The next boss of the BBC must be a Tory, according to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, he said the guarantee of funding from the licence fee left BBC staff with "an innocent belief that everything in life should be 'free'".
He said: "No wonder – and I speak as one who has just fought a campaign in which I sometimes felt that my chief opponent was the local BBC news – the prevailing view of Beeb newsrooms is, with honourable exceptions, statist, corporatist, defeatist, anti-business, Europhile and, above all, overwhelmingly biased to the left."
On this face of it this is hairy-assed nonsense (and bloody cheeky, firstly, because he had the slavish backing of most of the mainstream press, including all the papers in London, secondly, because this is a man with a definite naive sense of entitlement, whose idea of a jolly jape is to pretend his chief election rival is a concierge). It's utter gibberish not a million miles from the hard-right guff about 'cultural marxism'. But this is the Tory agenda. Their aim is to use as much of their time in government to go about rigging the terms of political debate for the next generation. The BBC is a throughly establishment establishment, for example, a senior figure from MI5 is always on the Board of Directors. But it is not right-wing enough for the Tories.