The flag, the Queen and the BBC

Thirty-six (!) years ago I was appointed director of the Media Monitoring Unit.

The MMU was set up by Dr Julian Lewis, now Conservative MP for New Forest East, and former Labour minister Lord Chalfont.

The aim was to monitor whole series of TV current affairs programmes and highlight the worst examples of systemic political bias with a view to putting pressure on broadcasters (the BBC in particular) to change their ways.

The background to this was a strong sense that current affairs programmes in the Eighties were consistently anti-Thatcher, anti-government and anti-private enterprise.

Indeed, a BBC executive confided in us that given the weakness of the Labour Opposition (under Michael Foot in particular) some of his colleagues considered the BBC to be the unofficial opposition to the Thatcher government.

Over the next five years we made numerous headlines, ‘Yes! The BBC Is Biased’ being the most notable because it appeared all over London on newspaper vendor stands selling the Evening Standard.

We ruffled feathers so much that a conference in Manchester attended by 200 broadcasting executives devoted an entire session to the MMU and our ‘tireless propaganda’.

The editor of World In Action, the late Ray Fitzwalter, even produced a video for the event to demonstrate where I had got it ‘wrong’. I was immensely flattered!

I mention this because, having watched hundreds of programmes during those five years, I never saw anything as crass as the conclusion to yesterday’s BBC Breakfast interview with housing and local government minister Robert Jenrick.

If you haven’t seen it you can watch it here. It's not shocking, it’s just embarrassing.

I’m surprised by presenter Charlie Stayt because I’ve always found him likeable and professional. I’m guessing he was trying to indulge in some light-hearted breakfast banter but because Jenrick didn’t respond he kept on digging.

His co-presenter Naga Munchetty had no excuse. Giggling on the sofa, she inexplicably weighed in by drawing attention to a picture of the Queen on the wall of Jenrick’s office, thereby making matters a whole lot worse.

Instead of having the sense to stop there she then made the further mistake (they can't help themselves) of going on social media with the result that last night she was forced to ‘apologise’ for ‘liking’ not one but multiple tweets that, in her words (or those of her bosses), were ‘offensive in nature about the use of the British flag as a backdrop in a government interview this morning’.

A better example of the sneering attitude of the metropolitan elite towards the flag, the monarchy and Britain itself is hard to find.

The irony is that this took place on the very day the BBC announced plans to move more programmes and staff out of London to better represent the views of the entire nation.

BBC Breakfast has of course been broadcast from Media City in Salford for several years so I’m not sure how much difference it will make to the political and cultural bias that is embedded throughout the corporation and has been for decades.

As it happens, I’m not a great flag waver myself.

For example, I loathe the flag waving nationalism that symbolises the Olympics, an event that should be a celebration of the achievements of individual sportsmen and women regardless of their nationality.

Nor, if I had a flagpole, would I be tempted to fly the Union flag except on special occasions, but if others want to do so that’s absolutely fine.

However, mocking the presence of the Union flag and a picture of the Queen in a government minister’s office is extraordinary even by the standards of the ‘biased’ BBC.

As former BBC presenter Andrew Neil noted on Twitter, ‘Sometimes the BBC forgets what the first B stands for.’

Yesterday’s incident not only highlights the bubble many BBC presenters (and producers) seem to inhabit, regardless of where they work, it also demonstrates a staggering ignorance of the responsibilities they have when working for the BBC.

Have they never read the Royal Charter?

Another problem is that programmes like BBC Breakfast can’t decide whether they are news or entertainment programmes. Over on ITV Piers Morgan clearly pushed Good Morning Britain in the direction of tabloid television but BBC Breakfast is neither one thing nor the other which is why it's so boring.

Anyway I was reminded that Munchetty’s former Breakfast colleague Steph McGovern - who was last heard presenting a rather lame lunchtime programme for Channel 4 - was herself forced to apologise after making a ‘snarky’ comment about Boris Johnson, albeit at a non-BBC event.

Perhaps she wanted to appear ‘edgy’. Instead she just came across as arrogant, and silly, much like Munchetty.

Speaking of Naga, she may be feeling a bit hard done by. After all, it was Stayt’s rather gauche attempt at humour that initially caused the problem.

But she didn’t have to giggle, or refer (more than once) to the picture of the Queen on the wall, which Stayt hadn’t mentioned.

Nor did she have to ‘like’ not one but several tweets that she later admitted were ‘offensive in nature about the use of the British flag as a backdrop in a government interview’.

Thirty-six years after I went out and bought two video recorders and started monitoring the BBC’s political output from a studio flat in west London, I found myself asking, not for the first time, ‘What is wrong with these people?”