Saturday 8 April 2006

To the BBC, a thousand consolations

To the BBC, a thousand consolations: even after a dozen years of trying, it has not quite managed to appoint three Party Leaders out of three who went from major public schools to Oxford, two (Cameron and Huhne) to read for the same degree, and two (Blair and Huhne) between exactly the same dates; and who all hold the same views (if any) about everything of any real interest or importance, mysteriously corresponding to the BBC's editorial line, which we are relentlessly told is "the centre ground" no matter how few members of the electorate stand on it.
Even though Kinnock, Hattersley, Prescott, Beckett, Brown or anyone else would have beaten John Major by the time that John Smith died, the BBC still reported Blair as the only person capable of doing so, mercilessly deriding Prescott (as it still does), largely ignoring Beckett, and to this day pretending that the 1997 Election would have been lost by anyone other than the BBC's man, among other lies about the early Blair era.
The BBC's coverage of the Conservative Leadership Election consisted of gushing over David Cameron's half-competent speech to a sympathetic audience as if it had been a rhetorical masterpiece, while playing in a continuous loop a clip of a lady apparently falling asleep while David Davis was speaking. No one ever asks how, when there are only 450 active Conservative Associations, and when half of those admit to having fewer than 100 members each, a quarter of a million people managed to vote in that Leadership Election, with two thirds of them voting for an ultraliberal, policy-free, BBC-endorsed, Old Etonian scion of the baronetage, who believes that cocaine use is an integral part of "a normal university experience".
And then came Chris Huhne, who probably only stood at all on the promise of the BBC endorsement that he did in fact so fulsomely receive. Meanwhile, of all the other new MPs from 2005, no more than three or four are ever invited onto radio or television. Are they members of the Campaign Group or the Cornerstone Group? Did they go to ordinary state schools? Did they go to non-Oxbridge universities, or even to Cambridge? As if!
Oh well, Auntie, better luck next time.

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