But he didn’t go quietly. The very day after his leaving party — held in the oak-panelled gloom of the old governor’s boardroom in the original part of Broadcasting House — the Daily Mail‘s front-page headline trumpeted: “BBC Icon savages bias … at the Beeb” and devoted many of the inside pages to extracts from his autobiography A Day Like Today. And I must admit, as someone who has spent many years trying to explain why bias at the BBC is so insidious and so important, my spirits rose; at last, I thought, a powerful endorsement from an unexpected source.

I enjoyed that small but gratifying spasm of affirmation particularly as Mr Humphrys was good enough to name check me and my work in the Mail extracts. But it turns out the paper’s take was somewhat misleading; a close reading of the book shows that yes, Humphrys does have his criticisms, but they are quite limited in scope. What actually emerges is just how much of a BBC man he is, whether he recognises it or not. Which might come as some consolation to the BBC’s director-general, Lord Hall, who, over the bad wine and foul canapes, had heaped praise on his star presenter only to wake the following morning to find that Humphrys had written disobliging things about the Corporation in the paper that is a sworn enemy.

The criticisms of the BBC that Humphrys makes in the book, to my mind come nowhere near the heart of the matter; they stem, rather from his own life story and prejudices. And Humphrys’ life has certainly been a fascinating one. As often is the case it is the early years which come across most vividly and in his case it is the stark poverty of his family background that grips the reader.

Suggested reading

Who will miss John Humphrys?

By Giles Fraser

One of five children — one of whom died tragically young — Humphrys was born in Cardiff during the war to a father who scraped a meagre living as a freelance french-polisher. His memories of those years underline the distance we have travelled as a nation during his lifetime; we have become immeasurably richer and it is impossible to imagine any family today enduring the privations his did. But Humphrys enjoyed one inestimable blessing: he was raised in a loving and stable family that cherished its children and put the greatest store on education. Working-class families today enjoy a standard of living undreamt of by his parents; but for so many children, of all classes, what is missing today is that emotional security he enjoyed.

There is one anecdote that struck me forcibly; the young John had to go to hospital for treatment on a cyst at the base of his spine. As he was lying, face down and butt naked, the consultant arrived with his ‘firm’ of juniors. The great man eyed the patient and declaimed: “the trouble with this boy is that he doesn’t bathe regularly” leaving the boy in question “cringing with shame and embarrassment”. The crass lack of empathy is breath-taking; did that man not understand that there was no proper bathroom in the Humphrys’ home? That ‘regular bathing’ was a luxury denied to many poor folk?

Understandably, slights like this left the young Humphrys with a substantial chip on his shoulder — an inbuilt resentment of the arrogance and entitlement of those who took the good things in life for granted. But that very sense of unfairness was also the spur which gave Humphrys his cutting edge and turned him into the formidable interrogator of the rich and powerful.

Suggested reading

On Brexit, Auntie just can't help herself

By Robin Aitken

Humphrys’ journalistic career is one which many another hack would envy; as a reporter he had stand-out talent; after working on local papers in south Wales The Sunday Times tried to recruit him. Unfortunately for them a job offer with TWW — the local commercial TV franchise — came along at the same moment and the glamour of TV seduced him. After that he had a stellar ascent; the BBC took him on and, still in his twenties, he was given the plum posting as BBC TV’s first Washington correspondent. Such things do not happen by accident; the BBC knew a ‘good operator’ when they saw one. Successful reporters have to have a range of skills — mental acuity, intellectual curiosity, verbal dexterity — they also need a measure of good luck. And, as he admits, he had more than his fair share arriving in his new job just as the Watergate scandal began to unfold culminating in the impeachment of Richard Nixon.

After that came South Africa, then a roving brief, then a stint as a newsreader on the Nine O’Clock News (the first journalist, as opposed to presenter, to do so) and then his true destiny when the offer of presenting Today came along. He admits he had reservations about the job; he’d never done radio, had always worked from scripts and wasn’t sure he had the personality to carry it off. At first he wasn’t a great success: I remember a cricket-loving BBC radio editor who likened him to a “medium-paced stock bowler, no variation in his game”. A bit unfair, perhaps, but in the early 1990s he didn’t seem like a natural. But he grew into the role and eventually established himself as the dominant personality on the BBC’s most important news and current affairs programme, a favourite with listeners and probably the most feared interviewer in the land.

His role as Today’s anchor man put him at the centre of some of the most significant political episodes of the past three decades. The chapter in the book devoted to the Iraq war makes for fascinating reading; that was perhaps Humphrys’ finest hour when he put Tony Blair’s government on the rack. Blair’s reputation never recovered from that dishonest war, and Humphrys’ forensic interviews played a large part in his fall from grace. He was a central figure too in the downfall of George Entwistle, the short-lived BBC director-general. In what Humphrys called “a catastrophically shoddy piece of reporting” Newsnight had wrongly named Lord McAlpine, a former Tory Party treasurer, as a paedophile rapist. Entwistle surprisingly offered himself up for interview on Today where, with steely precision, Humphrys laid bare his ineptitude; he resigned a few hours later.

Suggested reading

Why should the BBC censor the public?

By Douglas Murray

But what of those ‘savage’ criticisms of the BBC? They fall into three main categories: he views the corporation’s boss class with great suspicion; he thinks the BBC has become too middle-class and therefore unable to understand what motivates that section of the population which isn’t; and he thinks the BBC is too driven by political correctness. There is force in all these but they are stock complaints; so standard in fact that the BBC has seen fit to mock itself in these terms in the brilliantly satirical W1A series. The Daily Mail chose to highlight Humphrys’ remarks about how the BBC greeted the Leave vote in the referendum: there was anger and bafflement, he says, because BBC people just could not understand how anyone, let alone a majority of the populace, could possibly vote to leave an organisation so obviously wonderful.

But in the course of the book Humphrys reveals himself to be, among other things, an atheist, a republican who would like to see the end of the monarchy, and a Remain voter. He is, I suspect, a thoroughgoing social liberal, arguing strongly, for instance, for euthanasia for those suffering from terminal diseases. Whereas for me and those who think like me, the exclusion of socially conservative voices and the denigration of the values of social conservatism by the BBC make a mockery of its proclaimed impartiality, these things do not seem to trouble Mr Humphrys much.

Although he remarks on the BBC’s default liberal-left reflexes there is no follow-through on the shocking lack of internal political diversity; the BBC has become a political monoculture. The corporation might now be trying hard to employ the ‘correct’ percentages of black, brown and white people reflecting the population at large but there is no corresponding political diversity; if there were, conservative opinions would be better represented in the output. To social conservatives, and there are millions of us, issues such as multiculturalism, feminism, divorce, abortion and euthanasia are still controversial but our voices go unheard because we are unrepresented within the BBC itself.

Suggested reading

How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

When I was a reporter on Today and the gossip turned to the character of our lead presenter, as inevitably it sometimes did, it used often to be said that the one thing about John was that you couldn’t tell what his politics were. And he says in the book that at one time or another he has voted for all the mainstream parties. Having read his book though, a much clearer picture of the man emerges; sure he has his gripes about the BBC often expressed with an appealing vinegary sharpness: but actually, deep-down, he’s one of Auntie’s men even while he finds her sometimes maddening.

And this should come as no real surprise; the BBC only tolerates dissent if it is kept within certain bounds. John Humphrys’ criticisms — that the BBC is left-liberal by instinct — are very similar to those made by Jeremy Paxman but the fact remains that, despite their eminence, neither man was able to do much to affect Auntie’s core prejudices. Because this isn’t a something that individual BBC journalists, however famous, can do much to change. It is the deep-rooted political culture of the BBC, formed over many decades, which is the problem and it can only be addressed by systematic reform.

The BBC constantly frets about whether numerically it properly reflects the skin colour and sexual orientation of the nation; it’s time it woke up to the fact that a much greater problem is that it needs to redress the colossal political imbalance within its own ranks.

A Day Like Today is published by William Collins, £20

For decades, social conservatives have insisted that the institution provides a uniquely stable foundation on which to raise a family. It hasn’t always been a popular message, but at least it’s been delivered from the summit of a growing pile of supporting research.

There’s no denying the evidence – and a recent Economist article on the subject doesn’t try:

“You could make enough confetti for a summer of weddings with all the academic papers that show how much children gain from being brought up in stable, loving families, and how much they suffer when those families break down.”

Yes, that’s right, the Economist – the international house journal of the economically-and-socially-liberal – appears to accept what conservative types tend to know in their guts.

Marriage works, if not for every couple, then for society as a whole:

“Analysis of one large American data set by Kathryn Edin and Laura Tach, two sociologists, shows that 27% of marriages broke down within nine years of a child being born. By contrast, among couples who were merely cohabiting when a child appeared, 53% separated within nine years—and most of the remaining 47% were married by that point. Among couples who were dating but not living together when the child was born, 81% had split up.”

Ah, but what about the ‘selection effects’?

“Statistical controls are important. Some people are more likely to choose to wed than others. Married people tend to be not just more highly educated than unmarried ones but also wealthier, older, more religious, more cheerful and more likely to own a home…

“Studies that have wrestled with this problem have concluded that the greater the number of personal characteristics you control for, the less magical wedlock appears to be. Yet the effect of marriage cannot quite be controlled away to zero.”

According to the article’s reading of the evidence, two-thirds of the difference between the most stable (i.e marriage-before-children) families and the least stable families are attributable to personal characteristics like “education, employment, criminal history and women’s feelings about men”:

“But that still leaves almost a third of the difference attributable to marriage or to other, unmeasured factors.”

What could possibly account for the residual effect? It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to attribute it to values embodied and inculcated by the institution of marriage itself. The anonymous author of the Economist article writes somewhat flippantly about the supposedly “magical” effects of marriage, but perhaps that isn’t such an inappropriate word. The solemn and public ritual of matrimony stands in stark contrast to the privatised informality of the rest of our lives. Even if you doesn’t believe in it as a divinely ordained sacrament, you can still feel its power.

It was the founder of the Economist, Walter Bagehot, who wrote of the ‘efficient’ and ‘dignified’ parts of the British constitution, recognising both were essential to the stability of the state. Surely, the same could be applied to the way in which we form families – with marriage providing the dignified part of their constitution.

Our anonymous author seems to get the idea, if only in part:

“People fall in love with and marry people who are just as highly educated as themselves. They define and express their shared values through expensive wedding celebrations. After marriage, they continue to fine-tune their relationships and pool their resources. When children appear, they put their accumulated social and cultural capital to work. Married couples engage in a demanding four-handed juggling act that prepares their offspring for success at school, university and the most demanding jobs. Their children marry well, and the cycle begins again.”

This is a rather mechanistic account, but one that shows that marriage is even more important than the dry statistical analysis would suggest. Two-thirds of the “magical” effect of marriage may well disappear if you control for beneficial “personal characteristics” – but how are these habits of responsibility formed in the first place?

People aren’t just shaped by their own marriages, but by the example set by other marriages – those of parents especially, but also within wider circles of family, friendship and community.

Marriage forms not only families; it also forms culture – to the benefit of all, married and unmarried. It communicates at a deep and resonant level that promises matter, freedom has limits and that a life well-lived is an ordered one.

A case in point is extramarital sex – or adultery, if I may be so bold – on which public disapproval appears to be holding up. A fascinating article by Nicholas H. Wolfinger of the Institute for Family Studies presents the evidence:

“According to the past 30 years of the General Social Survey (GSS), three out of every four American adults aver that extramarital sex is always wrong. At the other end of the spectrum, under three percent of the population thinks extramarital sex isn’t wrong at all. The number of Americans who report actually having sex outside the bonds of matrimony has held relatively steady, at around 16 percent. Annual fluctuations have been minor, rarely exceeding more than a percentage point in either direction.”

However, when one unpicks the numbers on those admitting to extramarital sex, one finds a growing divergence between the generations – but not in the direction you might expect.

“…the broader trend has obscured startling changes: since 2000, older Americans are cheating more, while younger Americans are cheating less…

“For the first few years of the millennium, there were scant age differences. Starting after 2004, Americans over 55 began reporting rates of extramarital sex that were about five or six percentage points higher than were being offered by younger adults. By 2016, 20% of older respondents indicated that their marriages were nominally adulterous, compared to 14% for people under 55. Most married Americans remain committed to monogamy, but the mounting age difference is noteworthy and statistically significant.”

What could explain this phenomenon? Wolfinger shows that it isn’t those of advanced age driving the change, but rather people in their 50s and 60s — the “products of the sexual revolution”. While there may be some tendency for older people of whatever era to “grow bored of their marital beds”, the data is clear that “older Americans only became more sexually active outside marriage in recent years.”

Wolfinger wonders if the advent of Viagra might have some bearing on the matter – not in changing attitudes towards adultery, but in facilitating the dirty deed. However, the growing gap between the generations isn’t just explained by more infidelity among the older age groups, but less among the younger – for which Viagra surely can’t claim the credit.

One has to ask whether the baby-boomers play fast-and-loose with their marriages because they can afford to. If you have assets – especially housing assets – then divorce may be financially feasible. If on the other hand you have no property and no savings, and you and your partner can barely afford the rent between the two of you, then a split could spell financial disaster – even homelessness.

Nicholas Wolfinger’s analysis shows a big drop in extramarital sex (among the younger cohort) taking place in the second half of the last decade e.g. coinciding with the financial crisis. This also happens to be a period in which the long-term fall in teen pregnancies has accelerated.

The decline in various forms of youthful malarkey is often attributed to the distraction effect of social media. But perhaps it’s more a case of needs must.