The appointment of former Labour minister James Purnell to a top BBC job - one of those titles like Head of Vision or Strategy or something - is old news now, but computer problems have silenced this blog as effectively as the Stasi for a week or so, and Purnell has been on my mind.
The hoo-ha about his appointment is overdone. For one thing, try finding a person fit to be Head of Strategic Vision, say, who doesn't have political views of one sort or another. Impossible. For another, the head of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Tory minister, and I don't remember anyone being up in arms much about that.
But if the BBC really wanted to appoint Left wingers to senior posts, it wouldn't have to go to former politicians like Purnell. It would just carry on with the same recruitment policies it's had for years.
If an organisation recruits from a fairly narrow - in educational and class terms - band of people, it will tend to get people with a fairly similar outlook. To be specific, the BBC tends to recruit intelligent, well-educated middle-class people with a Humanities degree from a good University. Who could possibly have thought that they would tend to be Left of centre?
Despite the moanings of various disgruntled BBC luminaries like Antony Jay and Michael Buerk, I very much doubt that there is anything resembling overt political bias at the Corporation. But the BBC, the window through which British people tend to view the world, is a product of the attitudes of its staff, which in turn are a product of their background and education. Andrew Marr hit the nail on the head when he remarked that if your staff tend to live in a fairly small area of West London, and eat, drink and in some cases sleep together (he should know), "a certain group-think emerges".
And boy does it. The experience of moving to the provincial suburbs after 16 years of London (Balham, Notting Hill and finally Stoke Newington) has persuaded me that the majority of people in Britain march to a different drum-beat, and their views - conservative with a small c - are very different from the metropolitan elite. I don't always agree with them, but it's clear to me that the BBC doesn't represent them.
You notice it in the programmes that don't get made, the people who don't get interviewed, the questions that don't get asked and the assumptions that are made about where the centre ground in politics lies. The BBC retains a surprising deference about the Royal Family, but on the whole it sees the world through the eyes of liberal Humanities graduates. There are worse ways of seeing the world, but nevertheless the appointment of James Purnell is a red herring. It's the big picture that's a bit fishy.
