Arrogance of the BBC, by House of Cards author

HOUSE of Cards author Michael Dobbs has accused the BBC of organisational and intellectual arrogance and said it has sometimes ‘seemed more like a private fiefdom than a public service’.

Lord Dobbs, who wrote the novel turned into series for the BBC and Netflix, said the BBC is an important cultural export and is ‘often very, very good at news’. But its standing is being undermined by spending scandals and a failure to own up to its mistakes.

‘There is a real danger of the BBC being brought low by a hundred headlines, a thousand unnecessary taxi rides, and millions that have been spent on redundancies and failures,’ he said.

Criticism that it has too often in recent years slipped into both organisational and intellectual arrogance is in many instances well-founded, he added.

Delivering the Royal Television Society’s Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture, he also accused the BBC of a Left-wing bias in some of its reporting. A BBC spokesman said that the corporation disagreed with some of Lord Dobbs’s arguments.