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- [00:01]
Alastair Campbell
Thanks for listening to the Rest is Politics. Sign up to the Rest is Politics plus to enjoy ad free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets just go to therestispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com this episode is powered by Fuse.
- [00:15]
Rory Stewart
Energy, and there's a slight tendency to governments to talk about the future of energy as though it's some distant concept awaiting its next committee report. But in reality, of course, it's already being built fuel by fuel, turbine by turbine, by companies like Fuse Energy.
- [00:29]
Alastair Campbell
And Fuse is now the fastest growing renewable energy supplier in the uk, putting sustainability at the heart of everything they do. Their new solar and wind farm projects are helping to build a cleaner, more resilient national grid, proving that renewable energy can be both affordable and scalable.
- [00:46]
Rory Stewart
Every home that they power brings that future close to the present, whether it's panels catching light or turbines turning across the country. And this is progress, which isn't measured just in targets and slogans, but in sunlight, in wind, in electricity, and a bit of British persistence.
- [01:03]
Alastair Campbell
And progress is not always about shouting the loudest. It's about keeping the lights on intelligently and making clean energy something that everyone could afford.
- [01:11]
Rory Stewart
The energy transition isn't tomorrow's problem, it's today. And Fuse Energy is actually doing something to address it.
- [01:19]
Alastair Campbell
So switch to Fuse Energy today, using the code politics to save on your energy bills and help power a cleaner, more sustainable future. Welcome to a live episode of the Rest Is Politics, with me, Alistair Campbell.
- [01:40]
Rory Stewart
And with me, Rory Stewart. And we were together live in Bournemouth last night. So we've all been charging up to London. I just got out of car. But just before we went on stage, you pointed out that we'd seen the resignation of Tim Davy. So just to bring people up to date, the Director General of the BBC, Tim Davy, and Deborah Turnus, head of news, have both resigned. And they've both resigned at the end of a week of stories which originally came out of the Daily Telegraph leaking a memo by a man called Michael Prescott. Maybe I'm giving too much detail here, but we can get into this a little bit more. Prescott essentially focused on two allegations against the BBC. One of them is that Panorama, in a program at the end of last year, had spliced together two bits of Donald Trump's speech before the January 6 riots in a very unfair way, to make it look as though he'd said in a single sentence, we're going to march on the Capitol and we're going to fight, fight, fight. And in fact, those words appeared about an hour apart in the speech. And the second was a series of allegations about BBC Arabic in Prescott's views, providing a very different and more pro Palestinian, anti Israeli slant than BBC English. This got going during the week. And those of you who don't closely read the Daily Telegraph or the Mail may not have seen all of this, but you saw Kemi Badenot getting on this, Boris Johnson getting on this, and increasing calls for the Director General of the BBC to resign. And then finally yesterday, he did resign, which has raised a huge number of questions. The reason we're doing the emergency podcast is that the BBC is probably the most famous public service broadcaster in the world. It's certainly in international polls, the most trusted broadcaster in the world. And we are at a time when news and fact in news couldn't be more contested. And the Director General has gone on which. Over to you.
- [03:42]
Alastair Campbell
Yeah, well, that's right. And you were in your dressing room at Bournemouth. I came in, knocked on your door and said, I can't quite believe this. Tim Davy and Deborah Dunes have both resigned. And you said sort of something on the lines of wtf. Now, on the one hand, I think that maybe some people think this is a kind of classic Westminster bubble inside the Beltway. Media love talking about media story, but actually, I think this is a lot of angles to it that relate to the stuff that we talk about all the time. Donald Trump has become a big part of the story, as you say it was. And it was, let's be honest, it was a really stupid piece of editing, which it didn't need to be done. Very few viewers would not have known by then that Donald Trump did effectively incite a riot at the Capitol. And bear in mind, this documentary went out shortly before the election that led to Trump getting his second term. So the idea this was going to have a big impact in America for the birds. I think what's happened here, and look, I've been saying for a long time that I think the BBC has lost its confidence. I think it panders to those who seek to destroy it. And I'm afraid, I think that's what this is about. I think that this is going to lead to questions about the governance of the BBC. And let's just focus on one of the key characters here, Roy. Robbie Gibb. Robbie Gibb. And I wonder whether you had anything to do with Robbie Gibb when he was Director of Communications to Theresa May. He's on the board and he's appointed as one of what's called the national appointees. He's there for England and these appointments. So the appointment of the Chairman, Samir Shah and these national appointments, they're made by government and then the other appointments to the board are made by and from within the BBC. And Romy Gibb being there is honestly like. So Theresa May was Prime Minister, he was her Director of Communications. He's got a long track record of being a very, very active political figure in all sorts of areas, including Gaza and Israel, through his senior role at the Jewish Chronicle. And he's there, he's appointed under Boris Johnson. It is as though when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, I was appointed. Now, can you imagine, can you imagine what the outcry would have been on these papers you've mentioned, the Telegraph, the Mail, the sun, the Express, they would have gone completely berserk if Alistair Campbell.
- [06:06]
Rory Stewart
Had been put on the board of the BBC. And that may be why, sadly, we may not see you as the new Director General.
- [06:13]
Alastair Campbell
I think I'd frankly do a better job than some of the names that are in the frame. But you're absolutely right, it is not going to happen. But I think that, look, I've, as you know, I've had my criticisms of the BBC. I had a with the BBC over 20 years ago, which led not just the Director General going, but also the chairman. And look this, in a sense, there are various ways of looking at this story. One of them to which I subscribe in part, is that there has been a right wing, very organized, very well funded attempt to undermine the BBC. Because if you are a Trump, if you are a Farage, you don't want a media organization that properly holds people to account. You want a fanzine. And the other narrative is that the BBC is sort of hopelessly woke and left wing. I just don't buy that. The other one where I have more sympathy is that the BBC is very, very bad at dealing with complaints and dealing with crises of its own. And we've seen that in spades this week.
- [07:16]
Rory Stewart
So many, many different angles. First thing is that it's definitely true that a lot of people who were in the Conservative Party with me and many of the Conservative Party members in my constituency instinctively feel that the BBC is on the left. Just as you feel that the print media is broadly speaking on the right, they feel the BBC is broadly on the left. And it's probably basically true that many of the BBC journalists I knew traditionally were slightly more on the liberal side than on the conservative side. But, you know, whatever. Fundamentally though, the BBC's problem is that it's a punchbag. It's a punchbag with the right basically thinking that the truth is right wing and the left believing the truth is left wing and the BBC trying to present a story in the middle.
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Alastair Campbell
In a polarized world.
- [08:08]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, in a polarized world and being hammered from both sides. It is the most impossible job. Now, second thing, I was thinking a little bit about past director generals of the BBC and actually how difficult the job's always been. I think it's got much more difficult. We can talk about why, if you were actually to take that job in a few weeks time, it would be a pretty unpleasant job and we can talk a little bit about how you could do that job. But the. If you look back at direct journals of BBC, you. Yes, you've just pointed out you were absolutely central to Greg Dyke going. People remember George Entwistle who came in in 2012 and had to resign over Newsnight coverage suggesting that Lord MacAlpin had been involved in the sexual abuse of children in Wales. So that's another news story going wrong that led to his resignation. I was thinking about now going back a bit more time in your earlier career, Alastair Milne, who was basically booted out because Mrs. Thatcher brought in Marmaduke Hussey and I guess presumably was booted out because they thought the BBC was too left wing in the mid-1980s and kicked him out. So there's a big history there of a public service broadcaster really struggling and of course somewhere in the background are kind of old fashioned people like me who keep saying Wreathian values. Now, who knows whether this guy, Lord Reith, the first Director General, was quite all that we now make him out to be, but who are also horrified that the BBC has got rid of Stephen Sacco on Hard Talk, which was a fantastic program, has cut a lot of the funding for Newsnight, so it's now a shadow of its former self, has taken a lot of its coverage out of the party conferences, all of which. And then finally, and then I'll hand back to you, I think we're going to go on and agree absolutely violently how important the BBC is and an impartial public broadcaster is. It is shocking what they did. I watched that Panorama moment. It is unforgivable. They've shot it exactly as though Trump said those two sentences, one after, let's walk down to the Capitol and fight, fight, fight. And actually his fight, fight, fight is not a reference the Capitol and any decent Editor should have, particularly at the BBC, should have said, what the hell are you doing? How did you slice this together? And one of the things that I never see in the BBC, and maybe this is something we can get onto, is where are the resignations and the accountability at that level of the person who actually made it? Because presumably Tim Davy is dealing with everything from strictly to Radio 3 and goodness knows what else. Right. What's gone wrong with the editorial team at Panorama that they could have done that?
- [10:41]
Alastair Campbell
I mean, I don't know the answer because I don't know who made the decisions. I don't know what the commissioning process was. A lot of programs that are made these days are made by independents. That actually was part of Thatcher's reform, was to say the BBC needs to have more people outside who are brought in to make programs and so on. So I don't know the answer. It was a terrible mistake, no doubt about that. But it is a stick that is being turned into a kind of, you know, machine gun with which to beat the BBC. And let's just focus a little bit on this left wing, right wing thing. And you mentioned Margaret Thatcher there, Imam Duke Hussey. Margaret Thatcher had this thing that she reputedly always used to say when they were talking about public appointments. You know, is he one of us? Okay. And that became the title of one of the best books about Thatcher. Is he one of us? And I think what's gone on here is quite a lot of one of usery. The fact that Boris Johnson, who to all intents and purposes, apart from the occasional Covid appearance of the COVID inquiry, has not been involved that much in public debate of late. Why did he suddenly pile into this? Because actually, Robbie Gibb is quotes one of us. I would argue that Michael Prescott is quotes in their eyes, one of us. He's a friend of Robbie Gibbs. He made his name as a journalist on the Sunday Times. We know what the Murdoch press think of the BBC. He then went into corporate pr. And when we talk about this leaked report, you know, people say, oh, report got leaked. Always worth asking, who does the leak help? In this instance, the leak helps anybody who wants to say that the BBC is terrible and it gets leaked to a newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, I mean, how we still call. We have to call it a newspaper because it's registered at the post office, but it's not quite what it was. A newspaper, by the way, that was previously owned by Conrad Black, who went to jail, then by the Barclay brothers, who ended in pretty difficult circumstances. It's now there's a process of sale going on that seems to be going in all sorts of weird directions. But this week you've seen all these forces of the right, Johnson, Trump, reform, the Mail, the Telegraph, et cetera, coming together. And let's just put that in context. I have had fights with the BBC, okay. I have criticized often the BBC, but you cannot remotely compare the vast output of journalism they do with the absolute mendaciousness and indeed criminality of some of the newspapers that are now shouting loudest for them to be brought down.
- [13:17]
Rory Stewart
Can I get slightly uncomfortable ground here for a second? And then we'll kind of move back. Just take you back to those days in 2003. 4 and what you felt leading up to the resignation of the then Director General Greg Dyke and the chairman. Presumably you felt and the government felt and your allies felt that the BBC had mishandled it. And presumably some of it, I mean, you're obviously seeing it more from your angle. But some of the things you felt about the BBC would have some echoes with what the right complain about the BBC, which is BBC did something wrong, they didn't apologize in the right way.
- [13:53]
Alastair Campbell
That's exactly right. And I didn't enjoy getting into this terrible sort of battle to the death with the BBC because I actually, I've always been a defender of the BBC. I criticize it like we all do. I regularly shout at some of its programs. As I said at Bournemouth last night, I think the real scandal at the BBC today is their never ending platform of reform with their five MPs ahead of the Greens, the Lib Dems and most of the time labor and the Tories as well. So I criticize it, but I defend it. Partly to go back to what you said earlier about trust. I was just looking at a trust report in America. It's the second most trusted news source in the United States after the Weather Channel.
- [14:38]
Rory Stewart
No. Oh well, I wouldn't have got that.
- [14:41]
Alastair Campbell
So. And it's got big. It's got, it's got big and growing reach in the United States, which is why Trump and the White House and his press secretary last night saying GB News is now the only channel you should watch. This is ridiculous. The White House press secretary talking about this minor channel in the uk. Now back to Hutton. Andrew Gilligan was a journalist who said something on the Today program which was completely untrue. He essentially said that we and then later went on to say I had quotes. They used his phrase sex up, but essentially said that I had put intelligence into this dossier, knowing it to be untrue, against the wishes of the intelligence agencies. I, sitting there doing the job I was doing at the time, find it quite hard to think of a more serious accusation. And I knew it was untrue. Tony Blair knew it was untrue. The intelligence agencies he's knew is untrue. What happened though, and this is where there is a parallel with this, is that the BBC goes into a kind of defend a defensive crouch. But I think what's different with this is that when this story started to appear, as you say, led by the Telegraph, this leaked report lands in the Telegraph and the other papers follow up. And Katie Razzle, to be fair to the BBC culture correspondent, she has made the point on the BBC website today that, you know, for the life of her, she cannot understand why the BBC didn' grip it from the word go. If you'd have gripped it, that had come out and said, yeah, you're absolutely right, we don't know how this has happened, it's a terrible mistake and we're going to make sure that this doesn't happen again and somebody has to pay the price.
- [16:18]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, this seems key, doesn't it? And just to lean into this, Alan Rustbridger, in a good article in Prospect, quotes a man called David Brader, a great Washington journalist, saying journalism is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we've heard about in the past 24 hours, distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read in about now. So he's basically saying, as any news person, really, we going to get a lot of stuff wrong and the BBC is inevitably going to get a lot of stuff wrong. The key point is to get out there and apologize. So I suppose where the parallel might be is you presumably could have felt with Andrew Gilligan, listen, okay, he screwed up, he got it wrong. But provided the BBC comes out quickly and says, okay, we acknowledge, you're not going to be totally surprised that we get things wrong a lot. I mean, as that guy's just pointed out, you're putting stuff together very quickly, you're trying to get news out very quickly. And in the case of Panorama, look, I think it's very difficult to understand how the editor let that pass. But nevertheless, presumably Tim Davy hadn't seen that Panorama thing and goodness knows we need. So it's the apology point.
- [17:31]
Alastair Campbell
Well, can I give a possible explanation? I don't know, right. But when I was thinking about this this morning, this goes to how technology is changing, I'm guessing. But let's say you've got a young researcher producer who is told, right, we need a couple of clips of Trump's speech because actually if you look at the whole documentaries I know you have, it's, it's pretty fair in lots of different ways. It's predicting what might happen. It's got a lot of interviews with people explaining why they like Donald Trump. It's not a biased against Trump for a whole hour. It just isn't like that. But I can imagine somebody of the sort of tick tock generation maybe hasn't gone through all the sort of training that a lot of journalists, because journalism has changed so fast as well. So they've thought, well, actually there might be something that thinks, well, it sort of gets the sense of what he said. Now it's unacceptable, especially on the BBC, but I can see how that might have happened. But what I was asking for with the BBC and Gilligan was for them to accept that what he said was so contentious they had to be 100% sure. Instead of watch, as soon as we made the complaint, they went into, we're just going to defend this, whatever the truth. So what then came with an independent inquiry with a high, you know, top judge in charge of it, they got to what we always knew the facts were going to be. And the most striking thing for me was that what emerged was that there wasn't really any effort to find out whether what he said was true. They just felt they had to defend themselves against the government.
- [19:09]
Rory Stewart
Okay, all right, look, listen, we're speculating a little bit here, but I've been talking a little bit to some BBC people this morning and you will have been talking to even more. That is something that people worry about. So without naming names, maybe safer to go back to this Rusbridger article in Prospect that I thought was so good. He's talking about the way in which the management set up. And one thing is there's not enough journalists at the top. If you look at the board, I think three out of 13 of them are journalists. Tim Davy didn't come basically through the news journalism route. He came through more than he's marketing. Marketing, yeah. And when you look at the people looking at these editorial decisions, as you say, you have people like Robbie Gibb floating around. Michael Prescott was formally employed to look at this stuff and he says, who would you rather trust? People who were former journalists and then spent 15 years working in PR companies or public affairs or someone like Lee Doucet, for example, who's the kind of long term. So there is this sort of sense in which the BBC often feels very kind of defensive. And part of that defensiveness, as you pointed out even 20 years ago, and this is something I recognize in civil service departments, too, is that they defend and they don't really look into it. I actually found this sometimes when I was getting into fights with my own departments that the immediate stance to the permanent sector is total defence and actually not that much energy into truly trying to work out what had gone wrong.
- [20:42]
Alastair Campbell
It's weird as well, when you think about other institutions. You look at the way that the police now, when anything goes wrong, they immediately refer themselves to the body that has to investigate things. If the police go wrong now, whether they are, you know, and that can get very, very tense and very, very difficult. It was really, you know, this week, Rory, we should just tell listeners what the. The leading interview that's out today is with Radek Sikorsky, and it's mainly about Ukraine and Putin and what have you. But there's a very interesting section. I'd forgotten about this, but Fiona listened to it this morning and he, I don't know if you remember, it's when you asked him about the what happened to the media when the Law and Justice Party were in charge, this sort of populist party that was the government. And he said it was as if the BBC had been taken over by Breitbart. And this is before any of this stuff was going on. And he went on to say, we can all have our complaints about the BBC, but at least, you know, they check facts. They're not just a political organization. And why you now have. I mean, is it not absurd that the President of the United States, with all that he has to do and all on his plate, he this morning composes and writes a tweet as follows. The top in caps, people in the BBC, including Tim Davy in caps, whose name I suspect you didn't know until yesterday, the bastard caps are all quitting, fired in caps because they were caught doctoring in quotes. My very good brackets. Perfect in caps. Speech of January 6th. Thank you to the Telegraph for exposing these corrupt journalists in quotes. These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a presidential election on top of everything else. They're from a foreign country, one that many consider our number one ally. What a terrible thing for democracy. And then she says, caroline, leave it. BBC News is dying because they're anti Trump fake news. Everyone should watch GB news. This is what I mean about this is a concerted, organized right wing thing that is basically about saying we don't want media that holds us the powerful to account. We want media like Fox News, Breitbart, Infowars and all that stuff. And that's why we should be very, very, very careful watching all these reform people celebrating today and jumping on Tim Davies grave.
- [22:53]
Rory Stewart
I talked to my friend Matthew Paris this morning, who you're not a great fan of, but I think one of the things that he said, which I think you would agree with, is there's a very disturbing sense of kind of triumphalism on the right at the moment and the sense that the center left is in a defensive crouch.
- [23:09]
Alastair Campbell
Totally. They're on the marks.
- [23:10]
Rory Stewart
And this sort of sense that Charles Moore is kind of Charles Moore's sorry, previous Telegraph editor, great critic of the BBC very, very much. And of course there's a coming together of people talking about Trump, people talking about Israel, people talking about transgender has all been wrapped into a sort of general critique of the BBC. Then, okay, let's say we violently agree that we desperately need a really good public broadcaster. We were looking yesterday at Bournemouth together at this reporting with John Burns. Murdoch is just down in the ft looking at a recent paper from Harvard and MIT showing how the first generation of social media, Facebook and Twitter, polarized, but the second generation, TikTok, is driving to much more negative and aggressive responses. And that's to do with the change in the algorithm. A change from a simple algorithm that's just based on likes and searches to an algorithm that's based on attention. And we can now feel the sort of existential nature of this fight between the old school of reliable news anchors, kind of Walter Cronkite, various people called Dimbleby telling you what to think about the world every evening and the new world of this massively decentralized, algorithm driven polarization fake news. And in the middle of all this, you've got the BBC, most trusted media organization in the world, one organization that you hope you can kind of reach for. And we desperately need it. I mean I use the New York Times like that. And of course the New York Times, not perfect either. But I think all of us need in our life. Wait a second, is there something I can go to where I can get a more reliable news?
- [24:56]
Alastair Campbell
I agree. But let's just look at, as you mentioned, there are these other issues that Michael Prescott put into his dossier and we used to have this thing, I don't know if I'm telling you too many trade secrets here, but we did used to have this little thing called an mtbl. Have I ever told you what an MTBL is? MTBL is Memo to be Leaked. What that means is that sometimes, sometimes you might write, you might be trying to get a story into the public domain, okay, Phone up a journalist and say, you know about this. No, it doesn't sound that very interesting. But if you then put it in a memo to be leaked, suddenly it becomes very, very newsworthy. And this has the feeling of an MTBL to me. I could be very, very wrong, but who knows?
- [25:39]
Rory Stewart
Just to explain the joke here, the point presumably is that Michael Prescott writes this rather lengthy report which I've waded through looking at detailed comparisons of BBC Arabic and BBC English on exactly how they reported on this hostage. And it's probably not going to get much coverage, but if it becomes a leaked memo, suddenly it sounds secret, it sounds like somebody's trying to cover it up. It sounds like a classified thing. And now sud headline.
- [26:03]
Alastair Campbell
Yeah, no, even. No, it's not even about getting coverage because Most of most MTBLs are meant entirely for internal consumption. It's the fact that. So that adds to the sense of it. Now, I don't know, I could be maligning him. But all I'm saying is it is a thing in the world of corporate affairs and occasionally in government. Right. Two of the issues, as you say, because it wasn't just Trump and it was Gaza, as you say, it was the transgender issue. And just on those. So one of the problems the BBC has because of all this change that's going on, a lot of young people just aren't interested. They're on TikTok. They probably don't know who. Some of these big names on the BBC that we talk about who they even are, do they know who Laura Kuenssberg is? Do they know who Chris Mason is? I don't know, but a lot of them won't. And if you talk to a lot of young people, as I do about Gaza, insofar as they're aware of the BBC, they think it's massively pro Israel and hugely unfair to the Palestinians. And on transgender, I've had some stand up rows with really senior people at the BBC who are so far over in the kind of JK Rowling camp that it's sort of. And I think most young people, I'm not pretending I'm young here, Rory, but I do talk To a lot of young people, I think they think on the trans issue, that the BBC is the opposite of what Michael Prescott's report is saying that it is. And also when you get to Trump, Trump is such a huge figure. So he has a point where one of the points that he makes, as you say, you've read the report. I read it this morning for the first time, read the thing in full. And he's got this thing about, you know, the thing about they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats. Right. This was given disproportionate coverage. What does that mean? What does that mean? It's like he's the most talked about person on the planet and he happened to be saying this. It gave disproportionate coverage to a single poll. It should have done an equally aggressive documentary about Kamala Harris. As though the BB's. As though Panorama is, you know, it's just nuts.
- [28:01]
Rory Stewart
That is nuts. But it's also very interesting how difficult it is to explain what it's like running a newsroom.
- [28:10]
Alastair Campbell
Oh, yeah. I'm not underestimating that.
- [28:12]
Rory Stewart
And how difficult it is being an editor, because you've made this point a lot over Brexit. You know, their attempt to be impartial meant giving as much voice to the one economist pushing for an extremely unorthodox vision against the thousands of economists pushing for the more straightforward vision. And at one level, if you said quickly to someone, well, there should be an equally aggressive documentary about Kamala Harris, you'd be like, oh, well, I suppose those are too candid for equally aggressive. But of course, the point is that Kamala Harris, what were her weaknesses? Well, I think in the end, people might say she was a bit dull, she wasn't a great campaigner. Some people would say she was a little bit too woke, she came too late. Donald Trump is a totally different animal. I mean, if you're thinking about news, he is a kind of, in historical terms, a completely extraordinary in every way. His threat to the constitution, his views of the international order, his change. So of course you're going to make a documentary on Trump and you can't really make the same kind of documentary on Kamala Harris because there isn't that much to say about Kamala Harris in that kind of way.
- [29:17]
Alastair Campbell
But it's also is a Murdoch journalist turned PR guy who's also, by the way, been in that whole Appointments Commission world as well, and he's writing this report and it's as if, well, the BBC is the BBC and therefore, if you're doing Keir Starmer, you have to do Kemi Badenoch, because that's how our sense of impartiality works. If you're doing a leave economist, you do remain economist. The idea that a BBC Panorama is going to have the same impact in the American debate as a Fox News debate or CNN town hall, it is kind of crazy.
- [29:55]
Rory Stewart
The other thing, it's the way in which America's become so central to our culture that in the past, what would have brought down the direct general of the BBC is reporting on Britain. And that's what traditionally always did it. Now it's reporting on the United States. And that's very interesting. And again, you've made this point how central the British participants in the horrors around Epstein's abuse and their participation in that. It's the Brits that have been the center of this American scandal, and not really the Americans that our whole culture, I mean, we do not. Look, the BBC has an obligation to be as objective and impartial as it can. It should definitely not be splicing together misleading videos on Trump. But equally, it doesn't. Yeah, as you say, it's not the American public broadcaster. And look, let's say you did a program on Erdogan. Are you forced then to do a program on Erdogan's opposition? I mean, the whole thing goes, well.
- [30:49]
Alastair Campbell
You can't interview him because he's in jail.
- [30:51]
Rory Stewart
He's in jail. Anyway, the whole thing's gone completely bizarre, this idea of impartiality.
- [30:55]
Alastair Campbell
But we had one last week as well that relates to this point. And I keep saying this about we underestimate the extent to which Trump lives in the heads of all of us in a way that very few public figures have ever done before. So, Mamdani, Zoran Mamdani. Right. He's virtually. I imagine that every single person who's watching us now now knows who he is. Okay. Does every single American know who the mayor of Paris is? Does every single German know who the mayor of London is? It's because it's America and because it's Trump's America. And that's his genius, I'm afraid, as a politician, he gets into all the stuff that we end up talking about. And maybe the other thing to talk about, the reason why this is so timing wise, so sensitive. We should also talk a bit about how the government should handle this, because the BBC has a charter, and the charter is agreed every 10 years with the government, and it's coming up for renewal. I Think at the end of 2027. So the debate on that is going on now and let's just, just so people understand, the chairman of the BBC currently Samir Shah, and the non executive members for the nations, which is England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, which includes Robbie Gibbs Gibb, who's there for England for the next, I think he's up to 2028. They are appointed by your friend the King on the recommendation of Ministers. Okay, yeah.
- [32:16]
Rory Stewart
Just to explain to people, when, when we say that it's not actually the King, is it? It's the Prime Minister appoints them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, correct.
- [32:25]
Alastair Campbell
The government appoint them. And, and, and, and, and that's fine now. And I think people get that I, that I think is going to have to be looked at. I don't know what a better system of appointment is, but it seems to me it's a little bit like when we look at the Supreme Court in America, you and I, and I think most Brits look at that and think, you know, the fact that when you are in power you can tilt it one way or the other, that's not very good. And what we've seen, I think with the Tories in power, they have tilted the BBC and its management and its board and therefore it's politics. And when I heard, by the way Roy, you'll be interested in this, this is very inside the beltway. Do you know who was the person who was kind of driving the campaign to get Gibbon to the board of the BBC? Do you know? A gentleman by the name of Dougie Smith.
- [33:13]
Rory Stewart
Ah, well that's interesting.
- [33:16]
Alastair Campbell
Why don't you tell our listeners who this is.
- [33:19]
Rory Stewart
Dougie Smith is somebody who I came across when I was running to be a parliamentary candidate in 2010 and he was in charge of doing the background checks on candidates and he was considered in those days to be a sort of legendary figure, a bit of a kind of master of the dark arts backroom dealer. Sort of a little bit like the reputation in a different way that Dominic Cummings later developed and he was considered to be able to get into the kind not quite the dark web, but find out anything that could possibly be about Drake. He actually rather he got in touch with me and he said look, I've looked at you but all your scandals are so much out there in the public anyway. A there's. I don't need to have to worry about you too much. It's all kind of been covered. He then came back to prominence again because he survived every different change in Conservative government. Left to right, right to left. He became particularly, I think, the target of our friend Nadine Doris, who became convinced he was the center of an obscure sort of cabal. Bring him down. Anyway, that's very interesting that he's the man that brought Robbie Gibbon.
- [34:28]
Alastair Campbell
Yeah. So he's. He's the guy who is. He's a big. He's. I think he's usually described in the press in the rare occasions he. As the notorious Tory party fixer. I must admit, Roy, while you talk, I was looking at some of the comments and I have to say, all those handles with lots of letters and lots of numbers in very strange order they really are that. There's one here. I can no longer watch this. I find Rory now brilliant a few years ago, but now they're so out of touch, they're irrelevant. Next one. This is from KK, KK6UK.
- [34:57]
Rory Stewart
Good.
- [34:57]
Alastair Campbell
Greetings from Leningrad. Scrap the license fee and let the progressives pay for their own propaganda channel. On it goes. We've got some very good questions. I think that. Here's one from Nick Chat. When it came to the Brexit debates, the BBC took false equivalents to the next level. I do think that's a big point. Why has there been so little coverage of Lisa Nandy appointing someone to the football board without declaring that he gave her money? So these appointments are always fraught. Okay.
- [35:22]
Rory Stewart
On impartiality and balance. Yeah, just that question you asked. I think there needs to be. The new Director General needs to come out with a very strong, clear, consistent, easily comprehensible message about what objectivity means and why objectivity doesn't mean giving equal balance to people spouting fake news, to people telling the truth and what this difficult business of checking facts and trying to tell the truth is all about. But I also think think needs to invest much more heavily in news because somewhere at the bottom of this is, I think, a culture that is chasing often racings too much and has put all these management layers in place. I was talking to John Chuser, who was the Director General of the World Service just now, and his observation is that when he was doing Newsnight, Panorama, these things back in the 80s, it was about very strong, confident editors who were deeply interested in news. And his sense is that every scandal that's happened since starting with Bert has just dealt with the scandal by putting more and more layers of management and check on top. So I'm sure what will come from this is there'll be another commission and they will say, we need A new management layer which is going to stop a repeat of whatever happened. And that doesn't really deliver accountability. What it delivers is endless fudge, endless rules, processes and layers of people where it's impossible really to work out who's responsible for an thing. Over to you.
- [36:51]
Alastair Campbell
Yeah, the other thing I said. I used the word confidence earlier. It needs confidence. It needs to be. Look at. Just think back a few days. The BBC was basking in glory in this world where viewership is atomized and everybody's on YouTube and nobody watches. And this celebrity traitors thing, which you and I confessed to our audience last night, we hadn't watched, but we were very much in a minority.
- [37:15]
Rory Stewart
Our entire audience had watched. And basically everywhere in Britain, except for you and I, have watched. But I've realized I just went through my inbox, like you. I was asked to go on it.
- [37:24]
Alastair Campbell
Oh, were you?
- [37:24]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We could both have been on it.
- [37:26]
Alastair Campbell
Oh, we both said no because we didn't have a clue what it was about. But the thing is that. So that's happening. And so the BBC is Match of the Day and it's documentaries and it's Dimbleby and it's Attenborough and it's. And by the way, I mentioned yesterday, Fiona and I sat downstairs yesterday and watched the Cenotas ceremony. And I mean, I hate to Phra. I hate to use the phrase it's the BBC at its best, but it is, you know, who else is going to do it quite like they do it? And so I think we shouldn't knock them, but what they should be doing is regaining confidence in what they're about, what they're for. They haven't handled this crisis well. They've. They very rarely do handle crises well. And I think the other point I think is worth mating on, given we are. The rest is politics. I read. I think I read the same piece as you did that Alan Rusbridge wrote, and I don't think it was the same piece, but I read in there Keir Starmer has never met Samir Shah. I don't know if that's true, but Alan Rusbridger wrote that in his piece. This is going to be a very important part of the political debate going forward. And from my mind, I think the Labour government should be standing up for the principles and values of the BBC while saying we look at all issues related to the Charter, but they should not be. What they should not be doing is sort of being a sort of in between. Don't want to upset the right Wing too much, don't want to piss off Murdoch too much, don't want to, you know, upset Trump, who's now gunning for the BBC. They should be standing up for the BBC and pointing out to Americans, look, you may not like all that it does, you may not like what it did in this particular instance, but the BBC is a very, very important part of the uk, and we're going to fight, we're going to stand up for it.
- [39:09]
Rory Stewart
Look, I don't know anything about this. I don't understand how this works. And, I mean, Tim Davy, there was an amazing clip above Katie Razzle's article of him just apologizing and apologizing and apologizing and apologizing that they'd spliced together. Because, of course, he had to apologize about Hugh Edwards and the abuse scandal and the fact that BBC paid Hugh Edwards for five months beyond the moment at which they'd exposed that he had been involved in this abuse. They were apologizing for Glastonbury and they were apologizing for showing Gaza documentaries, not showing Gaza documentaries. They were apologizing for Strictly.
- [39:39]
Alastair Campbell
Yeah, had a lot.
- [39:41]
Rory Stewart
And I guess in the modern world, you have to get out there and you have to apologise quickly, but you also can't let that be the whole thing. I mean, the job of being Director General, BBC cannot be that. Every week you're just appearing in front of a committee, looking, Sorry.
- [39:53]
Alastair Campbell
No. I also do think that both the BBC and the government have got to do a better job of making sure the public understand the context of a lot of these stories. When we were in Bournemouth last night, I don't know what it was, you know, know over a thousand people there and we got. You get this sense when you're talking to people, yes, they're not very happy with the government. They might have complaints about the BBC, but they sort of know there is a massive bias going on. I mean, you, you know, you were making the point, not just me as a sort of, you know, labor person, you were making the point that, you know, you're not going to pretend that Keir Starmer's the greatest prime minister in history, but the level of kind of abuse and toxicity around the coverage of him is completely disproportionate it. And so I think that context is important and you've got to fight it, otherwise it becomes a given.
- [40:44]
Rory Stewart
We talk about this, too, that impartial broadcasting. There's a really good review into the BBC, probably the best one I've read, actually. Written by two authors, one of whom is Andrew Dillnutt, looking at the way that they report tax and spend. And that's a kind of geeky internal 52 page BBC document in which he points out that there are problems. And one of them is that most BBC journalists are kind of arts graduates and they're not actually awfully good on the numbers. And when he challenges them on how they're showing debt, they don't really take into account. In fact, it begins by saying, here's a graph and it shows UK debt at 500 billion in, I think, 2005 and it's now at crossing towards whatever 2 trillion. And he says to BBC journalists, what's wrong with this graph? And nobody is comfortable answering. Now the answers are, number one, has inflation being taken into account? Number two, what's GDP growth? What's the relationship for this to GDP? Because it doesn't matter too much. GDP's grown a lot, debt's gone up. Anyway, he gets into this. And I found this during COVID I was talking to one of the biggest stars in the whole of the BBC firmament in news. And during the conversation I was trying to complain about what Boris Johnson was doing about COVID And they said to me, to be honest, Rory, I didn't really do science at school. All of this leaves me a bit cold. I don't really understand this stuff. And I thought, for goodness sake, make an effort, because otherwise the whole thing becomes a sort of inside the Beltway kind of gossip about Boris this, Boris that, and nobody's really. And I go further, you talked last night about climate, talk about AI. I really think we're not covering and talking about AI properly. But we also looked at this fact that if you show people coverage about elites and scandals and sex scandals, you get massive coverage. If you make people look at economics, healthcare, public services, you get much less viewer response. So we've got a democracy where, where the things that really matter in our lives in terms of our health care, our economy, our debt, our spending, we're not covering properly because people aren't properly interested in them. And the things that are really catching our attention are narratives about crime or narratives about abuse, which aren't actually the big hundred billion dollar questions around government management.
- [43:10]
Alastair Campbell
I also think the other thing that I think is worth just reflecting on that, related to the point you just made, is that there are some very good specialist correspondents on the BBC, but right across the media, I think there has been a dumbing down away from special specialism towards kind of generalist, in particular political reporters and political correspondents and political editors who if the story becomes about the politicians involved, it goes over to them rather than the person who really knows about, about defense, who really knows about health, who really knows about transport. And that is an economic thing. I think the fact is that the BBC, it's a 5.4 billion pound organization. News is a very, very important part of it. But I don't think news is prioritized in the way that it should be. The BBC's value, I think comes above all. It comes in lots of different ways, but I think if it gets the news wrong, then that is where the, the issue becomes a problem for them. But as you keep saying, they are more trusted than any other media organization obviously, with the exception of the rest of his politics.
- [44:17]
Rory Stewart
My final thing before I tip out is to come to you on candidates and the kind of person who you think might be the right person to take the job. And look, you're into this much more than I and you know all these people much more than I do. I mean, obviously I, from a distance was very impressed, for example, by Alan Rustbridger when he was at the Guardian, for example, I, I went to him about a story and he sat down with me very professionally went through it over an hour looking at all the facts and I thought was very objective and fair in balancing the work his journalists had done and the complaint he received. So I would like someone like that. But I say that completely unaware of whatever your history is with Alan Rusbridge and whether you're going to groan and things, but tell me, what sort of person should we be looking for? Is it, forget Alan himself, who, I don't know what your history is with him, but is it that kind of figure, a sort of relatively grand establishment former editor of a quality newspaper or what is it we're looking for here?
- [45:13]
Alastair Campbell
Look, do I have history with Alan Rusbridger? I've certainly had run ins without Alan Rusbridger, but no, I actually think he's, I become a bit of an admirer of the work that he's done sort of post Guardian. And I think he's somebody who passionately believes in journalism as a force for good. So I think the first thing, it should be somebody who really believe, obviously the BBC is much more than journalism. It's entertainment, it's sport, it's the charter, it's politics. So you've got to have somebody who can navigate all of the above. And yeah, I put him in there. Funny if you mentioned John Chuster. I don't know how old John is now, but he was always. I think he was in the running for really senior jobs at the BBC before. But it's. Listen, it's going to have to be somebody who can stand up in this deeply polarized world, have their whole life taken apart, have the right wing digging into everything they've ever said to make them look like they're a lefty. The left wing looking into everything of themselves to make it look like they're sort of, you know, Boris Johnson's best friend. So they're gonna have to be pretty squeaky clean.
- [46:12]
Rory Stewart
Well, that sounds like a great job, Alastair G. I don't think I should apply for it at once. I'll. I'll send it. I'll send him my cv.
- [46:18]
Alastair Campbell
I think I'd love it. I'd love it, but it's not going to happen. I'd. I'd love it. Well, I don't know. Would you be able to. I don't know. Because you're quite sensitive. I think once they start really battering you, I've kind of. I don't get too worried about the batteries. But I'll tell you, I think it's got to some be somebody. I think part of this role has got to be educative. It's got to be somebody who can explain to the public in a convincing, compelling way and have a culture that makes that part of his mission. Why we need an organization like the BBC in which is adapting all the time to this massively changing editorial and political landscape and. And how it's going to operate within that. And so I don't know who that's going to be. I don't know. But, you know, there's never been a job that hasn't been filled, has there? You can always find somebody.
- [47:13]
Rory Stewart
That's. That's certainly true. There was always the mooch, isn't it? He Mooch is looking for a job, I guess.
- [47:17]
Alastair Campbell
Listen, we eventually went abroad for England football managers. We went abroad for the bank of England governor. Maybe that's the thought. Maybe that's the thought. Nicholas Sarkozy's on the lookout for a new job. He's just got out of jail.
- [47:31]
Rory Stewart
Okay. I think even I would do a better job than Nicolas Sarkozy. Thank you, Alastair, very much. Lovely to see you. And we'll see you. Well, tomorrow we've got both podcasts recording and we're doing the first of our live London shows.
- [47:43]
Alastair Campbell
Well, I suspect we might be doing talking about the BBC again tomorrow. But we'll see.
- [47:47]
Rory Stewart
Very good. Thank you again.
- [47:48]
Alastair Campbell
See you soon.
- [47:48]
Rory Stewart
Bye.
- [47:49]
Alastair Campbell
Bye. Take care. Bye.