Does Cameron think the Beeb impedes fair competition? Will he cut the DG’s salary? The closer Cameron comes to power, the more the Corporation panics, says Anne McElvoy
What does David Cameron really think of the BBC? A spectre (or several, perhaps) haunts the taupe corridors of White City, Television Centre and Broadcasting house as a likely Tory victory grows closer. Memories abound of Mrs Thatcher’s Peacock Report, which was intended to begin the dismantling of the licence fee, of Norman Tebbit’s 1986 broadside, unleashed by coverage of the Libyan embassy siege, but really a Kulturkampf against a perceived left-liberal bias.
The BBC may not have had an untroubled relationship with New Labour — Alastair Campbell and the Today programme’s coverage of the missing Iraq WMD saw to that. But it has lived in a kind of psychological comfort zone with a Labour government, which approved licence fee rises without undue rigour and shared a sense of a liberal mission with the BBC. A prickle attends the prospect of David Cameron, graduate of the commercial Carlton TV, where he was deemed to have sharp elbows and a sharp tongue in pursuit of his boss Michael Green’s interests.
Over the past year, the Tory leader has established his own modus operandi with the Corporation, which is to hug it one minute and kick it the next. ‘It’s a bit like being in an abusive relationship where you never know if you’re going to get a kick or a bunch of flowers,’ says one senior White City figure. Sometimes it’s both at once. Last week the Tories reinforced their opposition to Labour’s top-slicing proposals to spread licence fee income to other broadcasters. Their media and culture spokesman Jeremy Hunt was initially in favour. Today, he confesses to me a ‘Damascene moment’ which changed his mind. In fact, Channel 5, Sky and ITV all resist state subsidy, so the only wonder is why Labour so stoically supports it.
The Tory leader shoots from the hip on matters such as the Ross-Brand affair, where he is quick to identify with a public mood of outrage — and on the generous salaries of the BBC’s top officer class.
In Camp Cameron’s intended changes to the social topography of Britain, the BBC emerges as a prime target. Mr Hunt tells me, ‘Our approach is, we are going to keep it and keep the licence fee: but we are also going to ask some very tough questions that Labour didn’t ask.’
The Tories’ statement that the organisation was too big, too unwieldy and, in parts, exceeding its mission recently caused a flurry across TV and radio. ‘It’s easy to say that,’ says one controller. ‘When you sit down and start asking yourself what should be cut out, the answers aren’t so obvious.’ Already bosses are preparing a line of defence against the ‘leaner and smaller’ argument — namely that the very channels the elites always cite as dispensable — Radio 1, BBC7 on digital radio, BBC3 on TV — are the ones which help guarantee the organisation a broad demographic reach to justify the licence fee.
Hunt is unconvinced: ‘I think you can keep a breadth and quality to what the BBC does, but still be prepared to take a harder look at what a publicly funded broadcaster should and shouldn’t do.’
Full disclosure here: I present the arts and ideas programme Night Waves on Radio 3. So naturally I am convinced that this is exactly the kind of programme that the BBC needs to fulfil its mission to inform. And it comes without a private plane, or even a cashmere socks allowance.
Trouble is, many others across the Corporation also believe that they are ‘core’ to what it should be doing — and that core has grown to embrace magazine publishing, hugely expanded internet activity on the BBC website, and an awful lot of other objectives which are not strictly the provision of audio-visual material.
So the Conservatives have two possible lines of attack on what Mr Cameron has already called the ‘bloated’ BBC — one cultural and one commercial.
Mr Hunt, for instance, believes the broadcaster should have a social role. ‘If you’ve got kids using the F word, or kicking teachers, I don’t think the BBC should appear in any way to endorse that kind of behaviour.’ Are broadcasters really the problem in broken Britain? ‘They clearly do have an influence and a role and that has to be taken seriously — and I do think we should speak out if we think that isn’t happening,’ he insists. That goes down badly with programme makers, who dread the day they are obliged to show everyone being nice to each other down at the Queen Vic. ‘A bit East German,’ says one crisply.
But if the culture wars merely simmer, the commercial ones are already full-on. Mr Cameron launched his attack in the Sun, a powerful Murdoch-owned message-board. How close Mr Cameron will move to embracing the Murdoch family’s view, now aired with renewed vigour by News International’s feisty chairman James Murdoch, is one of the key topics at those expensive BBC dinners we keep reading about. Mr Murdoch Jr believes that the BBC is an inhibitor of a truly open media market and impedes fair competition in areas like the internet and other commercial activities. He’s accused the organisation of trying to ‘create a British Google ... funded by the taxpayer’. The presence of Elisabeth Murdoch on Mr Cameron’s digital task force hasn’t gone unnoticed either: though its chairman is the former BBC boss, Greg Dyke.
I asked the director-general Mark Thompson whether he now accepts the argument that the BBC’s online sprawl does affect other contenders. ‘So it is said,’ Thompson replies carefully. ‘US newspapers don’t have competition from the BBC and they’re not having much more fun on the net either. I’m yet to be convinced that what we do online is the cause of newspapers’ problems.’ Alas, the nature of the medium does mean one free news-content provider inhibits others — something even the pro-Beeb Guardian now resents. Just because the director-general can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
Mr Thompson and Mr Murdoch are, in a way, arguing for the two sides of Dave’s brain. One side of Cameronism emphasises benign collectivity and things that unite Britain. The other is sympathetic to tough entrepreneurs challenging monoliths — to say nothing of the gratitude this is likely to engender from powerful allies like News International.
The DG, however, wants to return fire.
‘The BBC shouldn’t just be about Planet Earth. We’re not just about filling niches or making up for market failures. Yes, the size of the BBC is something to be debated alongside its public service credentials. But the big debate is about the boundary between the BBC and the market — what should it do on the web and in mobile phone technology?’ If you think the rows so far have been bad-tempered, wait till they all start bickering over the rights to send information to your mobile phone.
Now, about the money. A director-general salary of well over £800,000 is publicly attacked by Mr Cameron as excessive and in need of a cull. Will the BBC’s top man be taking a pay cut pour encourager les autres? The answer (I paraphrase just a bit) is Not Bloody Likely.
‘I was waiving my bonus before it became fashionable,’ Thompson says. But a big part of the argument has been the relative security of BBC job tenure and the benefits that accrue from it. ‘It isn’t the case that I have complete job security. That’s not something DGs have enjoyed, if you look at the record.’
‘There is a market microcosm,’ he adds. ‘Of the 60 senior managers we most recently h ired, 57 came from the private sector and most took a pay cut to come here. Only 1.5 per cent of our staff earn over £100,000.’
I think this is intended to signal that life is far from milk and honey in the executive suite; and £100,000, while barely enough to feed Boris Johnson’s chickens, is not vast for top media professionals. He’s on less secure ground when it comes to the numbers of senior figures earning upwards of £300,000, salaries rarer in other media. Merely comparing the high-earning Channel 4 boss class with BBC equivalents doesn’t really do it. Lord Tebbit spoke of the BBC’s ‘statistical gymnastics’ when he was at odds with it, and that approach continues undiminished.
It certainly doesn’t impress Planet Cameron. ‘I think we’ve got to get away from talking about this only in market terms,’ says Hunt. ‘It is a privilege to be director-general of the BBC. It shouldn’t just be judged by what someone can earn in the market.’ Will the Tories not feel inclined to drop this bone of contention when they are in office? ‘I don’t think so. It’s about how the BBC thinks about itself and it can very easily get out of step with public opinion.’
Some things have changed since the Thatcher-era falling-out. I did not detect around Mr Cameron a feeling that the BBC is politically charged against them in its mainstream coverage. A couple of years ago, a fiercer argument about the licence fee’s validity was expected. For all that has transpired, its principle remains intact. If anything, we’re surprisingly slow to turn against it. Even in the era of Ross/Brand, evasions are the exception. The BBC, warts and all, is still a social norm in Britain.
‘The BBC has changed because society and politics have changed,’ says Thompson. ‘It was sometimes denounced as a nest of Marxists, and when I started working here in 1979 there really were some communists in the organisation. I don’t think that’s the case today.’ A couple of days later, the drama controller was revealed to have blogged about the need to encourage ‘left-of-centre’ thinking: by which he says he didn’t mean left-wing thinking. File that under ‘Bias’: the Big Oops.
A new generation of Conservatives doesn’t want a re-run of the Tebbit wars. But they inherit empty coffers and voters suspicious of publicly funded excess, and it would be extraordinary if the BBC were exempt. Its strength is that it’s a service which can plausibly claim universal reach. Its weakness is that it has expanded to a point where it has made a lot of commercial enemies, to add to the bedrock of cultural and political ones. Mr Cameron knows that that is its Achilles heel. That’s why he’ll keep on kicking.