 The BBC is seeking a new chair of its governing board, and the Sunday Times this weekend reported some high-profile names the government are considering for the job. They include Ex-Tory Culture Minister Nicky Morgan, Ex-Tory Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Chairman of the Right Wing Spectator magazine Andrew Neil. Somewhat surprisingly, these candidates were all presented by the Sunday Times as being concessions to the BBC. Boris Johnson, I suppose, reaching out a hand and saying he's not going to put people in place who are as anti-BBC as they might have expected. Let's look at how they have framed this particular story. So it says Boris Johnson is seeking to rebuild bridges with the BBC by appointing as its new chairman a prominent figure from the right who does not want to blow up the national broadcaster. Now, not wanting to blow up an organisation seems like a fairly low bar to pass, to be able to run it, but I suppose that's kind of the Tory approach to public services. We can get a bit more from that piece. Now, Johnson has ruled out appointing a Berserker to the role. John Whittingdale, accused by some of being a hammer of the corporation when he chaired Parliament's Select Committee, will remain a culture minister. So we're not going to get a Berserker, but Baroness Morgan, so she is in contention. A former culture secretary is an early front-runner for the role since she led calls for change at the BBC, but is seen as an emollient character. Neil, a former editor of the Sunday Times who criticised Johnson during the general election for dodging an interview, is seen as robust and independent-minded but as someone who has a long association with the BBC. Johnson and Rudd remain friendly despite her resignation from the Cabinet last year and Johnson's decision to strip her of the Tory whip. Now, all of those qualifications for the characters who are set to be put forward for that job. Obviously, this is speculation from sources, of course. I doubt it's pure speculation, but none of this is confirmed. None of them really seem like the kind of things that would qualify someone for a top job. So for Nikki Morgan, the argument seems to be she shares Boris Johnson's politics. She wants to reform the BBC probably in a way of sort of stripping back its independence, but she's also quite nice. Andrew Neil shares right-wing politics, but is also seen as independent-minded. And Amber Rudd, all it seems to suggest is her qualifications as she's on friendly terms with Boris Johnson. None of this inspires me with confidence. Now, it's not rare as well. So you might think, you know, this is the chair, how important is that position? It is an important position. It's the board who elect the director general or appoint the director general and the director general who's been appointed who is going to take over next month is also himself a conservative. So next month, Nick Davy will take over in the top job at the BBC. So that's basically being editor-in-chief for the whole organization. And Davy is a former deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Party and unsuccessfully ran for a council seat in 1993. So we've got the chair for the BBC, could be an ex-Tory cabinet member, the director general of the BBC, could be an ex-Tory chair of a conservative association, an ex-Council candidate. It's not looking particularly impartial at this point in time. Aaron, I'm going to go to you. Should we be shocked at the closeness of top BBC appointees to the Conservative Party or is this all par for the course? Yeah, I don't think the BBC is an independent organization. I think it's so subject to political pressure from the government of the day. I just think it's a ridiculous thing to claim. I think clearly it has some good moments, some not so good moments, but it often crosses the line from public service broadcaster to say broadcaster. I think that's an arguable. What I would say is with the claim of Andrew Neal potentially getting that job, there would be a profound conflict of interest because, of course, as I understand it, he's the chair of the spectator. He has a significant involvement in the spectator magazine. If he was to have that position, then journalists at the spectator were to be playing a more prominent role in the BBC's political affairs output, having arguably more influence over its editorial positions, etc. I think that would, I think has really significant grounds, sufficient grounds for him not to have that role. For a former MP to have it, I think he's clearly absurd. It has to be a media person. I mean, wow, let's look at Andrew Neal's CV, by the way, before the BBC. He works at the Economist. His first Andrew Neal, not many people know this, is Andrew Neal's first job was at the Conservative Research Department. His very first job, and now he's going to be apparently a concession as a moderate candidate to have this very senior authoritative role at the BBC. His second job was at the Economist magazine. Towards the end of the 1970s, early 1980s, he often said that he was a radical on the right. He was to the right of Margaret Thatcher. This is what he would say. He's written this down in black and white in his autobiography. He then, of course, went to work at the Sunday Times. He was a very young man, editor of the Sunday Times, when Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. He was there for the best part of a decade. He then proceeded to help start Sky News, briefly went to work for Fox News in the United States. And now he's being touted as a candidate for the BBC. So somebody who's got a record of Conservative Research Department, Economist, Sunday Times, Rupert Murdoch's Golden Boy, Fox News, now this is seen as kind of like an establishment concessionary person that can have this role at the BBC. I mean, that really does betray the extent of the right word drift in Britain's political culture, but also how there's been really, shocking in many ways, institutional capture of some of the most important public roles in this country, by actually what is a very small clique of people on the right, both in politics and in the media. And I mean, one thing I find incredible is that even though you've got, you know, the BBC, the director general who's been appointed is an ex-conservative candidate to be a Conservative councillor, and now the talk of who's going to become the chair, we've got two ex-Tory cabinet members, you've still got right-wingers who are so obsessed with their own victim complex that they think that left-wingers control all of our cultural industries. I want to go to a particularly, I suppose, overboard quote by Ed West in Conservative Home, which came out at the end of last week. So he wrote, there won't be a backlash because, and this was my argument, the left now controls almost every institution in Britain. It doesn't matter who's in government because the generation growing up, including my children, will be bombarded with progressive messages and signals, all equating left-wing social ideas with morality and conservatism, with low status, bigotry and failure. Ash, how did we get to a point where you've got out and out Tories, Tory politicians who are set to become chair of the BBC, you've got a director general who is a Tory politician or attempted to be a Tory politician, and you've still got right-wingers crying that the left control all of our cultural institutions. What the hell is going on here? I think you've got multiple different aspects to it. One is that the Tory party don't want to destroy the BBC. They want to completely eradicate its independence, make it a fully political creature, which becomes an extension of the Tory party propaganda machines. What they really want to do, and they want to do it in as informal a way as possible. So the BBC still has something of that prestige, that international reputation, but that's what they want from it. At the same time, right-wingers more generally are gripped by a panic that they cannot and do not know how to wield informal cultural power in the way that progressives can. The kind of generational divide that we're seeing in voting behaviour and ideology really is unprecedented in lots of ways, as Owen likes to say here again and again, the majority of young people in the 1980s voted for Margaret Thatcher. That is not a similar pattern that we're seeing in terms of the voters who delivered Boris Johnson, his majority just in 2019. So you've got a problem. You've got an electorate that's really reliable but dying off, and you've got young people who've got no economic stake in society as it is, and they have a profoundly different set of social and cultural values. And in the face of that panic, I think it's not all that surprising that the right are now trying to eliminate the left from any sort of institutional home that it's been able to find, whether that's in the academy, whether that's in state schools and of course in media as well. The other thing is I think that you've got a bastardisation of identity politics, and that's a big part of what cancel culture is all about. It's all about being able to appropriate the language of minoritarian grievance for the interests of power and wealth, and that's why journalists are so obsessed with cancel colleges, why any time you criticise a journalist in fairly polite terms, in a way that used to be called a marketplace of ideas, by the way, the cry goes up and being cancelled. And Andrew Neil, who I think is a very good interviewer, he does these live vivisections, he's very effective at what he does. The minute you get someone going on his show and saying, well, how can you claim to be an impartial journalist when you're the chairman of the spectator, which has got a very right wing editorial outlook, he goes berserk, he shuts down the conversation and a while later he claims this as an attempted cancelling, which isn't yet on the statute books as a criminal offence, but we'll get there. And so I think it's about playing this game and it's a game which is driven, I think, primarily by fear, because you've got your baby boomers in geographically inconvenient places, delivering you majorities, probably will do in 2024 as well. But 2029, what about 2034? Going forward, how are you going to have a conservative electorate reproducing itself without your hands on the cultural levers? The problem is, is that the demographics that you want to capture aren't really watching the BBC.