Andy McSmith's Diary: Rather a lot of reading for John Whittingdale to catch up on

The Culture Secreatary's pledge to read all responses to his consultation on the BBC's future has caused some furore

Andy McSmith
Monday 14 March 2016 22:19 GMT
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John Whittingdale's intentions for the future of the BBC are widely mistrusted
John Whittingdale's intentions for the future of the BBC are widely mistrusted

John Whittingdale, the Culture Secretary, was pleased with the immense volume of responses to his consultation on the future of the BBC. There had been 192,000, he told Parliament in January – more than the Government had ever received on any topic other than gay marriage. “We are, of course, committed to reading and analysing all of them,” he added.

No sooner had he spoken than the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail were crying foul, because 177,000 of the responses had been generated via the online “campaigning community” 38 Degrees. The papers smelled a left-wing conspiracy to save the BBC.

Now it turns out that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has definitely not read and analysed every reply. The Radio Times had encouraged its readers to take part, an exercise that generated 3,000 letters and 6,000 emails.

The digital responses were copied on to an encrypted memory stick and handed in to DCMS – but the magazine has revealed that DCMS staff never asked for the password, which implies that they published the results of the consultation without looking at any of those 6,000 replies.

Ben Preston, editor of the Radio Times says: “We have a duty to our readers, and have asked the Government to reopen the consultation as a matter of urgency to make good on its promise that it would listen to everyone’s views. We await the Government’s response.”

The future’s not what it was

“I was at one time a future prime minister,” the television presenter Michael Portillo – to whom the Tory right looked as their saviour during the John Major years – told an audience in the Watford Colosseum. “I’m now a former future prime minister. We’ve formed a club, and we’ve recently welcomed as a new member Mr Ed Miliband.”

How to get expelled – or not

The discovery that Vicki Kirby is an active member of the Labour Party has given the Guido Fawkes website a field day, and shocked people inside the party. She was the author of a sequence of crude anti-Semitic tweets, including one in 2011 that declared that Jews had “big noses” and another, from 2014, which referred to Hitler as the “Zionist god”. Back then, she was the Labour candidate in Woking, a seat Labour had no chance of winning. When these tweets reached a wider audience, her party membership was suspended and she resigned as a candidate. Now Guido Fawkes has found she was recently elected vice-chair of Woking Labour Party.

This raised questions about the competence of Labour’s compliance officer, who decides whether expelled ex-members should be readmitted, and who was implicated in last week’s fiasco when David Cameron taunted Jeremy Corbyn over the news that Trotskyist, Gerry Downing had been readmitted to the party: as a result, Downing was rapidly re-expelled.

The Kirby story is odd in a different way: she did not need to be readmitted to the Labour Party because she was never expelled. Her suspension ended with a warning from the national executive about her future behaviour.

A fight that never ends

Meanwhile, Labour MP Luciana Berger is in Berlin today for a conference on anti-Semitism. Before she left, she retweeted some of the messages she had received, which underscore why such a conference might be needed.

“Move to Israel, you don’t belong in Europe,” said one. “You need some more pork, fatty? Or a porking?” a second asked. While another, apparently sent from Texas, said: “Waking up and remembering you’re a Jew must be a horrid start to one’s day.”

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