Some of you may have noticed, in a recent debate on the election at Hay-on-Wye, a reference I made to John le Carre’s first-class novel ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’. I spoke of the ‘very clever knot’ described by le Carre and untangled by George Smiley, by which everything was made to appear the opposite of what it was.

It worked like this. The KGB agent who was actually debriefing the mole inside British intelligence was believed by MI6 to be a Soviet Traitor, the exact opposite of the case. Those who went regularly to meet this KGB man in a secret safe house in North London (surrounded by elaborate precautions) believed they were running a deep-penetration agent inside Soviet intelligence. One of this team of debriefers (you’ll have to read the book to find out which) was in fact an MI6 traitor, who thus managed to hold meetings with his KGB controller, on MI6 premises, at the British taxpayer’s expense and under the protection of MI6. His senior colleagues helped to provide cover for this traitor. The very boldness of the deception made it all the more effective. When it was exposed, the disbelief and fury of the duped was enormous. Had it not been for the detective genius of George Smiley, it might never have been exposed at all. Nothing is, but what is not. Everything is the opposite of what it seems to be. In that way, those who might act against it become its active and committed defenders.

Some remarks on Monday by James Harding, the head of BBC news, brought this to mind again.

The Daily Mail reported on Tuesday : ‘THE boss of BBC News has denied any trace of Left-wing bias despite a series of rows over its coverage in the run-up to the election.



James Harding insisted that the Corporation is always 'scrupulously impartial' and rejected as 'fable' claims that it is prejudiced against Right-wing parties.



However, he did admit to some failings, saying that the BBC had allowed political polls - which predicted some form of coalition - to 'infect [its] thinking'.



As a result, he said, they spent too much time examining which parties might do deals with each other instead of analysing their policies.



Addressing the accusation of bias, Mr Harding told a conference in London: 'I find this increasingly hard to take seriously.



'In the light of the Conservative victory, what's the argument? That the BBC's subtle, sophisticated Left-wing message was so subtle, so very sophisticated that it simply passed the British people by.'

Gosh, how witty.

But it depends entirely for its force on the idea that the Conservative Party is in some way ‘right-wing’. What if it’s not, and the BBC’s behaviour helped that party into office? Perhaps it was quite subtle. Then everything’s upside-down, and everyone’s doing the opposite of what they seem to be doing, aren’t they?

Now, as we have discussed here, the modern Tory Party is not conservative, and has not been for many decades, if it ever was. It is all but impossible to believe that it once contained, at its heart, such people as Janet Young, a committed and determined foe of the sexual revolution.

It is certainly *liberal* in economics, in culture and morality. Many politically unlettered people think of this position, associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as ‘right-wing’. It certainly conflicts with the pre-1989 ideas of the political left, which until the end of the Cold War was still devoted to state ownership of large chunks of the economy.

This devotion, while essential to Soviet Communism, doesn’t actually have any particularly strong connection with Social Democracy. States which are largely Social Democratic, Germany, France, Scandinavia and the Low Countries spring to mind, seem to me to be quite pragmatic about state ownership of the economy, certainly more pragmatic than the 1945 Labour government were. For the Labour Party under Alastair Campbell to pretend to abandon (which they didn’t really) Clause Four of the old Labour rules, wasn’t a great step. In effect, Harold Wilson had abandoned nationalisation as a policy in the 1960s. I still meet people who think New Labour was ‘right-wing’, when in fact the ideas of New Labour came out of Eurocommunism, social and cultural radicalism stripped of Soviet impediments, and was crammed with former Marxists who weren’t all that former, which is why they don’t like it mentioned to this day.

The modern Labour equivalent of Clause Four is in fact comprehensive education, something David Blunkett repeatedly pledged never to abandon during the Blair years, and which he legislated to make compulsory in all new schools. This is because it is the absolute key and foundation of Labour’s commitment to ostensible egalitarianism, a position it will not abandon. Of course, its own leaders and rich supporters don’t believe in this, and are very skilled at avoiding it in their own lives. But they do very much want to impose it on the fast-declining independent middle-class, the main opposition to the strong state and the main defender of common sense against dogma.

Now we come to the very clever knot in British politics, the one which you must undo to grasp what is actually going on. For this, readers are strongly recommended to get hold of my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, or its earlier hardback version. The Broken Compass’ (they are broadly the same but ‘The Cameron Delusion’ was brought up to date to deal with Cameron Toryism).

Read especially the early chapter ‘The Power of Lunch’ (the index, itself a work of art, will find the passage if you look up the name ‘Goslett, Miles’).

It recounts the failure of a Freedom of Information request, pursued doggedly by Miles Goslett, to obtain details of a meeting at the Palace of Westminster on 28th February 2008. The location is important because who went to see whom is also important in working out who was setting the agenda.

What we *do* know about this meeting is that it was hosted by David Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, and his visitors were Mark Thompson, then Director-General of the Corporation, and Caroline Thomson(no relation – though ‘Thomson and Thompson’ reminds one of the two hopeless detectives in the Tintin books), at that stage the BBC’s chief political commissar. Caroline, whom I know slightly, is very well-connected in the left liberal establishment, especially its pro-EU wing. Her father was the former Labour MP, later Social Democrat peer Lord Thomson of Monifieth, her husband Roger Liddle, Eurocrat extraordinaire ( from 1997-2004 special adviser to the Blair creature on EU matters), who in turn became Baron Liddle of Carlisle in 2010 (his supporters were Lord Mandelson and Lord (William) Rodgers).

This was not a meeting about Tory policy on the BBC (Licence fee, Charter etc). BBC officials were having other meetings with the relevant Shadow Cabinet members about that.

This was, I believe, a meeting about the BBC’s policy towards the Tory Party. And that is why they won’t talk about it.

The BBC, as Mr Thompson has frankly accepted, had been institutionally hostile to the Tories in the Thatcher era http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/09/lecture-thompson-bbc-interview , though he asserted that this was now all in the past.

A more general admission of cultural liberal bias was made by Andrew Marr at a famous ‘impartiality summit’ recorded here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-411846/We-biased-admit-stars-BBC-News.html

Round about the same time, some will remember, the conservative media were rather sceptical of Mr Cameron’s re-engineering of the Tories, and concerned that they had been cowed into liberal policies by a fear of the BBC as we see here in a (BBC) report of a rare speech by the editor of the Daily Mail:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6289751.stm

The full text of this speech can be found here

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Media/documents/2007/01/23/CudlippDacre.pdf, and contains this passage;

‘I recently had lunch with the BBC’s Director General and I don’t think it’s breaking a confidence to reveal that he told me that their research showed that the BBC was no longer perceived as being anti-Tory. “That’s because you’ve broken the buggers”, I said laughing.’

He added : ‘Cameron’s cuddly blend of eco-politics and work-life balance, his embrace of Polly Toynbee – a columnist who loathes everything Conservatism stands for but is a totemic figure to the BBC – his sidelining of Thatcherism and his banishing of all talk of lower taxes, lower immigration and Euro scepticism, are all part of the Tories’ blood sacrifice to the BBC God.’

This is very perceptive. The re-engineering of the Tory brand in this period might have been (in my view almost certainly was) aimed at placating the BBC, the arbiter of orthodoxy and the gatekeeper of government. Suddenly the Tories were Greener than Green, metrosexual, Euro-friendly, comprehensive-friendly, equality-friendly, immigrant friendly. For many of them this was no great effort. The private opinions of the Tory upper deck have for many years been left-liberal, with concessions made at conference-time and during elections, during which these people try to appear to be conservative, by talking tough on crime, immigration, the EU, drugs, human rights, schools etc, in non-specific, non-committal ways which will never translate into real policy.

Even odder, in this instance, was that Mr Cameron (whose leftish sexual politics I explored and recorded in my lonely way in 2010, to the interest of nobody,

see here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/04/the-lisbon-scandal-and-other-cameron-matters.html

went ahead with the legalisation of same-sex marriage without putting it in his manifesto, a very clear sign that his real, true views are further to the left even than he confessed in his BBC-wooing period before 2010.

There’s also the excellent point made by my old adversary David Aaronovitch, in ‘The Times’ of 29th April 2008, that ‘Tony Blair's mission, unexplained even to himself perhaps, was to make it not matter whether the Tories came back, as they would be hemmed in by Blairism just as Labour was by Thatcherism’.

This may also have helped the BBC come round. But come round it did. In 1997 and afterwards, the BBC did not of course openly shout ‘Vote Labour’. It just used a lot of energy reporting on Tory ‘splits’ and rows. All parties are split, always, and generally these splits and rows remain minor unless exploited by active media coverage.

It also virtually ignored everything they said that wasn’t to do with a split or a row. Then the ‘split’ reporting faded, and indeed the splitometer was directed instead at Gordon Brown’s Labour government. Tory speeches and policy initiatives were reported more fully and more respectfully. The Tories had in short, been presented with the cloak of electability and Gordon Brown had been robbed of it. Only incredibly expensive, day-to-day, hour-to-hour monitoring across all the channels for years could actually demonstrated this, and who can afford that. It was done on the edge of a remark, or by nuance, timing. It wasn’t organised or directed. It was just permitted, when it previously hadn’t been, and everyone knew it. Conventional wisdom understood that the Tories were on their way back, and indeed went so far as to believe they could actually win in 2010, which *was* a physical impossibility. All this was helped by Gordon Brown’s unfashionably conservative manners and style of dress, his rejection of Blairite style, things that made BBC liberals less bothered about whether he won or lost.

The election of Ed Miliband, a second Brown, ensured that the Tories would continue to receive the blessings of BBC patronage. I wonder if, had David Miliband been picked instead, things would have been the same. I suspect not, though we shall never know. John Rentoul, of the Independent on Sunday, is a useful Blairite barometer on such things. I don’t get the impression he is especially grieved by the Labour downfall last month.

But that chance to reconnect the BBC with a Blairite Labour Party has gone. Labour is almost certainly done for now, because the Scottish loss has destroyed it as a national party, probably for good, while the Tory party has become New Labour. David Cameron truly is the heir to Blair, and UKIP can scrabble for the Noisy Minority which is all that is now left of a supposed ‘Silent Majority’ that, by staying silent and indeed endorsing its own destruction by voting Tory, allowed itself to be marginalised and defeated.