justify.”

***

This article was first published on 4 November, 2024.

On 6 August, at the height of the riots that swept Britain after the Southport murders, BBC Verify revealed “one of the most shocking” outbreaks of violence: a racist attack on Humberside. According to Verify, “an angry mob of white men surrounded and attacked a car with men of Asian heritage inside.” Some of the attackers “threw bricks and shouted racist slurs. One performed the Nazi salute.”

The Verify team deployed its OSINT (open source intelligence) skills and facial recognition software to compare images from the scene with social media profiles. Soon enough, they’d identified and named two of the alleged attackers. Yet despite having no less than four writers on the story — just one of many Verify articles to boast multiple bylines — this gaggle of reporters initially failed to spot the most important fact of all. 

That only became clear later, in a note added at the bottom of the BBC website once the story had been published. “An earlier version of this article identified the men in the car as of Asian heritage,” it said. “Humberside Police has since told the BBC they are Eastern European.” To put it differently, the victims on Humberside were as white as their attackers. Whatever else the incident was, then, it certainly wasn’t a straightforward case of white racism against non-white targets. Later, the BBC also changed the headline.

If journalism is the first draft of history, often produced at speed, it’s inevitable that reporters sometimes get things wrong. But just as the 6 August story suffered from a glaring and arguably story-ending error, BBC Verify seems to suffer more mistakes than most. Having examined more than 200 stories listed on BBC Verify’s website, and produced between its launch in May 2023 and 5 October this year, we found 12 that were later corrected, clarified or withdrawn. That’s about one in 20.

For an outfit like BBC Verify, an expensive new unit established to combat disinformation, that’s awkward enough. That’s doubly true when journalists elsewhere in the corporation face redundancy, with £24 million annual cuts to the BBC News budget forcing executives to axe well-regarded programmes and shed 130 staff. Yet beyond these individual embarrassments, or the strange focus on Verify to the detriment of other reporting, the real story here is what BBC Verify says about the contemporary BBC’s approach to journalism — and how it often seems to put shallow, memeable newsgathering ahead of the facts. 

BBC Verify was born in an age of disinformation, in which “fake news” spread by platforms such as TikTok has eroded trust in “legacy media” — and diminished its audience. A high-level BBC insider says that from the moment Deborah Turness was appointed chief executive of BBC News in 2022, she tried to persuade her senior colleagues that the way to restore both was to set up a unit to challenge the spread of disinformation and report the facts. She got her way, and BBC Verify was the result. 

Despite being founded around 18 months ago, Verify has quickly come to dominate BBC News output. Boasting over 60 dedicated journalists, it enjoys a special corner of the BBC website, with each story it publishes highlighted by a BBC Verify logo. Covering everything from war (“What satellite images reveal about Israel’s strikes on Iran”) to climate change (“No, Hurricane Milton was not ‘engineered’”), online content is dovetailed by Verified Live, which airs weekdays on BBC News. No less striking, Verify has also made stars of several BBC journalists. One example is Ros Atkins, the BBC’s analysis editor. Another is Marianna Spring, a disinformation correspondent who’s appeared everywhere from Breakfast to Radio 4, and so become one of the corporation’s most recognisable faces.

Given all this coverage, at any rate, it’s unsurprising that Verify should also enjoy praise from executives. “BBC Verify is transparency in action — fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analysing data and explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth,” is how Turness put it. As Verify’s creator has added, its staff aren’t just ordinary journalists. Rather, they’re “a highly specialised team with a range of forensic and OSINT capabilities that enable them to go beyond conventional newsroom techniques”. 

Last month Turness sent a message to every BBC journalist making further grandiose claims. In the note, seen by UnHerd, she said Verify was “on the front line” of the corporation’s “fight for truth”, and its “forensic teams” were “setting the standard for transparent journalism”. Such enthusiasm is clearly echoed in the accounting department too: the BBC has said the salary bill for Verify’s 63 staff is £3.2 million a year.

Yet amid the plaudits and the paychecks, just how accurate is Verify’s reporting? 

Certainly, that the unit has had to correct, clarify or withdraw about one in 20 stories isn’t a good start. “The BBC claims that BBC Verify is on the frontline of the ‘fight for truth’ — but the fact it has been forced to correct 5% of its stories suggests otherwise,” explains Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television. “That is a very high number for any news organisation, and the BBC should be upholding the highest of standards.” 

Nor do things look much better once you dig a little deeper. Like the Humberside story, after all, some mistakes involve that most sensitive of subjects: race. On 25 February, for instance, BBC Verify published a troubling exposé. Its author, Maryam Ahmed, had used advanced statistical techniques to compare thousands of car insurance quotes, finding that drivers in racially diverse areas were having to pay much higher premiums — an average of 33% more than people from places that were mainly white.

It seemed the motor insurance industry was racist, for behind the disparity lay what the BBC called an “ethnicity penalty”. Even if differing levels of accidents, crime and economic prosperity were taken into account, “areas with a high number of people from ethnic minorities saw higher prices”, the article said. It went on to quote a demand from Citizens Advice that the Financial Conduct Authority “get off the sidelines and investigate why people of colour are being charged so much more”.

Seven months later, the BBC quietly replaced the article with an embarrassing statement. It now transpired there was no “ethnicity penalty” after all. The BBC “had not established why premiums were higher”, because it had failed to see “the limitations of the data we used”. The story “did not meet our normal editorial standards” and was therefore being deleted.

And if that’s echoed by errors in other domestic stories — among other things, that includes a muddle over high speed railways — the unit has arguably faced its biggest problems very far from Britain. Since the Hamas attack of October 2023, indeed, the Middle East has proved something of a theme for the unit: our analysis shows that in the year since the attack, about a fifth of the stories listed on its website have focused on the region. 

And if Cohen says this suggests an “unhealthy obsession” with events in Israel, some of Verify’s claims on this most controversial of conflicts don’t stand up.

Early in the war, on 17 October last year, an explosion at the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza triggered furious controversy, after the BBC correspondent Jon Donnison said on air that it was “hard to see” what could have caused it other than an Israeli airstrike. 

Israel insisted that the blast was caused by a Palestinian rocket, but according to Donnison, these might kill “half a dozen — maybe a few more”, and “when we’ve seen rockets being fired out of Gaza, we never see explosions of this scale”. In its reports that evening, the BBC echoed a claim by Hamas that it had killed 500 people. In fact, the hospital itself had not been hit: the blast was in the car park outside, and the death toll, according to both Western governments and Human Rights Watch, was far lower than 500.  

BBC Verify published three successive items on the event, culminating in a lengthy article on 26 October that carried the bylines of no fewer than 12 of its staff. 

By this time, the Biden administration and numerous independent experts had concluded that the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket, launched from inside Gaza. Rishi Sunak, the then-prime minister, had told Parliament this was likely true, based on the “deep knowledge and analysis of our intelligence and weapons experts”. Yet BBC Verify continued to maintain the cause of the blast was still “contested” — and that, as Hamas still claims, it might have been an Israeli strike. 

Verify’s assertion relied on analysis by an organisation called Forensic Architecture, which the BBC somewhat obliquely described as a “UK-based organisation which investigates human rights abuses”. 

What it failed to mention was that Forensic Architecture’s advisory board includes Ryvka Barnard, the deputy director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign; and that it has a long record of issuing reports critical of Israel. At the same time, Forensic Architecture has often worked with Al Haq, a Palestinian group designated a terrorist organisation by Israel. After the October 7 attacks, meanwhile, Al Haq staff issued numerous statements describing them as legitimate acts of resistance. One of its leaders urged his social media followers to support the “jihad”. 

Despite all this, Verify’s initial story is still online — complete with the claim that the origin of the hospital blast remains “contested”. That’s even as the story now includes a clarification at the bottom conceding that Forensic Architecture itself now admits “they had been wrong” about the specifics of the attack.

Nor is this Verify’s only Gaza story to be based on dubious sources. On 1 March, it published a report into the deaths of 112 Gazans, who’d died the previous day while food was being distributed from a convoy of aid trucks. Hamas claimed most of the dead had been shot by the IDF; Israel that they’d been crushed in a stampede.

The six named Verify staff accredited in its report analysed satellite photos, videos and drone footage. It seems OSINT wasn’t much help, as they still weren’t able to draw any definitive conclusions. In the end, Verify relied on an old-fashioned human source. A Palestinian named Mahmoud Awadeyah told the reporters he’d seen what happened: a deliberate attack on desperate civilians by Israeli soldiers.

Beyond Awadeyah’s testimony, Verify’s story contained no other evidence this was true. More to the point, other research suggests that he may not be a reliable source for such serious allegations. For one thing, he has worked for Tasnim, a news agency controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. On the same day as the murder of seven Jews outside a Jerusalem synagogue, meanwhile, Awadeyah tweeted about “A state of rejoicing, exuberance, and mosques confirmed with exuberance.” The same message included an emoji of a contented-looking face with a halo. He’s also posted photos of himself with Khalil Al Bahtini, a leader of the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and mourned his “sincerity and loyalty” when the latter was killed in an Israeli airstrike.

Twelve days after the Verify piece was published, the BBC appended yet another “clarification” — noting that “this piece has been amended to make clear Mahmoud Awadeyah’s current employment” for a Lebanese news station called Al Mayadeen. For its part, Verify also noted Al Mayadeen’s sympathies to groups fighting Israel. But even that’s not the full story: Al Mayadeen openly supports Iran, Hezbollah and the murderous Assad regime in Syria. 

Suggested reading

How to weaponise the BBC

By Aris Roussinos

Cohen, for his part, is amazed that the BBC didn’t feel the need to explain that an eyewitness source was employed by a pro-Iranian outlet. “This is a good example of bias by omission,” he says. “Without all the facts and context clearly presented, the BBC is misleading audiences.”

And if Verify has been caught out by its sources in other areas too — an expert quoted in support of a wealth tax has campaigned for just such a policy, even as his background wasn’t made clear — reporting on riots or war at least feels worthy in principle. 

Elsewhere, though, the unit seems content paddling in distinctly shallow waters. On 7 May, for instance, Spring presented a filmed segment describing a fake picture on Instagram. This was significant, she said, because AI-generated forgeries often involved politicians, and so could potentially influence elections. In the event, though, the picture she highlighted wasn’t of Donald Trump or Joe Biden — but rather of the singer Katy Perry, doing nothing more than standing in a floral dress she hadn’t actually worn. Undaunted, Spring justified her prime time report by saying it was “a reminder to put our social media sleuthing to the test”.

Nor is this the only story that feels like it could have been left to the tabloids. On 17 October, BBC Verify published a story about a supposed “wave of cases” involving an alleged drug called Devil’s Breath. The article explained that it was apparently a travel sickness remedy, which could “be administered to victims in the street, without them realising they have been drugged”. Perhaps it can. Yet Verify admitted there was “no evidence” it had been administered in the cases it examined, though it “has been used in robberies in Ecuador, France and Vietnam”. Even if it had been used in Britain, meanwhile, this would have been “difficult to establish”.

Sometimes, Verify even “proves” things that no one seriously disputes. One example came on 7 September, when it published images showing Israel had been building a new road along the border between Gaza and Egypt. Three weeks later, it analysed videos of the airstrike that killed Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut. The fact that solar panels were seen facing away from the bombed building suggested that the attack had come from the south: in other words from Israel. Who knew?

Combined with those monumental bylines — even a straightforward story about flooding in Libya involved a dozen staff — and that £3.2 million wage bill begins to feel oddly high. Indeed, Verify might cost the BBC even more than that. Notwithstanding the unit’s focus on transparency, when we asked the corporation about the rest of its budget, for costs such as travel and OSINT software, a spokeswoman said they weren’t available because they’re “accounted for as part of the overall BBC News budget”. 

Such munificence might matter less if the BBC was rolling in money. As it is, the corporation is seriously cash-strapped, a situation that’s obliged managers to cancel some of its most respected shows. Newsnight, for one, is now a shadow of its former self, shorn of filmed reports and investigations. HARDtalk, an in-depth interview programme, is vanishing too, despite first going on air back in 1997. Together with those 130 redundancies, and the high-level BBC insider is unsurprisingly upset about the corporation’s apparent focus on BBC Verify, especially when they suspect it’s indulged as Deborah Turness’s baby. “Because she is the head of news, it can only ever be declared a success,” he explains. “Its triumph is pre-ordained.” It hardly helps, the insider adds, that other sections of BBC News actually have to correct stories far less often than Verify — even as they “they don’t presume to be more truthful than anyone else”. 

Nor do things seem likely to change going forward. In late October, mere days after BBC director-general Tim Davie made a speech about the growing threat of “misinformation” from foreign powers, the corporation had ordered four of its most seasoned foreign correspondents back to Britain to save money. All had years of experience, backed by foreign language skills, of reporting on authoritarian regimes including China, Russia and North Korea. Now, though, they’d been told to cover news in Britain.

Within the BBC, the news was received with dismay. The Times quoted a staffer saying they had been “told to return at a time when the amount of propaganda we are up against is astounding. None of them costs very much money and strategically, it doesn’t make sense when you look at the big, looming stories.” But in the new BBC, it seems that on-the-ground reporting, battling to get at the truth, is destined to be replaced by analysis of videos shot by amateurs on mobile phones — all carried out by BBC Verify in London.

Certainly, the corporation clearly remains optimistic about the unit. 

More from this author

The Miliband files

By David Rose

We asked the BBC to comment on everything in this article. Its spokeswoman told us: “By their very nature, BBC Verify stories are heavy in facts and detail on contentious topics which can sometimes require clarifications and updates, and occasionally corrections, which we do in an openly transparent way. Often pieces are updated to show our workings to audiences — showing them how stories develop as new information comes to light. We do not recognise the flawed calculations that attempt to describe updated pieces with transparent workings as corrected articles.

“We are proud of the vital work that BBC Verify is doing, and our audience research shows that people value this offering and are actively seeking out BBC Verify stories to help them understand events.”

Regarding the false claim that the victims of the attack on the car during the riots were of Asian heritage, the spokesperson said: “The story used a range of technology, on the ground reports and social media to piece together how the violence escalated in Humberside that day. When we became aware of the new information we amended the story swiftly and transparently. We stand by the story as an accurate account of what happened.”

As for the now-deleted article about “racist” car insurance, the spokeswoman said that “we have been transparent in saying this story did not meet our normal editorial guidelines and why we withdrew the article”. She also defended the report claiming Israel had massacred Gazans when they tried to get food, despite relying on a single source who’d worked for a pro-Iran TV channel. “The fact,” she said, “that someone has expressed an opinion on social media doesn’t automatically disqualify them from giving eye-witness testimony.” 

Not everyone at the corporation is so bullish. Our BBC insider was unimpressed by these comments, saying he was dismayed that even when Verify had admitted that fundamental elements of major stories were wrong, they’d nonetheless stayed online. As he puts it: “This is misleading and dishonest.” 

Beyond the finances, questions about the unit surely remain. Scanning our analysis of the stories on BBC Verify’s website, it’s hard to avoid the impression that it’s selective with its targets: evidence, perhaps, of a certain Left-leaning bias. It doesn’t, for instance, examine claims made by Hamas with anything like the frequency and rigour it applies to Israel. During the UK election, meanwhile, it dismissed Reform UK’s manifesto by saying its promises had been described as impossible by “experts”, “economists” and “analysts” — without naming or quoting any of them. As was noted last week, meanwhile, it failed to measure the Budget, and the tax increases it contained, against Labour’s pledges during the election. 

Especially when the corporation is tightening its belt elsewhere, it’s little wonder Cohen remains sceptical. “At a time when the BBC is having to cut jobs and save a lot of money,” he concludes, “the track record of BBC Verify seems very hard to justify.”

The opening of Episode One presents the listener with the implicit antagonist of the rest of the series, to be schooled by all that is to come: young Rory, a neurotic-sounding child who “grew up wanting to know everything and believing I could know everything”. He would take the newspaper to his bedroom and spend hours there, cataloguing the day’s stories on his computer: “I became worried about the fact there might be things I did not know, books I might not read before I died”. He assumed “this knowledge was vital for what it was to be a human”. Later, in his twenties, he set out to walk through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal as an extension of his quest to mentally devour the world and all its contents. But along the way — plot twist! — he began to realise that the village people whose hospitality he was freely receiving were no less human for being illiterate, entirely parochial, and never having heard of Alexander the Great.

This, like many other of the stunningly obvious points made in the course of the series, is delivered by Stewart with all the ponderous solemnity of someone addressing small boys at a prep school speech day. And did you also know that sometimes people who feel certain about some particular matter can get things badly wrong? That it is impossible for government ministers to know everything about their ministerial briefs? That no expert can possibly know the future with certainty? That “I should not listen in to my wife’s conversations with her therapist or read my wife’s letters, partly because I will hear things will be painful … but partly in order to respect her privacy?” One cannot help suspecting that the reason Stewart thinks such points will seem staggeringly revelatory to the listener is because at some point they have been staggeringly revelatory for him.

As for the edgy reversal that presumably first got the series commissioned — namely, that ignorance can be valuable, and knowledge harmful — though heavily trailed, it barely makes an appearance until late on in the series. Instead we get some obfuscatory fluff about the limits of knowledge which has nothing to do with the main point, and in fact tends to underline how devastating ignorance can be. And when the main theme does eventually appear, the arguments for it are either disappointingly anti-climactic or confused.

Ignorance can be valuable, it turns out, because it would be hellish to know what everyone really thought of you; or because watching horrible things on the internet can mess you up; or because in the context of double-blind refereeing, it is a way of filtering out prejudices; or because a teacher might usefully leave out some difficult details of a topic in order to concentrate on the main point. Philosopher John Rawls makes an appearance too, with his “veil of ignorance” thought experiment, encouraging us to abstract away from our own particular circumstances when deciding how to distribute goods fairly in society — not really a case of ignorance at all, strictly speaking, but rather a case of temporarily ignoring what you already know.

In other words — not that Stewart troubles himself to reflect on what these cases might have in common — “ignorance” about some matter X is valuable, wherever consciously reflecting upon X would work against some wider rational purpose you also have (e.g. functioning without crippling self-doubt; getting through life without distressing flashbacks; being fair to other people by eliminating bias; teaching students by layering up their knowledge slowly). Here again, there is very little counterintuitive bang for your buck, despite all the teasing and hinting earlier on.

And what about the corresponding claim that knowledge can be positively harmful? The central case offered concerns a familiar folk devil for BBC programme makers, the conspiracy theorist of the Q-Anon variety; and more precisely, someone who does lots of research and can cite encyclopaedic references for his crazy conclusions. Such people, Stewart says, do not “necessarily know less than the average person”. In fact, they are “much more knowledgeable, so much more wrong… their desire for and their accumulation of knowledge only strengthens their delusion”.

At best, this is another banality — namely, that a little learning is a dangerous thing, and especially in the mind of someone with an idée fixe, obsessively trying to justify some point for deep-seated emotional reasons he can barely discern. At worst, it confuses being a reliable knower with someone who has lots of disjointed facts at his disposal, yet who is unable to connect them into rational, evidence-responsive wholes. The man who insists that lizards run the White House, and who also has a lot of true beliefs up his sleeve about the mating habits of lizards, is still a much less reliable knower than the average person who knows nothing in particular about lizards and believes the White House is run by humans.

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In fact, quite ironically given how sneery the programme is about conspiratorial thinking — loftily described as “pursuing knowledge through narcissism and insecurity” — the state of mind represented by The Long History Of Ignorance seems to me to have a lot in common with that of someone from Q-Anon. As with the format of many a BBC factual offering these days, we don’t so much get the slow and deliberate prosecution of a joined-up argument as a dizzying succession of historically orphaned facts and gnomic pronouncements. A variety of talking heads appear alongside Stewart, alternating between snippets of information to be taken on trust, and warnings about the dangers of taking things on trust from experts purporting to inform you. The series races from subject to subject — from indigenous wisdom to terrible mistakes in history, to the role of creativity in theory-construction, to the value of citizen’s assemblies, to William James, to personal relationships, and on and on — without spending more than a minute or two on each. It is impossible to solder the whole thing together into a coherent framework without leaving a lot of huge gaps.

We could call this style of thinking QAnon-style thinking, but equally we could call it QI-style thinking, in honour of the insufferable TV panel show of the same name. And indeed the originator of QI, television producer John Lloyd, pops up in the last episode of The Long History of Ignorance to tell us about the midlife crisis which prompted his creation: a personally difficult time, when he realised that all his many Bafta awards on the wall meant nothing, and that he understood very little about life. He then went travelling, and realised that “the world is inherently interesting, but for some reason it’s concealed from us”.

Of course this is true, though the solution hardly seems to be to chop the world up into tiny jigsaw puzzle pieces, only ever considering one or two in isolation at a time. A bit like Stewart’s series, effectively QI treats the building of human knowledge as if it is exactly the same project as rote learning a list of dislocated facts or quasi-facts, to be regurgitated entertainingly at dinner parties later. The conceit of the show is that the information to which various smug luvvies draw our attention is “surprising” and “interesting”, though this only works at all because collectively most of us are such ignoramuses. And as with Stewart’s series, the clever-clever public profiles of the celebrity presenters and guests — Stephen Fry, Sandi Toksvig, etc. — tend to do most of the work in establishing putative intellectual credibility.

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That some piece of information is “interesting” in the QI sense, or indeed the Radio 4 sense — say, that monkeys don’t actually eat bananas, or that until 1858 all British passports were written in French — is only because it exposes a previously false or lazy assumption of ours that we hadn’t noticed before. If we had fewer false assumptions, because we were able to connect discrete pieces of information up with their intellectual hinterlands and explain to ourselves coherently why they are likely to be true, the world would become much less “interesting “in this sense — you can’t be surprised by what you already know — but it would become more fascinating in quite another.

But perhaps a would-be technocrat like Stewart doesn’t want you to do too much of that sort of thing — you might end up seeing through the soundbites. For all that he frequently says he wants a more intelligent kind of government, in practice he often seems uneasy with treating audiences as intellectual equals. Along with his combative co-host on The Rest is Politics podcast, too often he opts for lazily smearing or mocking political opponents, saving them both the bother of having to try to justify their criticisms in detail. But one can’t have it both ways: finding a more intelligent way to govern requires spelling out to would-be voters the detailed thinking behind particular political decisions, in a way that doesn’t presuppose prior agreement, and isn’t just flirting gratifyingly with a home crowd.

In any case, given the dominant format of BBC factual programming these days, there is little hope of the licence fee providing something with more depth along these lines. There are honourable exceptions — the astonishing In Our Time is one — but for the most part, even Radio 4 shows badged as “serious” and “important” as this one are ludicrously superficial. The independent podcast market is now streets ahead, in terms of the extended time, focus, and degree of detail it can offer to juicily cerebral topics. It seems that there is a real appetite out there for completing the jigsaw.

Indeed, at the end of The Long History Of Ignorance, Stewart gravely tells us that “the boundary between knowledge and ignorance is never static… we are always dealing with the limits of knowledge. But we must explore and respond to those limits in every conceivable way.” Who could disagree with such a thought? But if it’s real insight into the relationship between intellectual light and darkness you are after, you should probably look elsewhere. It’s one thing to be given a leg up, by standing on the shoulders of giants; quite another to be helicoptered to the summit, then left there with no map.

The BBC’s malaise as compared with the big streaming platforms, addressed in the Director General Tim Davie’s speech last week, is a cultural expression of other national failings — primarily the inability to capitalise on success that has bedevilled British industry for generations. Just as the birthplace of the jet engine, of the worldwide web and of television itself finds its innovations adopted and then outpaced by other nations, so Britain serially underperforms in its cultural exports. As Davie observed, “On global streamers, a minority of the offer is UK content,” with the result that “global economic models drive you to a different place, editorially, from a UK player”.

They certainly do. There are few more revealing exercises than burrowing deep within the algorithmic suggestions of the big streaming platforms to see the cultural production subsidised by Britain’s state rivals. For some years now, the Russian state has overseen the production of big-budget war dramas, with a theme of painful sacrifice in the service of the Motherland: it does not take a conspiratorial mind to see this output as a foreshadowing of current events. China, similarly, has produced countless lavish historical epics on the past glory of the Middle Kingdom, a flexing of civilisational confidence that reflects the priorities of the rising superpower. India’s increasingly nationalistic output, equally, should be recommended viewing for British policymakers keen to win New Delhi’s favour: Britain most frequently appears in current Indian cinema as the source of cartoon villains, brutal sneering foils to the patriotic heroism of the leading actor. It is not an exaggeration to say that, buried within the bowels of Netflix and Amazon, we gain a clearer sense of the worldview of the rising powers of the coming decades than in all the sensible think-tank pieces driving British foreign policy.

What, then, does Britain’s outward-facing cultural production say about us? Frankly, nothing good. There are few more heart-sinking phrases in the English language than “Home-grown British Drama”, given the British film industry’s strange fascination with preachy kitchen sink parables, and unwatched gentle boomer comedies set in neglected regions. If a nation is defined by its culture, then ours is Jim Broadbent going on a bittersweet late-life journey of self-discovery across the Durham coalfields, forever. There are two opposing strands to the British imagination, the astonishing, visionary creativity that, we too easily forget, still characterises Britain to the wider world, and the suffocating tweeness around which our state-funded cultural exports revolve. The wrong strand still dominates.

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And if our external efforts are drab and lifeless, British television’s domestic output, like our high streets, increasingly appears a blasted wasteland. The bulk of the BBC’s programming can be characterised as Blue Peter for adults, whose presenters address the audience with the cheerily patronising, dead-eyed bonhomie of staff in a nursing home. If ITV expresses the inner world of the British working class, then it is alone a rebuke to any post-liberal project: surely no hope lies in the proles. And Channel 4, whose executives to this day see themselves as edgily groundbreaking innovators, produces by some margin the most formulaic programming on British television, endless “blue-light” observational formats set in maternity hospitals and animal shelters that blur interchangeably into each other. From its daytime roster of programmes warning pensioners about telephone scams and featuring aspiring slum landlords buying up rundown terraces at property auctions, to its evening output following the artificially constructed sexual quandaries of dazzling-toothed Deanos, British television presents an almost surrealist vision of modern Britain in all its claustrophobic grimness.

In these circumstances, it seems delusional to lament the audience’s drift towards American streaming services: it is the rational choice for any discerning consumer. It is perhaps too late for the BBC to catch up with Netflix, given its inattention to technological investment: until recently, it was impossible to even favourite a programme for later watching on iPlayer, one of the most basic functionalities of any streaming service. Yet as with everything else in modern Britain, the malaise is easily fixable with a clear reformist vision and a ruthless wielding of the scalpel. If British cultural production is an industry in decline, then it requires an industrial strategy to address. And as with heavy industry, that overperforming fellow middle power, South Korea, perhaps provides the clearest model to follow.

As a concerted effort of state policy, the South Korean government has championed film and television in service of the country’s soft power, with remarkable success. Launched by the Korean government nearly two decades ago, as “a distinct cultural policy based on state-developmentalism, public diplomacy, and nation branding” with the explicit aim of using culture “as both a domestic and foreign policy tool to strengthen its economic diversification, export profile, and cultural and public diplomacy outcomes”, the Korean Wave or Hallyu has been a remarkable global success. As one academic study observes, through the Hallyu policy Korea’s “export of cultural goods and services has grown exponentially; between 1998 and 2019, it chalked up a forty-time increase from $188.9 million to $12.3 billion in 2019”, with a ripple effect on other industries, so that between 2011 and 2016, every $100 of exported Hallyu content “generated an attendant export of USD248 worth of consumer goods from South Korea”.

Seeded by government grants and a concerted, joined-up state effort to enhance Korea’s global standing, the Hallyu policy has matured over time to depend on private finance. While the government bore the initial risks, as the Korean Wave has blossomed, a corporate ecosystem has evolved, generating both revenue and cultural and diplomatic capital in the service of the state. South Korea’s cultural diplomacy does not strive, like the BBC does, to compete with American platforms: instead it employs the Netflix and YouTube infrastructure in clear-eyed pursuit of its own goals. Working with laser-guided efficiency towards global success, South Korea’s cultural output nevertheless remains firmly Korean. Perhaps it is this unapologetic Korean-ness, that unabashed cultural self-confidence that makes it so appealing to a global audience. It does not fawningly attempt, as we do in every sphere, to seek American approval, but wins international esteem for being so resolutely of itself.

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Yet international success does not mean playing to the gallery: from Old Boy to Squid Game, Last Train to Busan and Parasite, South Korea’s international film and television hits have been marked by formal experimentation, dark and disturbing themes and a relentless quest to construct new visual worlds. It is the precise opposite approach to Britain’s cultural strategy in recent decades, a strategy which has not only failed but goes against what is most striking about the British character: its seam of visionary, innovative imagination, too often crushed by uninspired management, a timid desire to play it safe, and the relentless national trait of letting others exploit and benefit from its own low-hanging fruit.

Tim Davie’s assertion that the BBC’s “most successful approach is to focus on our point of difference: authentic British stories produced beautifully, not worrying too much about an abstract notion of global appeal” makes the right noises, yet his focus on “a shared British culture and our democratic, tolerant society” and gobbledegook pursuit of “unique algorithms to serve our values, for good… that bring us closer, not drive us apart” naturally makes eyes glaze over. There is surely no more interest globally than there is domestically in a televisual cross between Very British Problems and a period of detention in a Michaela school, or in being lectured on our Brilliant British Values by Marianna Spring. All of this is an expression not of cultural self-confidence but of its absence, the state broadcaster uneasily papering over cracks that threaten to bring down the roof. Like the country itself, British programming is hidebound by timidity and self-doubt.

In his 2021 essay “After Brexit, We Need an Iron Maiden Britain”, the writer Jeremy Driver posits the unfashionable, but undeniably successful, rock band as a model for a reformed British state: bombastically self-confident, freed from the tiresome restraints of good taste and unashamedly hungry for global success. In pursuit of soft power and prosperity, I would go even further: we need Warhammer Britain. The unfashionable, but wildly popular hobby is an underexploited national champion which a country like South Korea would long ago have swung behind in pursuit of soft power. More profitable than Google, worth more than Marks & Spencer, the Games Workshop company behind it has turned the Warhammer 40k intellectual property into a global phenomenon. It is remarkable, for example, that both sides in the Ukraine war have displayed a tendency to allude to Warhammer’s fictional universe, with Ukraine even fielding two units named after its fantasy factions: that is what soft power means. Warhammer’s lucrative gaming figurines are all made in Britain, with the company about to open its fourth factory, bucking national economic trends. During lockdown, the company didn’t claim any government subsidies despite shuttering its more than 500 shops: it’s so profitable it didn’t need to. Its characters are “ridiculous, over-the-top pastiches, created by people who were bored and angry” in a world where “hope has been extinguished for millennia” — and what could be more British than that?

With its global fanbase, its relentlessly successful pursuit of market dominance and ever-expanding profit, its rooting in British culture and commitment to local industry, the Warhammer intellectual property has the potential to be a British Disney or Marvel, an endlessly productive cash cow that simultaneously advances the nation’s soft power, not least within state adversaries such as Russia and China. As Games Workshop recently declared, “we own what we believe is some of the best under exploited intellectual property (‘IP’) globally”, a statement of self-belief that is surely correct. Yet — as so often — Britain lets America reap the full benefits, with Amazon set to exploit its popularity in a lavishly-funded series of TV shows and films produced by the British actor Henry Cavill. There is no reason why the BBC, with government backing, could not have picked this luscious low-hanging fruit as a national champion: all the elements for success present themselves with glaring obviousness.

But the same could be said for other under-exploited British intellectual property: given the relentlessness with which discourse in recent years has revolved around issues of empire, colonialism and race, the Flashman series of novels, which presents Britain’s imperial history with a far more sceptical and ambivalent eye, rooted in scholarly accuracy, than many perhaps realise, could have been a global success, deftly asserting Britain’s ownership of its own history. Why was the success of Peter Weir’s Master and Commander not capitalised on with a reboot of the Hornblower series? Given the success of BBC’s The Last Kingdom, an adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon series of novels — promptly sold to Netflix, with the quality declining even as the budget was boosted — could we not use the vast armies conjurable with CGI to reboot Cornwell’s Sharpe series for a new audience, or even better, adapt his Arthurian series on the forging of the British nation in a way that speaks, as the source material does, to Britain’s current, fissiparous challenges? From HBO’s Rome to Disney’s Shogun, the appeal of immersive historical worlds is enduring — and our national inclination to recreate them is surely the basis of our global brand.

The answer is that none of this is appealing to our cultural tastemakers, even if it would be wildly popular both at home and abroad. But, then, the British culture industry has been captured by people who are worse than political enemies: they are simply boring. It possesses neither the confidence to strive for high culture, nor the commercial instincts to exploit what is organically popular, leaving us stranded with a middlebrow output that, by trying to appeal to everyone, pleases no one. Who does not, when they hear a “topical” Radio 4 afternoon play, or listen to Mark Steel perform his notionally comedic circuit of provincial towns, reach for their proverbial revolver? It is like being trapped in a dictatorship whose cultural showpiece was the 2012 Olympic Ceremony. But the BBC’s rivals are no better: Channel 4 shows more of a commitment to showing quality European drama than making it, a reflection of our sad cultural cringe and lack of self-belief, while it would be an act of national self-harm to inflict ITV’s programming on the wider world. Like everything in Britain, in the interests of national survival, our cultural output requires total reform.

So where do we start? Conflicted though our tastemakers may feel about it, Britain’s Early Modern history is the basis of our global brand: it is the reason why the English language, the English men’s suit, and the game of football have become so widely adopted, globally, that it is hard to remember they are expressions of our national culture, surely the most widely adopted ethnic culture in world history. This is a vast seam of cultural capital, ready and waiting to be mined, which a South Korea could only dream of. But instead we let the wider world write our national story, turning Britain, as in Bridgerton, into a theme park for other cultures’ fantasies, a provincial museum whose captions are written by other people — and rarely to our best interests.

There is a vast market for a Britishness beyond our oscillation between tweeness and miserabilism, for a confidence that can be feigned even if it is hard to feel, and where even working out our doubts and insecurities in art — with a clear-sighted honesty absent in Britain’s current cultural output — would be productive. If we accept the argument, made in defence of the licence fee, that the BBC is a tool of British soft power, then in an era of global confrontation and self-assertion by rising powers, drawing on their history for worldly success, it must begin to act like it. For our age of moping twee to end, Britain’s new cultural imperium must begin.

If the same incident replayed today — let’s imagine that the spirit of Glenn has possessed the mind of Gareth — the purification ritual would be just as intense, but its rhetorical architecture would be different. The manager would be called out for disseminating dangerous misinformation. Anti-hate NGOs and think-tanks would conduct rapid-reaction research on how many social media accounts “liked” and shared the manager’s hateful narrative. And Marianna Spring, the BBC’s indefatigable disinformation journalist, would no doubt launch a special investigation to expose all the harm caused, especially to women and minorities with disabilities.

Misinformation, or whatever you want to call it, has always existed. The difference today, as Spring explains in her book, Among the Trolls: My Journey Through Conspiracyland, is that it’s now “turbocharged”, spreading at a rate and volume hitherto unprecedented, thanks to the internet and social media. At the same time, an entire industry of journalists, academics and experts has arisen to hunt down, track and police misinformation. In some ways, this industry is just as creepy and alarming as the conspiracy culture it gorges on, mirroring its familiar pathologies of distortion and hyperbole.

Spring’s book shines a vivid light onto the assumptions and biases of those who toil away in it. This isn’t, of course, the book’s purpose. Spring’s aim, rather, is to journey into conspiracyland and to speak to its inhabitants in order to better understand who they are and how they got there. Her intention is also to show that what goes on in conspiracyland can cause suffering far beyond it. Often, she steps into the centre of her own story, relaying all the voluminous hate that she herself has received as a result of her reporting. She even reaches out to several of her trolls to understand their motives.

Spring argues that disinformation (i.e. deliberate lying) doesn’t just cause harm to private citizens and journalists like herself, but threatens the very fabric of democracy. She cites the January 6 storming of the US Capitol as a primary example, even though democracy didn’t in fact die in darkness on that day — and the chance of Trump’s motley crew of mostly unarmed supporters seizing power was almost zero.

One side-effect of hate, Spring observes, is that it intimidates people and makes them fearful to speak out. She’s right, of course: many people, for example, are afraid to criticise or mock Islam because they’re worried that some Muslim believers might murder them for it, as happened to Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004 and in Paris in 2015 at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were coldly executed by brothers Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi. Many, too, are afraid to criticise the political claims and activities of Islamists, believing — with some warrant — that to do so will incur the damaging and sometimes dangerous charge of “Islamophobia”. This point holds with even greater vehemence within the Islamic fold, where Muslims have been murdered after hateful accusations of blasphemy and apostasy have been levelled against them.

However, Spring doesn’t discuss these examples, intuiting perhaps that were she to do so it wouldn’t be good for business or her personal safety. (“How I Confronted My Jihadi Troll” isn’t happening anytime soon over at BBC Sounds.) Nor does she show any curiosity about the huge, roiling global conspiracy theory called jihadism that has directly led to the deaths of hundreds of British civilians over the last decade and a half — to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Muslims and other minorities it has killed elsewhere across the globe.

The book goes on to argue that because hate undermines free speech it should be censored and that social media companies should be more vigorously pressured by governments to eradicate hate from their platforms. This is a weak and incoherent argument: even controversial ideas, such as the view that some women make poor football pundits, deserve to be protected from censorship. Of course, there are limits to free speech and there are laws that punish speech which causes direct and serious harms, such as incitement to violence, fraud, perjury and defamation. But the kinds of limits Spring has in mind are far more expansive than this and would permit the prohibition of a vast swathe of speech that is offensive but not dangerous. At no point does she consider that prohibiting such speech would itself cause serious harm to the very democratic values she claims to uphold.

Indeed, Among the Trolls is a somewhat repetitive and predictable book written in the tone of a concerned school mistress whose reprimands are more in sorrow than in anger. The conspiracy theorists Spring meets are more banal than demonic, the tech companies she presses for comment are cold and unresponsive bureaucracies, and the ordinary normies who are harassed by conspiracy theorists are all very lovely and relatable.

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These clichés of thought are dutifully recorded in clichés of prose. Popular conspiracy theories, we’re informed seven times, “spread like wildfire”, while the people who believe in them have “fallen down the rabbit hole”. One prominent conspiracy theorist, it turns out, “seemed to have gone off the deep end”, while a long-suffering son of another “had reached his wits’ end”.

Spring seems to have fallen down a “rabbit hole” herself. Recent research by academic Sacha Altay and his colleagues shows that, contrary to Spring’s narrative, the internet is not saturated with misinformation, but with memes and entertainment; that falsehoods don’t spread faster than the truth; that people don’t believe everything they see online; that they’re more likely to be uninformed than misinformed; and that the influence of misinformation is exaggerated since it often “preaches to the choir”.

Many of the popular misconceptions identified by Altay inform the overarching narrative of Among the Trolls, and while Spring tries to be non-judgmental toward the conspiracy theorists she meets, especially the “true believers”, her approach is deterministic and a little patronising. Many, she thinks, “are misguided and misled, vulnerable to the worst liars and lies”. Indeed, Spring often suggests that were it not for some wound in their lives they would have never journeyed to conspiracyland.

What this account fails to capture is not only the agency of those in conspiracyland, but also its intrinsic appeal to those who jump towards it. Conspiracy culture, for those who are part of it, offers a profound spiritual enlargement of the world, imbuing it with hidden meanings, mysteries and secrets. Conspiracies can be engaging and fun and thrillingly transgressive. But you wouldn’t know this from reading Among the Trolls.

Anyone who touts themself as a disinformation journalist will inevitability be accused of purveying disinformation. Spring’s online critics have said the same about her, and when it transpired that she had once told a lie to advance her career — she’d made something up on her CV — many sought to make a great deal of hay out of it. There are no lies in Among the Trolls, as far as I could tell, but there are several instances when Spring trades in what she herself would call misinformation. One of these concerns the racist abuse targeted at England’s black players after the Euro 2021 final against Italy, which England lost on penalties. She writes that “a mural that honoured [Marcus] Rashford in Withington, the suburb of Manchester where he’d grown up, was defaced”, strongly implying that this was motivated by racism. It wasn’t.

But the deeper problem with Among the Trolls relates to its sins of omission. It is here that the inherent political bias of Spring’s wider enterprise reveals itself. “I’m driven by exposing disinformation, hate and polarisation that cause serious harm and often reach a significant number of people,” she writes. Yet only insofar as it has a Right-wing valence, for Spring has little interest in conspiracy theories or misinformation that lean Left. This reflects a broader selectivity bias among disinformation journalists, for whom, as the statistician and writer Nate Silver has observed, the “term ‘misinformation’ nearly always signifies conservative arguments (which may or may not be actual misinfo)”.

There isn’t much self-awareness or self-doubt in Among the Trolls. Spring notes that conspiracy theories thrive because of a distrust of mainstream media. This is surely true, but she doesn’t recognise that the kind of politicised journalism she engages in helps deepen that distrust. On a few occasions when she meets the denizens of conspiracyland, she pushes them to defend their beliefs with evidence and then gently chides them when they cannot. Yet it never seems to occur to her that she, too, has beliefs or that those beliefs, which closely adhere to the official consensus that now underpins all elite institutions, require any kind of defence. Rather, she just assumes that they are true — and that any deviation from them amounts to misinformation.

Despite the best efforts of disinformation journalists, conspiracyland is here to stay: the demand for it is just too great. People want and like conspiracies — and nobody more so than those who make a lucrative and celebrated career out of finding and exposing them.

Can the same be said for its pretentious spin-off, MasterChef: The Professionals? Or does it need to be sent back to the kitchen?

I have lingered over every dish of the 16th series. After seven weeks of culinary challenges, with 31 other professionals eliminated, Tom Hamblet was crowned champion last Friday. Yes, it’s taken me almost a week to digest the news. But it didn’t always go down so easily.

My love/hate relationship with the programme got me into trouble a few years back, after I railed against its “smug, self-congratulatory” judges. That same day I received the nastiest piece of hate mail to ever land in my inbox, if we leave out the death threats and calls for my decapitation.

It was from one of those smug, self-congratulatory judges. They — yes, they; I’m loathe to identify this person — railed against my attempt at humour, calling me a “pretty dull, joyless, clumsy uninspired writer”, adding that they “didn’t ever have [me] marked down as yer actual nasty little shit”. Anthony Bourdain, they weren’t.

I replied, saying I was flattered that they had read enough of my writing to be able to form a nuanced and considered opinion. “You’re a thoroughly nasty, bitter, unpleasant piece of work who chooses to make enemies of people who would otherwise be on your side,” replied the judge. “So not just boring and nasty. But intensely stupid too. It’s a killer combination.” That’s when I realised that viewers are not the only ones taking MasterChef too seriously — those at the tasting table are at it as well.

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When did cookery shows get this intense? And why, over the 33 years of its amateur, professional, and celebrity servings, do we keep coming back for more?

MasterChef, as it then was, used to be a very different animal. I started watching back in 1990, when it was on a Sunday afternoon, presented by Lloyd Grossman. During his decade at the serving hatch, its style was formal, well-mannered and very old-fashioned. More brasserie than burger bar.

Described as “The British Grand Prix for Amateur Chefs”, contestants from across the UK would cook for a food expert, perhaps a chef or restaurateur, or just any old celebrity — Ulrika Johnson and Imogen Stubbs were both guests on the programme. Such women would invariably make twee remarks about “death by chocolate” when tasting the dessert, or “pure evil!” if they really liked something. This was a world where contestants would compete to do the most complex thing to a potato, and a kiwi garnish would be the height of sophistication. Don’t get me started on the fruit coulis. Or the loud slurping noises that would accompany it.

By the turn of the millennium, a makeover was unquestionably called for. “Very nice” as a descriptor would no longer cut the moutarde. Chef Gary Rhodes took over for a while — but by 2008, Torode, with a mouth so wide you could reverse a Ford Cortina into it, and custard-loving Wallace had their feet under the kitchen table.

Since then, the programme has been high energy and lots of fun, peppered with an assortment of tasty characters. Once upon a time, lesbians had a reputation for making bad vegan food — but MasterChef has punctured the myth that we don’t know our way around a joint of meat. In the most recent series, for instance, I fell in love with Molly from Leeds. Not just because she’s a lesbian, of course, but because of the enthusiastic way she placed her perfectly poached haddock on a fancy potato.

There wasn’t anything tasty, though, about the finalists’ visit to a grotesquely expensive restaurant in Denmark that serves food designed to “make you think”. Calling itself the “world’s most daring restaurant”, it serves caged chicken in a bid to get customers to consider animal cruelty. Also on the menu are pigs’ windpipes and cows’ udder sacs. I half-wondered if they were going to serve up Torode’s Ford Cortina for dessert.

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Why do we love to hate MasterChef? I suspect it has something to do with the way it transposes the utterly unimportant and insignificant into a context in which the stakes seem unbearably high. Contestants behave as though they are ending child poverty or curing cancer — when in fact they are only producing a perfectly set sorbet, or a jus that is to die for, or a perfectly poached haddock.

Yes, there are some bits that make me want to vomit. The pompous judges, their overzealous “tasting” faces, the toothsome language they use to describe the food. The well-rehearsed spontaneity and staged annoyance with contestants who are late plating-up gets stuck in my craw.

But I also love the highfalutin food nonsense. In the recent season, contestant Kasae offered up a gorgonzola mousse topped with nasturtium-caramelised walnut gel, caramelised batak-pepper apple, walnuts, candied walnuts and salty sea fingers, along with pear and nectarine chutney served with a ginger-and-timut-pepper bread. At least half of these ingredients were strangers to me. But they flicked every one of Wallace’s custard-loving switches.

Then there’s Monica Galeti. Fancying her just means you are breathing (at least, it does for us lesbians). And Torode and Wallace wind me up completely. The way Wallace puts on his facial expressions and phwoars, telling us in his faux cockney accent that he wants to give the dessert “a great big cuddle”. I hate it but I lap it all up.

Shortly after the latest series concluded, I contacted the judge who’d sent me those rude emails all those years ago, asking if they would do the same in response to this piece. “The short answer is no, I wouldn’t,” they replied. “Read back nine years later those emails look practically unhinged.”

But what if we were all unhinged at the time? I suppose that’s part of its winning recipe. A sprinkle of the absurd. A dash of pretence. A glug of the likes of Monica or Molly. Friday night dinner is always supposed to be chaotic — and perhaps that’s its secret ingredient.

Nothing could bring our waning love for the automobile more forcefully home than reports that the BBC may be axing its internationally bestselling motoring show, Top Gear. First broadcast in 1977, fronted by Angela Rippon and Tom Coyne, Top Gear began as a straight-faced motoring magazine show. It became the best-selling juggernaut production of its peak period after a 2002 reboot, fronted by the laddish trio of Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond.

At its peak, Top Gear encapsulated an entire relationship between engineering and the pursuit of excellence: one inextricably bound up in material and cultural conditions that were already wavering when Clarkson was fired. And it’s this complex relationship, equal parts technical and emotional, which is in flux today: not just within the show itself, but out in the car-driving world itself.

The joy of Top Gear, in its Clarkson/Hammond/May salad days, was the way it captured the two dominant forms of motoring enthusiast: the tinkerer, and the petrolhead. Top Gear tinkerer features would depict these three middle-aged men making daft modifications to second-hand cars, for example turning a Porsche 944 into an “ambulance”, or a Ford Transit into a “hovervan”,  then try to complete ever sillier challenges. Petrolhead segments would feature the same three middle-aged men, driving beautiful, fast, staggeringly expensive miracles of engineering perfection through stunning landscapes.

Of course, petrolheads and tinkerers are often one and the same, though in my observation car-lovers tend to incline one way or the other. My late dad, for example, was a tinkerer: an engineer by training, he spent as much time as he could get away with in a workshop overflowing with hand and power tools, plus shelf after shelf of labelled tobacco tins brimming with nuts, bolts and other small objects that might come in handy one day.

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Tinkerers, of course, don’t confine their tinkering to cars. But cars have, historically, been a central object of tinkering attention. Whether mending, restoring, customising, or otherwise fiddling about with engines, the tinkerer is happiest absorbed in the material business of making the damn thing work. This both affords distinctive pleasures, and calls for a particular mindset: one eloquently defended by the mechanic and philosopher Matthew Crawford.

Working with your hands, Crawford argues, requires distinctive modes of knowing based in practice, imitation, and tradition as much as in abstract principles. Importantly, too, such work requires a pragmatic acceptance and understanding of what your chosen material will and won’t accommodate, such as flexibility, flammability, melting-point and so on. The resulting aggregate skill set is both physical and aesthetic: Crawford speaks of “pride in meeting the aesthetic demands of a workmanlike installation”, a sentiment my dad would indisputably have recognised.

For the petrolhead, meanwhile, the main attraction is how fun it is to make machines go ridiculously fast. Crawford analyses the emotional side of driving as a distinct aspect of his philosophy of engines, arguing that self-directed driving at speed expresses an attitude to risk-taking and personal agency that delivers immense social benefits.

For Crawford, giving up that sense of agency to an infrastructure of automated vehicles, speed cameras, and safety-minded restrictions may deliver some social utility, narrowly understood. But, driving is emotional as well as functional, expressing that aspect of our spirit that takes risks, and aspires to mastery of our tools. At its best, he characterises skilled driving as a “state of grace”.

In peak Top Gear, the avatar of tinkering was James May: an amiable nerd emanating pure essence of garden-shed. Clarkson, on the other hand, embodied the petrolhead delight at what these engines can do. (Hammond was the designated straight man and token biker.) Clarkson obviously knew about as much about engineering as I do, but his transparent delight at howling V8s, smoking brakes, and machines that let you corner at speeds that would kill you in a lesser vehicle, was genuinely infectious to watch even for a motoring agnostic like me.

But in different ways, both the tinkerer and the petrolhead have been losing cultural cachet for some time. Indeed, Top Gear itself captured this decline, mostly depicting tinkering in comic terms, and motoring excellence as the out-of-reach preserve of far-away experts. The supercar segments lionised these sleek, roaring vehicles as things of magic and wonder a long way from the reach of someone in a shed. And while my dad took his own tinkering seriously enough, car modifications for Top Gear challenges are usually comically shonky workmanship done not for the admiration and emulation of tinkering peers, but for banter. In amidst all the motoring was a pessimistic message radically at odds with Britain’s history as a nation of engineers: that fiddling under the bonnet is off-limits to amateurs, except as a joke.

As for the emotional side of driving, petrolhead joy in the high-velocity “state of grace” has also grown problematic. This is partly thanks to mounting anxieties over the financial and environmental price of fossil fuels — and, more broadly, a growing sense of scarcity. But it’s not just climate change. It speaks, too, to a growing discomfort with the pursuit of excellence as such — especially such resoundingly impractical forms of excellence as a car that will do 0-60 in 2.5 seconds but doesn’t have a boot.

Engineering miracles such as the Bugatti Veyron express a culture that will stop at nothing in pursuit of the “state of grace”, attainable in transcendent moments of harmony between driver and machine. And the cultural cachet accorded to this pursuit is, far more broadly, on the wane. It’s hard to point at a single cause, though it’s possible that at least some of those who once pursued mastery of tools and machines now devote the same attention to video gaming. In any case, the tinkering culture that once underpinned such joyfully pointless quests for excellence is also waning. Here, de-industrialisation no doubt plays a part, and it probably doesn’t help that modern gadgets are deliberately built to thwart tinkerers. So, too, are modern cars: there is much less point in buying a Haynes manual for a vehicle whose innards are largely powered by computer software.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the kind of inventive “shopcraft” that once characterised Britain’s tinkerers is today found more in culture where scarcity is part of life, and hence where tinkerers are still valued. Nor should it surprise us if the aspiration to build supercars has migrated with the tinkerers. Earlier this year, Entop unveiled the first Afghan supercar: the Simurgh, which looks like a Batmobile and runs on a modified 2000 Toyota Corolla engine.

The internal combustion engine was, once upon a time, accessible both mechanically and financially. Such machines afforded a democratic and emotionally potent playground for the symbiotic 20th-century emergence of the tinkerer and the petrolhead: the twin mastery of the engine’s innards, and of its capacity for excellence. But with its comical tinkerers and inaccessibly magical supercars, even peak Top Gear tacitly acknowledged that this age was on its way out.

Post-Clarkson the show has limped on for several fairly forgettable series, until presenter Freddie Flintoff’s horrific track accident last year took it off the air – possibly forever. And this may be wise: for even by 2015, the writing was on the wall.

Regulatory changes and rising fuel costs were already combining into the now acutely palpable pressure on Western consumers, to shift from internal combustion toward batteries. Some years on, there are no car manufacturers anywhere (except perhaps in Afghanistan) working on new internal-combustion models, while the cars we already have are at the heart of many energy-related culture wars. Whether it’s the cost of EVs, the politics of “Net Zero”, “15-minute cities”, or the geopolitics of petrol prices, much of our most contested political fractures concern personal transport. Against that backdrop, Top Gear’s fun, relatively apolitical magazine format feels at best out of step, if not outright disingenuous.

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And the energy transition has a bearing on the car as symbol of agency, too. This is partly practical: compared with internal combustion engines, the technical complexity of EVs poses tremendous barriers to entry for car-tinkerers. And there’s a class element, too: hybrids and EVs are prohibitively expensive compared with a battered-but-serviceable petrol runabout.

No wonder, then, that many young people are deciding not to bother, or to treat cars as mere appliances, with as little emotional weight as a dishwasher. To the extent that cars speak of agency or excellence today, they do so in ways that are ever more problematic – or simply inaccessible, whether through complexity or cost.

Cheap, abundant fossil fuels may have placed machine-enhanced grace temporarily in the hands of Everyman; but today, we are witnessing the end of that era. I have too much faith in the world’s nerds to imagine that tinkerers will ever die out completely; but the meaning of cars has already changed forever. And outside the dwindling community of tinkerers, a culture that has largely abandoned the search for mechanical mastery may not even feel this as much of a loss.

Still, who could ever have guessed that the treble-winner of The Sun “Shagger of the Year” award — the self-confessed owner of a “Wonka ticket to a lovely sex factory thanks to the ol’ fame” — might stray into territory which the words “rape” and “assault” would feature? Of course, there was that 2015 Mail on Sunday interview with Brand’s ex-girlfriend, an articulate former model called Jordan Martin, in which she said that during their six-month relationship, in 2007, the star was controlling, verbally cruel and sexually assaulted her. She warned politicians such as Ed Miliband — recently interviewed by Brand — to stay away. But the wider media didn’t really want to hear. Exes, eh? And anyway, Brand was box-office: a quick-witted, motor-mouthed Essex Byron in a fright wig and skinny jeans who made scant secret of his predilections, although his rhetoric cleverly shunted them more towards the seaside-postcard end of sexuality: his helpless eagerness to service a non-stop parade of willing dolly birds — “different women three, four, five times a day. In Ireland, nine times a day” — which had intermittently landed him in the sex addiction clinic, alias “sex chokey” or “winky nick”.

There are no doubt numerous women for whom sex with Brand delivered more or less what was expected: a fleeting encounter with celebrity, and a longer-lasting anecdote. The details that emerged from the joint investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches, The Sunday Times and The Times, however, were grimmer and more shocking. One was of Brand pursuing a star-struck 16-year-old girl, Alice, now a regretful adult. At first, the fact of taking Alice’s virginity was enough to excite him, she said. Later, she alleged, his kick came from spitting in her mouth and compelling her to swallow it; or forcing her into oral sex until she punched her way free. Another woman said he raped her at his LA house, an allegation backed up by her visit to a rape crisis centre, and text exchanges in which she wrote “When a girl say(s) NO it means no” in response to which Brand apologised. Yet another woman — whom he met at AA and later worked with — described a sexual assault from Brand which she finally fought off, reportedly leaving him furious.

Dispatches is not a courtroom, of course, and Brand has not been found guilty of a crime. But, then, this type of incident often doesn’t make it to court, as both predators and victims are acutely aware. They unfurl in territory with which many women are nauseously familiar, but which a certain proportion of men seemingly struggle to see clearly or take seriously: situations in which a woman agreed to one sexual act but not another; or consented to sex on a previous occasion but not this time round. Situations in which a measure of trust is swiftly and starkly betrayed.

Brand, who denies the allegations of rape and assault, is now married with two children. He has created a bolt-hole from cancellation in his social media platforms, flanked by an army of 6.6 million followers on YouTube alone. From there he accuses the mainstream media, or “MSM”, of having “another agenda at play” and seeking to silence him for asking difficult questions about Big Pharma and other hot-button topics. Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson have already responded to the clarion call with sympathetic comments. Yet the truth is that Brand himself is a creature of the MSM, as he must know. Mainstream broadcasters and media built him up, flattered him, fawned over him and handed him the keys to the sexual “Wonka factory”. And if its previous record is anything to go by, his spell in what Brandspeak might dub “reputation chokey” may not last long.

A brief list of things that — by a kind of communal consensus — the media has ultimately found excusable in the past: John Peel’s penchant for sex with underage girls (broadcasting genius, and it was the Seventies). Bill Wyman’s sexual relationship with Mandy Smith, then 14 (he was a Rolling Stone, for god’s sake, and it was the Eighties). Jimmy Carr’s Channel 4 rape jokes, such as “what’s the difference between rape and football? Women don’t like football” (if you don’t like “spicy content’” don’t listen). Frankie Boyle’s rape jokes about female athletes, and foully relentless gags about the abducted child Madeleine McCann (ditto: anyway, Frankie’s ‘progressive’ now).

If you’ve been around long enough, however, some things stick in your mind — extraordinary pieces of moral blindness, enabled by the media. One came when Dylan Jones, then editor of GQ, commissioned the late A.A. Gill to write and direct a porn film. What could be more “outrageously funny”, as Jones recalled in 2016, than to see “the country’s best critic immersing himself in the seedy world of hardcore pornography”? Until you read it, that is. Perhaps wisely, the article itself no longer seems to be available online. But it’s included in a 2002 collection of Gill’s journalism. In his other pieces there is room for elegant flourishes of authorial compassion, but not here: the subject-matter — commercial sex — has blotted it out.

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The setting is LA, in 1999, and Gill is busy directing his own lurid script. In his own words, a half-Mexican girl called Clarissa – who is “very young and exceedingly nervous” – is being plastered with make-up for her scene, which is with the “truly, madly, deeply hideous” veteran porn actor Ron Jeremy. He’s “funny and he can act” but is considered so unattractive that Clarissa is getting “a $200 premium to do it with Ron”.

Clarissa’s wary of doing porn, but she’s “grateful for the money”. Why, we don’t know: Gill doesn’t ask. Perhaps he senses that her answer might spark the libido-killing onset of sympathy. This is only her second film, and so she isn’t really listening to Gill droning on quasi-ironically “about motivation and the Method”. Gill is contemptuous, describing her as “such a bad actress” and “not bright”. She is “horrified’ when she sees Ron, who — perhaps mercifully — can’t get an erection, and ends up masturbating on to Clarissa’s cheek. After this young girl finally leaves the set in distress, Gill — having orchestrated the entire grotesque scene — follows her out to ask “Are you all right?”. Ever the English gent.

A coda to the article: earlier this year — due to advancing dementia — Ron Jeremy was deemed incompetent to stand trial on serial charges of rape and sexual assault, involving 21 victims aged from 15 to 51. Allegations dated back to 1996, three years before the making of Gill’s Hot House Tales. The comments beneath the news reports were telling: many were sceptical, asking why Jeremy would “need” to do this, given the numerous sexual opportunities afforded by his work. They appeared unable to consider an alternative scenario: that Jeremy was so steeped in the mores of porn plots — and his own star status in the industry — that he had lost sight of any sexual boundaries, in particular those of consent.

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These real-life stories aren’t about sex, freely if recklessly exchanged in mutual appreciation: the happy, heady original vision of sexual liberation. Instead, to varying degrees, they’re about porn, ego, power, money, cruelty and humiliation. Some men saw the direction of travel early. In 2001, the novelist Martin Amis also travelled to an LA porn set, not to direct a movie but to write about the dynamics on set. Amis wasn’t exactly a feminist saint: he’d once cut a swathe through literary London, leaving women stung by his infidelities, and was sometimes accused of misogyny in his depiction of female characters. But he wrote about the performers with feeling, and in his brilliant and disturbing article “A Rough Trade” he recognised straightaway where the industry was headed: “the new element is violence”.

The thing that Amis feared most in porn’s endless pushing of boundaries to darker places, its taboo-breaking quest for the “polymorphous perverse”, was what it might speak to in the user: that it might draw out the inner “Mister Monster” in him, triggering arousal at something his value-system knew to be wrong. “Porno, it seems, is a parody of love,” he wrote, “It therefore addresses itself to love’s opposites, which are hate and death. ‘Choke her!’ ‘Spit inside me!’ ‘Break me!’”. Amis had perhaps more reason than most to contemplate where male lust, when fused to violence and cruelty, might take society in general and women in particular: in 1994 he discovered that his 21-year old cousin Lucy Partington, an English student missing for 20 years, had been murdered by the sexual abuser and serial killer Fred West.

In the years since Amis’s article, porn has indeed followed his prophecy. It’s more ubiquitous, more extreme and being absorbed in heavier concentrations at a much earlier age. A report by the Children’s Commissioner earlier this year found that young people were regularly exposed to content in which “pictures of degradation, sexual coercion, aggression and exploitation are commonplace, and disproportionately targeted at teenage girls”. Earlier this year, the Times journalist Helen Rumbelow wrote searingly about a day spent “watching what the kids are watching” on Pornhub. Of the 32 sites deemed “most popular in the UK”, 12 showed men being physically abusive to women, and 11 featured “pseudo-incest” between step-parents and adult step-children or step-siblings. One of the most popular categories is “teens”: in many videos, young-looking girls, officially over 18, are bound, frightened, or shown with restricted airways. It is deeply chilling to think that — barring actual murder — the stuff of mainstream porn is inching ever closer to the practices of 25 Cromwell Street.

There remain many adult men who instinctively understand the line between consent and its refusal, pleasure and abuse. But online porn culture does not, and its effects have already manifested themselves in real life: in a 2020 BBC Disclosure survey of 2,049 UK men aged between 18-39, 71% said they had slapped, choked, gagged or spat on their partner during consensual sex. One third of that percentage said they wouldn’t ask verbal consent for such acts, either before or during sex.

The 48-year-old Brand is perhaps unusual in his generation for the degree to which he was steeped early in prostitution and porn, starting with the stomach-churning way his father introduced him to sex as a teenager, hiring prostitutes for them both in their shared hotel room. But now hardcore porn is schooling children en masse through their smartphones, while much of the “mainstream media” long ago paved its way by demonstrating that — when it came to women, at least — boundaries of legality and taste could frequently be transgressed at no cost to career. Even as Dispatches puts its spotlight on Russell Brand, the painful reality is that future generations of young women will almost certainly experience much more of the behaviour the programme describes, not less. A.A. Gill and Martin Amis are both dead, but it was Amis who saw the danger and called it correctly. The genie’s out of the bottle: Mister Monster is everywhere.

But as well as identifying several genuine perpetrators, the Yewtree overreached. In 2014, the police raided Cliff Richard’s home and the BBC was on hand to film it; no charges were brought and there is no suggestion of wrongdoing on Richard’s part. In 2018, the High Court ruled that the BBC coverage had infringed Richard’s privacy in a “serious” and “sensationalist” way.

Both Richard and Paul Gambaccini, another innocent who was arrested during Yewtree and released without charge, have argued that those accused of sexual offences should have anonymity to protect them from the stigma of the “sex offender” label. And in practice, the media has grown increasingly cautious about publishing suspects’ names, particularly famous ones.

Over the past few days, it has become obvious that this approach is as likely to inflame speculation as protect reputations. On Friday, The Sun reported that an unnamed “top BBC star” had been suspended over allegations that he had paid an unnamed 20-year-old “more than £35,000 since they were 17 in return for sordid images”, according to the unnamed 20-year-old’s unnamed mother.

The whole country became engaged in a high-stakes game of “Guess Who?”. There were so many candidates. Within 24 hours, one had been settled on in media gossip circles. Online, though, the guesses ran wild, with the words “nonce” and “paedo” freely dispensed. This was potentially career-ruining stuff: Rylan Clark, Gary Lineker and Nicky Campbell all issued statements denying being the presenter in question.

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But if you knew, the name still seemed so unlikely. Huw Edwards. Beneath the stentorian furrowed brow that has carried the nation through election night and the Queen’s death, the naked absurdity of male lust.

And there were still twists. On Monday, the young person involved made a statement calling The Sun’s report “rubbish” (and saying that The Sun had been informed of this before publication). The BBC opened an investigation, then suspended it at the police’s request. On Tuesday, another person told the BBC they had received “abusive and menacing messages” from the accused, after they met on a dating app. A detail that attracted less attention was that the abuse happened after the alleged victim had hinted on social media that they would out the presenter.

Then the police concluded that there had been no criminal offence. And finally, on Wednesday, Edwards’s wife issued a statement confirming that it was him, and that “Huw is suffering from serious mental health issues”. “The events of the last few days have greatly worsened matters,” she said. “He has suffered another serious episode and is now receiving in-patient hospital care where he’ll stay for the foreseeable future.”

The mood deflated at this point. It felt a bit like having stayed at a gathering too long, queasily sobering up among the cold canapes and dregs of booze. The Sun has announced it had no plans to publish further allegations. The BBC will continue its investigation.

There is no nice way to be accused of being a predator. But the toxic mix of celebrity and anonymity seems to have made this exceptionally messy: the scurrilous chatter about Edwards expanded to fill the void of information. By the time he was officially named, the shaming had grown so extreme that he began to look like the victim — and yet we still don’t know what, if anything, he’s culpable of.

In one sense, the Edwards story is a very old-school tabloid expose. It’s in the lineage of sports anchor Frank Bough, who was brought down by the News of the World in 1988 with the headline “I TOOK DRUGS WITH CALL GIRLS”; or Jamie Theakston, who was reported by the Sunday People in 2002 to have visited a “vice club”. A good old-fashioned British sex scandal.

But although the British public loves those stories, it also harbours a conflicting instinct that celebs deserve some privacy — especially if it’s about sex. If Edwards was active on apps (he has yet to respond to the allegations), it says something that no one he communicated with went to the press until The Sun broke its story. Being a bit sleazy, on its own, isn’t deemed disgraceful behaviour.

But that doesn’t mean the British public has no taboos. There was much focus on the youth of the individual Edwards is alleged to have received pictures from. Age gap relationships, even legal ones, are broadly disapproved of. The Sun quoted the mother referring to “my child”, even though the individual is well into sexual majority — a technique to foil identification by not disclosing gender, maybe, but one that introduced an unsavoury implication.

The reports about Edwards also referred to his “power” as a celebrity. His greater fame, like his greater age, was assumed to confer a seniority he was able to exploit. This is true of some kinds of celebrity: the YouTuber who grooms his fans, the popstar who chews through groupies. But it’s also a logic that, at the peak of #MeToo, saw cases such as a bad date with the comic Aziz Ansari rounded up to practically assault.

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It feels doubtful that presenting the 10 O’Clock News casts that kind of irresistible spell over young dating app users. Outside of the newsroom, it’s hard to imagine what power Edwards had to exercise. Conversely, anyone with compromising chats from an august national treasure has a one-click means of undoing them. The allegations against Edwards so far amount to unwise, but not illegal. There are certain things that are incompatible with broadcast gravitas, and it seems being incontinently thirsty online is one of them.

Edwards has suffered a humiliation that would be unsurvivable for many, personally as well as professionally. What he is accused of would appear to be a deep betrayal of his family; the way in which the accusations have been made has set him against his BBC colleagues, who at a minimum have seen their workplace brought into disrepute, and at worst have been dragged into the scandal on social media. And he has suffered in isolation, walled inside a formal namelessness that didn’t stop everyone from knowing it was him.

It is a strange fact that there are, out there in the world, actual paedophiles — men convicted of viewing the worst child sex abuse imagery — serving non-custodial sentences and living their lives. Meanwhile Edwards appears to have been comprehensively ruined by an allegation that so far amounts, at worst, to looking at pictures of someone he could have legally had sex with. This is not to say that his actions are beyond moral reproach. It’s possible to wrong other people without breaking the law.

It’s also possible to be both sinned against and sinning. But there is no proportionality in public shaming, and there is no privacy on the internet. Edwards was the perfect public figure for this scandal because everything about his image suggested perfectly controlled professionalism. How incongruous for the solemn man behind the desk to have appetites.

Those already committed to the “abuser” narrative will continue to believe the worst about Edwards; others will recalibrate him into a pure victim. The truth is probably messier. Whatever it is, it would have to be exceptionally bad to merit the destruction already inflicted. The problem is one of justice. Despite what Richard and Gambaccini believe, this is unlikely to be achieved in secret, any more than it is likely to be achieved by the febrile processes of social media.

I was there to talk about cluster bombs on The Moral Maze. Are there any moral limits on the sort of weapons one can use in a just war? Cluster bombs leave unexploded bomblets in the ground for years to come, with curious children often the casualties.

But most people at the BBC weren’t interested in this. A popular newsreader was alleged to have had dealings with at least one young person, the nature of which was still unclear. But the country — in its media and social media guise — was transfixed. The police have said they do not think any crime has been committed. The newsreader lies in a hospital bed, suffering severe distress. I wonder what the man from Kyiv thought about our moral priorities?

Perhaps this is an unfair juxtaposition. The Sun’s exposé of Huw Edwards could be seen as a legitimate expression of public-interest journalism. If the BBC’s highest paid newsreader had been acting inappropriately with people young enough to be his grandchildren, abusing his celebrity, isn’t this the sort of thing tabloid journalism exists to bring to light?

But there is another player in all of this who has come out of the last few days very badly indeed: the great British public. Notwithstanding the question of The Sun’s behaviour, we get the journalism we deserve. And there is nothing the British public enjoys more than seeing the mighty fall, especially when caught with their trousers down.

Social media is often blamed for amplifying our vices — and it does — but it also reflects back to us something of the underlying reality. We enjoy the downfall of others. We take a certain secret or not-so-secret pleasure in their suffering, dressing up our gossipy schadenfreude as moral concern. For too many of us, morality has become a pretext for cruelty. Something we relish, revelling in the prurient finger-pointing, pretending we’re part of some kind of high-minded moral crusade to root out hypocrisy. With a public like this, how can we expect the media to do anything other than spend its time sniffing about after other people’s sins?

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And which of us could withstand this sort of scrutiny? If our lives — our private lives — were written up as unsympathetically as possible, by people clever with words, intent on dialling up to the max all that we have got wrong, I suspect even the saintliest among us would look like a wrong-un. If you don’t think, “there but for the grace of God go I”, you don’t understand the terrifying power of the press.

But defend someone who has been disgraced, and the mob may turn on you too. You are an apologist for grooming or racism or whatever. “Look, he sits with sinners and tax collectors”, they said of Jesus, implying he was one too. So, best keep your head down. Or throw more stones at the guilty, thus to direct attention away from you.

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For who would take on the mob? Politicians need their votes, so are reluctant to stand against a social media cascade of mimetic hatred. Large organisations fear those weasel words of the PR advisor: “reputational risk”. And most individuals cower, powerless.

While all this poisonous dance is being played out, a man is hiding under the covers of his hospital bed, clearly unwell, surely terrified. He may well have done wrong. And of course, people do need to be held to account for this. But, as a man of faith, the hard work will be done in silence, as he confronts his maker. We used to believe that God was our judge. A God who knew all the secrets of our hearts. A God who loved us nonetheless. We don’t believe in this God anymore. We believe in Rupert Murdoch. And it’s not been a happy swap.

Certainly, there are imperial subtexts to Great Expectations. An English man writing in the middle third of the 19th century, obviously Dickens carried a set of attitudes towards the Empire and its relationship to the Condition of England. As his satire of Scrooge’s obsession with decreasing the “surplus population” by letting people die showed in A Christmas Carol, Dickens hated Malthusianism. But his alternative to addressing the consequences of population growth during industrialisation was imperial emigration.

The actual expression of Dickens’s own worldview clearly does not though interest Knight. In his telling, Pip equates becoming a successful gentleman with getting rich in the colonies, while Dickens packed off characters to the colonies who could not succeed materially or morally in England. They either went voluntarily, like Micawber in David Copperfield, or as prisoners, like Magwitch in Great Expectations and the sadistic Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby. In Great Expectations, Pip’s friend Herbert moves to Cairo to practise merchant shipping because he gets nowhere in business in London, and an indebted Pip joins him when he realises even a life in Kent is no longer possible for him. Indeed, Dickens sent five of his seven sons, whom he deemed likely failures, to imperial life: one to the East India Company, one to the Bengal Mounted Police, two to Australia, and another to the Navy. (Walter Dickens died aged 22 trying to get back home from India and is buried in Calcutta.) Only Dickens’s eldest son, Charles junior, and the one successful son, Henry, were allowed to stay in England.

Great Expectations is also concerned with ignorance about the source of inherited wealth. Magwitch’s return to England, after he made a fortune farming in the penal colony of Australia, is a brutal revelation for Pip, whose whole view of his London life rests on him mistaking the surface of things for reality. As Pip assumes wealth breeds wealth, Magwitch’s lower-class toils initially incite “abhorrence”. His first instinct is to hide the truth and exile Magwitch, so that he can resume his gentlemanly ways. But Pip has to learn to see Magwitch as a flesh and blood human being to whom he owes gratitude. For Dickens, the Magwitch story has a symbolic purpose: the return of unbearable knowledge about the price another has paid abroad. While he does not make clear that farming in Australia means farming appropriated land, the point is there to be made.

By contrast, Knight’s telling traduces the literal Magwitch-Pip story and robs it of its human and thematic heart. Knight’s miss on the Pip-Magwitch relationship is part of his whole approach to Pip. Dickens’s novels are populated by memorable, strange characters and Pip is one of them. Pip’s entire consciousness arises from a moment on a “raw afternoon towards evening” when he fearfully learns “the identity of things”: that he is in a churchyard, that he is an orphan, that the surrounding “wilderness” is the marshes, that the beyond is the river, that the wind comes from the “savage lair” of the sea, and that “the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, [i]s Pip”. Just as he has articulated this litany to himself, Magwitch arrives from behind his parents and siblings’ graves, crying “keep still you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat”. Rather than possessing any childhood faculty of wonder, Pip has a darkened and guilt-ridden Gothic imagination. After an acquaintance of Magwitch turns up one night at the village pub to give Pip money, he conjures images of the man shooting him with an “invisible gun”. Fighting Herbert, he feels like “a species of savage young wolf”. By his adolescence, he reprehends himself for things he has not even done.

In starting Pip’s story with him reciting Malvolio’s lines on greatness from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Knight offers a more familiar, and less striking character: the intelligent boy from the provinces knowingly superior to those around him and desperate to leave what is beneath him behind. This Pip neither needs nor has a dark alter-ego whereas in the novel the journeyman at the forge, Orlick, expresses in action what lurks in Pip’s inner consciousness.

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This set-up lessens the shame that comes upon Pip arriving home from Satis House, and it misses entirely what a strange kind of snob Pip becomes. Pip’s whole conception of the superior life he wants to live is shaped not by visions of grandeur, but the decay of a world a touch of natural light away from turning to dust. Pip knows that the attempt to rewrite the laws of Creation at Satis House is disturbing his mind. On his first trip, he momentarily sees Miss Havisham as a terrifying spectre calling to him, yet afterwards “Miss Havisham and Estella and the strange house and the strange life appear to have something to do with everything that was picturesque”. On one beautiful summer day, as afternoon turns to evening — the same hour of the day in winter he meets Magwitch — ­he walks with Biddy, the woman who he knows he should love, along the river. He begins to wonder if he “was not more naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbour by candlelight in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella”. But, as he says of such moments, the “confounding remembrance of the Havisham days would fall upon [him] like a destructive missile, and scatter [his] wits”.

Dickens’s Pip fails to succeed at making money in the capital city because his mind is so distorted that he can see little clearly beyond the reality of Estella’s character. Even after Magwitch reveals his secret, Pip imagines that the wind and the rain had for weeks been carrying “mysterious warnings” from the “wicked spirit” of Magwitch because this is the kind of Gothic script that runs in his mind.

Although it is too late for him to lead the life he could have led if his imagination had not been warped, Pip’s arc is his return to the world of natural light, where he finds forgiveness. In his final confrontation with his alter-ego in the pitch blackness of a sluice-house on the marshes, Pip feels on the brink of death, until a “gleam of light” comes in through the door. After he begins to recover from his illness, he realises spring has emerged from the death of winter and he can see the physical beauty of the marshes. By contrast, Miss Havisham, while forgiven by Pip, dies in the darkness of fire, reflecting “her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like … other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world”.

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Pip’s journey back to the realm of light cannot be told in Knight’s series because as well as making Pip’s ambition so conventional, he sanitises Satis House and its occupants. Olivia Coleman’s Miss Havisham is not a quasi-mythical character enveloped in decay, in the grip of the notion that her suffering demands the entire passage of time with its rotation of light and darkness stop. Instead, she is a relatively energetic woman in her wedding dress surrounded by obvious wealth in a house where there are more than a few glimpses of daylight. Far from darkening her, her opium-taking brightens her.

Dickens was in good part a Christian storyteller writing stories of redemption. That is a part of why he was so popular and why he endures. It matters that as he moves towards the light Pip learns to love Magwitch, and in freeing himself from his self-corruption can love Joe again. There is nothing at all wrong with any adaptor of Dickens looking at what politically underpins Dickens’s literal story to draw out more of the historical world underneath this tale. Dickens was a realist writer, too, who very much worked out his religious stories in the concrete setting of England. But to rewrite Great Expectations as a vehicle for a historically driven story to which Pip’s pilgrimage is incidental is to violate the whole hope Dickens invested in storytelling.

With fans like these, you might assume I would be supportive of the case currently being made by the BBC’s Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent for stricter regulation of disinformation and hate speech. In an interview and an accompanying feature published this week, Marianna Spring reiterates a narrative about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that she first aired on Panorama a few weeks back. According to Spring, online disinformation and hate speech is getting worse, and it’s the responsibility of social media platforms to regulate it more heavily.

Like me, Spring receives a lot of online misrepresentation and criticism in her professional role. Indeed, she frequently uses such experiences as a superficially compelling peg for many of her stories. Despite our similarities, though, I remain unconvinced by her case for strong regulation. More than that: through observing her output, I’ve become convinced that the BBC should not have a specialist “Disinformation Correspondent” at all.

In this week’s interview, Spring described her job for the BBC as “interrogating how mistruths or trolling or abuse online can affect real people, and then to investigate and hold to account the social media companies, policy makers, law enforcement…”. At face value, this may seem like a fairly standard quest for a journalist, albeit a noble one — a bit like investigating fraudsters or corrupt politicians, in order to bring their misdeeds and lies into the light.

But there’s at least one big difference. A journalist investigating fraud, but who accidentally misidentifies either what fraud is or the people committing it, doesn’t thereby become guilty of the very thing she is investigating. In contrast, a Disinformation Correspondent who misidentifies disinformation, either positively or negatively, runs the risk of disseminating disinformation herself — and is arguably all the more harmful because of the status implied by her position.

Perhaps it could be rejoindered that disinformation is not the same as misinformation. Whereas misinformation consists in the unwitting dissemination of false statements believed to be true at the time, disinformation is the knowing introduction of false statements with the explicit intention to deceive people. In other words, with disinformation, there is an intent to deceive. That’s a reasonable distinction to make as far as it goes; the problem is that it’s utterly useless in helping us analyse the growing problem with conspiratorial and magical thinking in the world. It also has no relevance to most of the things reported on by Spring.

The capacity of human beings to cling to incredible beliefs in a self-serving way, while being blind to blatantly contrary evidence, is well-established. And given this capacity, it’s very hard to know whether conspiratorial thinking has been propagated in the cynical knowledge of its falsehood. For instance, those in charge of Russian botfarms churning out what liberals call “pro-Putin propaganda” probably half-believe their own falsehoods. The originator of the New World Order conspiracy theory almost certainly believed his. Even bonkers theories like the lizard people one were probably started by the mad rather than the bad. Ironically, the persistent belief that there is a lot of disinformation in the world, in the sense of deliberately deceptive lies, is itself a kind of conspiracy theory. For some people, it seems much easier to believe in the organised and deliberate deception of others than in the chaos of accidental human fallibility.

In practice, then, any conception of disinformation as positively requiring intentional deception is going to be of marginal use to society at most. And it certainly seems unlikely that the BBC would ever have put someone in a full-time role to investigate disinformation, had this been the background idea. It’s far too niche.

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In fact, what Spring tends to investigate at least some of the time is disinformation in a broader and potentially more useful sense, meaning something like: widespread false or misleading beliefs, seemingly attractive to people for reasons that have little to do with the amount of good evidence available for them, and which cause significant social dysfunction. Whatever the reason for these beliefs, a neutral approach to evidence has taken a back seat to some other goal, and the process of producing them is no longer what epistemologists call “truth-tracking”. In this broader sense, spreading or believing disinformation is not just about misinterpreting evidence, but rather about ignoring certain inconvenient bits of evidence to fit with prior political, social, or emotional goals.

This is perhaps a more useful conception of disinformation, though admittedly not as snappy. The problem for Spring now is that it seems to apply to some of her own output too. This is understandable, given that, to paraphrase the King James Bible, it’s always easier to notice the motes in other people’s eyes rather than the beams in your own. Nearly everyone is subject to bias, like I said. But given Spring’s job title and growing influence, including a recent expert appearance at a Parliamentary Committee about online speech regulation, I still think it’s a problem.

Take the Panorama documentary. The narrative offered by Spring and the team around her was almost parodically absent of nuance, offering no attempted counterpoint to the extremely simple and obviously partisan fairy-tale it was thrusting upon the viewer. This story goes: a bad and foolish man took over Twitter (Spring barely suppresses her eyerolling as she talks about him); he laid off a lot of people responsible for dealing with “hate speech”; hate speech increased exponentially; regulators therefore need to do more to protect the ordinary people that suffer.

Basic critical questions one might have asked about this narrative were missing in action. The most obvious of these is what counts as hate speech. Throughout her work, Spring’s habitual examples (speech by misogynists, rape apologists, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers) tend to suggest she thinks hate speech is angry, threatening, and/or insulting speech produced by people with the Wrong Politics, causing anxiety and distress in more innocent people who don’t share their persecutors’ dodgy views. I’d be fascinated to know whether Spring assumes that the level of insult and aggression flung by online anti-vaxxers towards epidemiologists, for instance, becomes morally neutralised when directed instead towards radical feminists, Zionists, Tory politicians, or any other folk devils of the contemporary progressive mindset.

A second obvious question unexplored by Spring’s documentary is what negative consequences might follow when you devolve responsibility for what counts as hate speech to people working in Silicon Valley. For instance, gender-critical and radical feminists have been at the sharp end of regulatory decisions by Twitter for years now — many of them banned or censored for talking about the social importance of biological sex, or for saying it cannot be changed.

The crossover between tech bros and people of a transactivist or transhumanist persuasion is high. But in her work, Spring seems uncurious about any potential for political bias or self-interest in their decision-making — quite possibly because, like many others, her compass for what counts as hate speech has been significantly affected by exposure to the values of people working in Silicon Valley. Again, this is hardly a crime. Nobody forms their beliefs in a social vacuum. But as a Disinformation Correspondent, it might be good to have self-awareness about it.

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When it comes to examples of disinformation, meanwhile, Spring has a tendency to roll relatively reasonable cases of political wrongthink together with madly conspiratorial ravings, suggesting that she doesn’t really differentiate between them. If you start off as an anti-vaxxer or lockdown sceptic, she seems to imply, you might easily end up a climate-change denier, or even a believer in a New World order. When talking about QAnon supporters, she clearly feels it’s important to throw in that they are “pro-Trump” as well — as if being a member of QAnon wasn’t quite bad enough. Such clues to what Spring really thinks of them must be quite infuriating to the thousands of anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters who hold those positions for relatively non-conspiratorial reasons. And then there’s Spring’s tendency to turn stories about conspiracy theorists into suspiciously neat cautionary tales propping up preferred social values — such as in her documentary series about a conspiracy theorist called Gary, who didn’t believe in Covid until it killed him, quite conveniently for the triumphalist narrative purposes of many at the time. It’s almost enough to make you believe in the existence of a repressive liberal media elite.

So what should journalism do with the growing phenomenon of disinformation, if not this? In the old days, of course, we used to have lots of disinformation specialists. We called them investigative journalists. They covered stories in some depth, gave voice to a range of counterpoints, and tried to ensure that their personal views weren’t in the driving seat, even if they sometimes failed in the attempt. By their general example, they encouraged readers and viewers to trust them, or at least, not to virulently distrust them — not because they had the “right” political values, but because they had the right journalistic ones.

These days, though, slowburn investigative journalism is often too expensive, and doesn’t get the same clicks as a hot take. So instead, the idea of disinformation gets thematised as if it were a special kind of moral vice only committed by ill-intentioned or delusional others, to be rooted out and exposed by the intrepid journalist-activist on the side of the good. But good and evil are not so straightforward. In the long run, I suspect this vaccine may turn out to cause more epistemic illness than it prevents.

Nothing works anymore. There are shortages of fruit and vegetables; energy is cripplingly expensive; strikes have become an everyday occurrence. Then there are the NHS, the railways and the Post Office. Match of the Day and, by extension, the BBC, is just another great institution run into the ground. But its collapse also reveals something about football and its place in society, its potential as a locus of dissent.

On 2 May 1953, the great cricket writer Neville Cardus went to Lord’s to watch the opening first-class match of the season: the MCC against Yorkshire, the champion county. “Play was not possible until 3.15pm,” he noted glumly in a letter to the Times. “Then the players came into the field and in an hour 20-odd runs were scored without a sign of a daring gesture, without a hint of personal relish.”

Nine miles to the west, at Wembley, Bolton Wanderers led Blackpool 3-1 in the FA Cup final. It looked like the 38-year-old Stanley Matthews, widely regarded as the best footballer in England, was again going to be denied the first medal of his career. But in the half-hour that followed, Matthews inspired a fightback and Blackpool won 4-3. Journalists, breaking all codes of etiquette, stood on their seats to applaud one of the most emotional of victories. As Cardus left Lord’s and ran into excited fans leaving Wembley, he spoke of his fear that cricket would “gradually disappear, not greatly lamented, into profound oblivion”. When Geoffrey Green, in his report of the FA Cup final in the same paper, spoke of football as “the game of the people”, Cardus said he felt he could no longer argue.

Although commentary of the FA Cup final had been available on the BBC World Service, the BBC Light Programme carried commentary on only the second half, preferring to cover the touring Australians at Leicester and a championship match between Hampshire and Essex. It wouldn’t happen again. What really hammered home football’s advantage was the fact that, for the first time, it had reached a mass television audience, as many people buying televisions for the Coronation did so a month early to watch Matthews and his last shot at silverware. As Martin Kelner argues in Sit Down and Cheer, this was the day when football supplanted cricket as the national sport.

FA Cup final coverage on BBC soon became a staple and, in 1964, Match of the Day was broadcast for the first time. Football, suddenly, was taken into people’s homes on a weekly basis. It became possible to see teams and players without actually going to the ground. Football became a mass cultural phenomenon.

Football was initially sceptical about television. The 1968 League Cup final between Leeds and Arsenal, for instance, wasn’t screened live for fear of reducing the attendance at Wembley, while for years the league games whose highlights would be broadcast were kept secret. But England’s World Cup success and the emergence of George Best, the first bona fide footballing celebrity, intensified the relationship, which soon became symbiotic. What was cause and what was effect is difficult to say, but in the late Sixties and early Seventies, English football was blessed with an array of colourful and controversial managers: Brian Clough, Bill Shankly, Don Revie, Tommy Docherty, Malcolm Allison. It became a great soap opera that was just about able to withstand the worst years of hooliganism that followed.

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And it was television that offered an escape from the dark years of the Eighties, as Sky funded the breakaway Premiership in 1992. Even then, though, Match of the Day remained: highlights on free-to-air were essential for awareness of the product. Football gentrified, stadiums became less unpleasant and gradually its worldwide appeal took the game away from its roots. Thanks to television, football became a case study of globalisation. Match of the Day had made it easier to support a club from afar — you could follow Manchester United or Liverpool and have a reasonable idea of how they played without ever visiting Old Trafford or Anfield. But over the last couple of decades, as the Premier League has been aggressively marketed overseas, this process has accelerated.

On the one hand, English football is a tremendous success story, a potent tool of soft power. Hundreds of millions watch each week, with the result that audiences from Argentina to Ethiopia have a vague understanding of such disparate places as Burnley, Hull and Swansea. But on the other, this leads to tensions between the demands and expectations of, say, Chelsea fans in Ghana or Japan, and those who haven’t missed a game at Stamford Bridge in 30 years. To whom a club belongs seems a fundamental question with implications far beyond football.

And that’s why football has become so important. It offers a sense of community and identity, but it is also as close to universal as anything can be. Football brings broader, often intangible, issues into focus. Politicians recognise this. That’s why the Government intends to create a regulator for football when the economics alone make the expense hard to justify. It’s why, when Roman Abramovich was sanctioned, Chelsea were treated as a special case rather than simply having their trading suspended. And it’s why oligarchs, sheikhs and petrostates are so eager to involve themselves in the game.

Which brings us to the Lineker Affair and the absurdity of the fall-out from a sports presenter’s tweet about the language surrounding the Government’s immigration policy. It’s hard to discuss, because while it’s about fundamental issues of free speech and government policy, it’s also about a former Leicester striker being able to guide Martin Keown and Danny Murphy through a discussion about VAR.

Quite apart from anything else, it’s striking just how badly the BBC management has handled this. Journalism is a precarious and far-from-lucrative business. But the one class of people in the industry who have a level of financial security are the former players who serve as pundits. And football is based on mateship and not letting the team down. Once Ian Wright had withdrawn from Match of the Day in solidarity with Lineker, there was little doubt that others would follow; it was football’s “I’m Sporticus” moment.

What was perhaps less foreseeable was that commentators would then follow. And it turns out that watching three minutes of highlights without commentary is a weirdly alienating experience. Even for those of us who cover the game professionally, identifying Dango Ouattara or Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall or Max Wöber with little context in a clip of five or six seconds is extremely difficult. If nothing else, and despite John Redwood’s unconvincing tweet to the contrary, what this affair has demonstrated is just how necessary commentators are.

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And by suspending Lineker, the BBC leadership has shone a light on itself. That it is either craven or hypocritical is undeniable. Some will believe this is all part of a Right-wing plot to undermine the BBC, to make people ask what exactly the licence fee is for. At the very least, there is a growing recognition that it’s a bit rich for a former advisor to Theresa May (Robbie Gibb), a Conservative donor who helped arrange a loan to Boris Johnson (Richard Sharp), and a former Conservative councillor (Tim Davie) to be preaching about impartiality. Nobody, surely, is surprised this storm has blown up over comments from Lineker, rather than by a BBC freelancer of more Right-wing views such as Alan Sugar or Andrew Neil.

Rishi Sunak’s statement on Saturday, contradicting a number of his MPs, including the culture secretary Lucy Frazer, seemed intended to distance the Government from Lineker’s suspension and to paint it as an internal BBC affair. It suggests he feels public opinion may be on Lineker’s side. Yet the danger now for the BBC is that this spreads beyond sport. Might others at the broadcaster concerned by this issue take action? Can the BBC back down or at least find a workable fudge? And if it does not, will Match of the Day survive? Who, credibly, could present it now?

Lineker’s hand is strong: he is 62, highly respected and co-owns a successful production company. With BT Sport and Discovery merging to form TNT, there’s a high-profile presenting job still unfilled for next season. His decision to go to watch Leicester play Chelsea on Saturday was, whether conscious or not, reminiscent of Brian Clough’s appearance at Derby vs Leicester days after Derby had sacked him. He was pointedly relaxed and, as with Clough, fans took the opportunity to demonstrate their support for him.

The Premier League, presumably, is not impressed about its product being overshadowed, with its coverage reduced to a perfunctory 20 minutes. BBC Sport is already a shell of what it used to be. It’s lost the cricket, the golf, the rugby league and the Formula One. If it were to lose the Premier League highlights as well, its days as a serious sports broadcaster would effectively be over, prompting further questions about the value of the licence fee.

Six decades ago, through Match of the Day, the BBC took football into people’s homes and elevated itself to a whole new level of popularity. It may now be that football, through Match of the Day, destroys the BBC, or at least forces it to consider the extent to which its credibility has been damaged by the present leadership. Football has outgrown its nurturer to become a powerful political force in its own right — and nobody quite knows how to tame it.

If he returned to the UK today, on the BBC’s 100th anniversary, Morris would find that pretty much all of its output is one long advertisement for itself. In one series, the presenter unearths “lost” BBC recordings with all the reverence one might expect an archaeologist to accord to some piece of Etruscan pottery. In another, the son of the DJ John Peel (the BBC gives much airtime to broadcasting dynasties) discusses his father’s record collection. The BBC, forbidden from carrying paid advertisements on its own channels, pays for posters that advertise its own programmes but also for a more general form of advertising that promotes the whole BBC with slogans such as “This is our BBC”.

The sense that the BBC is “ours” and that it is a “national institution” has, in fact, done great damage to the broadcaster. There is a cosy, self-congratulatory tone to much of its programming. Its presenters can expect to become “national institutions”, which greatly increases their earning power from sources other than their formal salaries. Meanwhile, its position as the national broadcaster has made its political reporting lazy. It expects to be at the front of the queue for interviews and inside information: there was, for example, much indignation last Friday when Liz Truss failed to give the BBC first dibs in her press conference. This means that its definition of journalism often means just repeating what politicians tell their interlocuters: “Friends of the Prime Minister tell me that…”, and so on. What gets lost in this is real research.

The keystone of the BBC is the licence fee — an institution similar to one of those ancien regime taxes on windows or powder for wigs. Everyone who watches is required to pay for the privilege and the fee is complicated and messy to collect. Every householder in the country gets stern letters telling them that they must pay and, ostensibly, detector vans can pick up illegal sets in much the same way that the Gestapo could find the position of Special Operations radio operators in occupied France. The exception to this is the BBC World Service, which is paid for out of general taxation. It is also the part of the BBC that commands most respect. Anyone following events in Ukraine will note that the experts from the World Service are usually less smooth than their counterparts in the mainstream BBC, but they are almost invariably better informed and more interesting.

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The problems with the licence fee are obvious. Once the BBC had an effective monopoly on Broadcasting in the UK — though there were always a few heroic dissidents who insisted on getting their information from Radio Tirana. Independent television companies have existed since the Fifties but they were regulated in ways that meant that they had to observe the same kinds of rules as the BBC. Now, however, anyone with a computer can watch programmes from anywhere in the world and many don’t bother with television sets at all. Anyone who listens to France Culture or watches the Franco-German television channel Arte would regard the suggestion that the BBC is the best broadcaster in the world as laughable. Most of all, the BBC faces competition from the big American streaming services which have deep pockets and the advantage of starting from scratch, unencumbered by the veneration for its own traditions that does the BBC such damage.

There is a simple way out. Sell the BBC, or sell the particular programmes that it makes. This would be less of a break with the past than it might sound. The BBC already sells its formats to foreign broadcasters. Some say that it would be wrong to sell the BBC because its programmes are popular, but this is an absurd argument — popular programmes are precisely the ones that will get made by private sector companies. And they will be made much better. Not least this will be because Netflix will make celebrity programmes that feature real celebrities rather than just people who are slightly famous because they have appeared in other BBC programmes. There is a core of news and documentary programmes that will probably not attract commercial buyers. But these are precisely the kind of programmes that are made well by the current BBC World Service. A slightly expanded version of this service could be funded by the state — perhaps from the receipts from selling off the rest of the BBC. It would concentrate on factual broadcasting and its gravity would be greatly enhanced by the fact that its presenters would be relatively unknown people who would concentrate on doing their job. They would not have their own twitter accounts and they would certainly not perform cringe-making imitations of Duran Duran, which is what Andrew Marr, until recently the lynchpin of the BBC’s political reporting, once did on one of those charity marathons that the BBC periodically inflicts on its audience.

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So why does no one do it? The Right claim to believe in the free market and constantly mutter about reducing or abolishing the licence fee, but the truth is that they like the BBC as it is. It is, like almost all parts of the establishment, conservative at heart: its coverage of the death of the late Queen would have embarrassed the most slavish of Soviet broadcasters. The Chairman of the BBC from 2011 to 2014, Chris Patten, was a former Tory politician — only in the insane world of current British politics can someone who was a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher be described as a member of the “liberal establishment”. There is plenty of pantouflage between the BBC and the Conservative Party. Michael Gove has worked for the Corporation and Allegra Stratton moved from being a presenter on Newsnight to being Boris Johnson’s press advisor. Robbie Gibb had a 25-year career at the BBC before spending two years in Downing Street under Theresa May and then returning to the BBC board. When Jeremy Paxman stepped down as presenter of Newsnight, he was filmed in a matey little scene cycling a tandem into the sunset with Boris Johnson.

Most of all, Conservatives like the BBC because it is easily bullied. Every time a journalist says something that they do not like, they can make threatening noises about the duty of impartiality and hint that they might appoint some particularly brutal Gauleiter as chairman of the governors. Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph perfectly encapsulates this relationship. For a while, he refused to pay his licence fee. The ostensible casus belli was, in fact, a good one. The BBC refused to sack the oafish, pretentious, and unfunny comedian Russell Brand after he used a radio programme to make offensive remarks about a young woman to her grandfather. However, refusing to pay his licence fee has not stopped Moore from appearing on the BBC or from presenting programmes (for which, one assumes, he was paid with licence payers’ money). It was even suggested that he might be made chairman of the BBC governors.

The Left should put a stop to all this. Getting rid of the BBC would end the absurd Tory pantomime of simultaneously getting uncritical coverage and complaining about Left-wing bias. An enlarged World Service would be much better. Neutrality, objectivity, and balance are all problematic words but a broadcasting service that has managed to annoy the governments of China and Russia must be doing something right.

The next government is probably going to be a Labour one and no one doubts either that it is going to have to deal with appallingly difficult circumstances. The BBC has done much to trivialise politics — think of the cringe-making television career of Ed Balls after he lost his parliamentary seat. But if a small, news-focused BBC core were built around the World Service, it would encourage seriousness about public affairs and a new level of clarity and concision from our leaders. Perhaps we will go back to the wonderful days when Clement Attlee was asked whether he wanted to comment on some matter and replied with one word: “No.”

After weeks of looking like Russia was going to invade, Putin now seems to be backing down. Why?

Firstly, we can’t get too complacent — that “some” in the BBC headline is doing a lot of work. Russia is not going home completely; rather, what it has done is given a major signal that it is de-escalating.

And this shouldn’t come as a surprise. From the beginning, the talk of Russian invasion that has filled the Western media has been irrational. Technically, any incursion into Ukrainian territory by Russian forces is an “invasion” — and Russia is already occupying the Donbas region in the east of the country. But between that and “marching to Kyiv” lies a geopolitical and military gulf.

Throughout the past month, Russia only ever had around 100,000 troops on the border. That may seem like a lot, but as the former British soldier and military analyst Mike Martin has pointed out, it is nowhere near enough to take all of Ukraine, let alone hold it. Then there’s the international backlash that would follow — as well as the fact that there’s no appetite among Russians for conquering Ukraine, as there was for thieving Crimea.

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What Ukraine can learn from Israel

By David Patrikarakos

But while the press coverage has been a touch hysterical, for once you can’t blame the media. They’ve taken their lead from the politicians — and none more so than Joe Biden, who for weeks has been telling the world that Russia would invade. So adamant (many would say feverish) was the US President on this point that his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky had to plead with him to “calm down the messaging” in a recent call between the two.

And it wasn’t just the talk. The US began evacuating its embassy staff, which soon created a domino effect of scuttling diplomats across Ukraine’s capital Kyiv. Even the Israelis started getting diplomats’ families out — something they almost never do short of full war. I confess this is when I began to entertain some doubts. Washington had kept its diplomatic staff in Kyiv during the height of the fighting when Russia first invaded in 2014. I should know: I met with its then-US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in his office just after Russia launched a major offensive.

But contacts in DC put this down to the scars of the recent Afghanistan evacuation; according to one source, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Adviser, almost collapsed with the stress during the calamitous withdrawal. Never again would the US allow itself to evacuate its people in total panic at the last minute with enemy forces closing in all around and the entire world watching.

Frankly, I found it all a touch embarrassing. And this, I think, is the point. It is impossible to know what calculations factor into Putin’s thinking, but there is a long record of what he has said — and nothing is more instructive than his comments in his 2005 State of the Nation address to the Russian people, when he called the collapse of the Soviet empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

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Test article

By Aris Roussinos

Now Putin is not stupid. He knows the USSR is never coming back. What he intended, I think, was to lament the loss of his country’s superpowers status, prestige, and respect. But here’s the thing: it is tough to be a superpower when your GDP is half of Britain’s; when you can’t fight the US in a conventional war because you know you’d be hammered; and when you live in perennial fear of China stealing the eastern part of your state.

So if you can’t actually be a superpower that can match the US, then what’s the next best thing? Well, you can act like one — especially if you sense weakness in your enemy. Putin began amassing troops on the Ukrainian border soon after Biden — a man the Kremlin thinks is old and weak — took office. Once that happened, he got Biden’s attention and it has never wavered since. Biden asks for meetings and calls. He expresses his willingness to talk to Putin any time and any place. That’s the most powerful politician in the world — and a traditional modern enemy — pretty much at your beck and call. That’s Russia being a world actor. That’s prestige; that’s status.

And while you’re there, why not remind the Europeans — especially the German government — who heats their voters’ houses? Get the new Chancellor of Germany in and make sure he knows the score. Get Emmanuel Macron to come round and plead with you, while you make him sit at the other end of a long table like a supplicant. Get one of your underlings to insult the British Foreign Secretary. And perhaps most importantly, get Ukrainian officials to say the country will never join Nato — which is of course what you fear more than anything else — and do it all without firing a shot, without marching to Kyiv, and without the inevitable sanctions and diplomatic isolation that would follow.

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Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

Don’t think this is the end, though. Far from it. BBC News headlines now squawk Nato’s warnings that there is no sign of Russia de-escalation. The Sun shrieks that a huge dawn invasion is set for today. The Kremlin, meanwhile, says troops that have been on “exercises” are returning to base. Back and forth and up and down the troops go, and with them the heart rate of the watching world.

You can be sure of this: the troops won’t all go home. A force will stay on the Ukrainian border so that Putin can raise or lower tensions whenever he needs— as well as use other means: reports are now coming in that Ukraine has suffered Cyber attack, almost certainly from Russia.

In this sense, Russia uses its presence similar to the way that Iran uses its nuclear programme: as a means of extracting concessions. So it threatens but it never fully acts — because to do so would mean to exchange leverage for punishment.

Putin has always been pretty rational, even cautious. It appears this is still the case. It may well be that after 20 years of acting like a Tsar, he has gone mad, like so many before him, and something crazy is coming. But for a moment it seems that this whole affair has been another big Russian victory. Putin has won this round — and we let him get away with it.