BBC ICON SAVAGES BIAS... AT THE BEEB
EXCLUSIVE: Days after he retired, we publish bombshell book by Radio 4’s John Humphrys
JOHN Humphrys today lifts the lid on ‘ institutional liberal bias’ at the BBC.
Two days after retiring, the legendary broadcaster accuses the ‘Kremlin’-style corporation of being out of touch.
He says its bosses ‘badly failed’ to read the nation’s mood on Europe and ‘simply could not grasp’ why anyone voted Leave.
In an explosive memoir serialised from today in the Daily Mail, Remain-voting Humphrys pulls no punches after decades of being constrained by rules that stop journalists expressing opinions.
The 76-year-old, who spent 33 years on Radio 4’s flagship news show Today, says he is now free of ‘the BBC Thought Police’ which has ‘tried to mould the nation into its own liberal-left image’.
Having left school at 15, he says he felt an outsider at the BBC ‘rather like the junior butler trying to blag a seat at his lordship’s
dining table in Downton Abbey’. His memoir also reveals that:
BBC bosses wallowed in despair when Britain voted Leave in the referendum;
Its staff increasingly ‘confuse their own interests with those of the wider world’;
‘Barmy’ jargon- spouting managers behaved like 1950s Kremlin commissars;
The BBC is in hock to ‘the politically correct brigade and the most fashionable pressure groups’.
The son of a French polisher father and a Welsh hairdresser mother, Humphrys earned a reputation as the BBC’s ‘rottweiler-in-chief’.
During his final Today programme on Thursday, David Cameron thanked him for ‘striking fear into politicians like me every morning’.
Despite his searing criticism of an organisation he has served since 1967, Humphrys says he is in ‘no doubt whatsoever that the BBC is a tremendous and irreplaceable force for good’.
He adds: ‘Our democracy needs it. And it could not exist but for the loyalty of so many millions. I remain convinced it occupies a special place in the nation’s heart and we would be the poorer without it.’
But recalling the morning after the 2016 referendum, he says: ‘Leave had won – and this was not what the BBC had expected. Nor what it wanted.
‘No nods and smiles when the big bosses appeared. No attempt to pretend that this was anything other than a disaster.
‘Their expressions were as grim as the look on the face of a football supporter when his team’s star player misses the penalty that would have won them the cup. Bosses, almost to a man and woman, could simply not grasp how anyone could have put a cross in the Leave box on the referendum ballot paper.
‘I’m not sure the BBC as a whole ever quite had a real grasp of what was going on in Europe, or of what people in this country thought about it.’
The Today programme inquisitor said: ‘This may explain why the BBC sometimes fails so badly to spot a change in the nation’s mood – in hugely important areas. Immigration was one of them. Euroscepticism – once belittled as a small-minded, blinkered view of extremists – was another.’
Last year, the BBC faced complaints that Humphrys was guilty of pro-Brexit bias. Today he reveals he actually voted to stay in the EU.
In his candid book, A Day Like Today, he describes the corporation as being terrified of offending ‘fashionable pressure groups – usually from the liberal left, the spiritual home of most bosses and staff’.
Humphrys writes: ‘So is there some grand conspiracy orchestrated by a group of sinister Lefties?
‘I don’t believe that for a moment. That there is a form of institutional liberal bias, however, I have no doubt.’
Humphrys, who grew up in post-war Cardiff, bemoans ‘the growth of groups of employees who conflate and, perhaps, confuse their own interests with those of the wider world’.
He blames this on recruits to the BBC being overwhelmingly middle-class graduates.
Humphrys was the first reporter at the Aberfan disaster and the BBC’s youngest foreign correspondent. He was also in the White House when Richard Nixon resigned.