Have I got news for you ... Nadine’s heart isn’t in BBC reform

I DO wish people would stop calling the BBC ‘Auntie’. It hasn’t been Auntie for decades. It is a gaunt, unfriendly body with a mental age of about 22. And it fights hard and dirty.

And I guess Nadine Dorries’s licence-fee freeze will not lead to very much. Her heart’s not in it, and nor is Johnson’s (remember, the BBC made him a star, on Have I Got News For You).

One of many reasons why the Tories don’t want to take on the Corporation is that they owe their revival in 2010 to the BBC. The BBC decided that David Cameron had accepted Blair’s revolution and would not reverse it. After that, the Tories started getting fair treatment from BBC news and current affairs for the first time in decades. On all the key issues – break-up of the country, sexual revolution, destruction of education in the name of equality and diversity – the Tory Party has stayed on the side of Blairism. And during the Corbyn years, the Tories were much more Blairite than Labour.

Only now that the Blairites are back in charge of the Labour Party is the BBC beginning a switch to supporting Starmer.