Just a few weeks ago, Nadine Dorries had almost shed a tear during a Commons statement as she praised the efforts of BBC and Channel 4 journalists in reporting the war in Ukraine.
For someone who has spent most of her career trashing the BBC and Channel 4, this was a rare slip. The culture secretary is a good hater. She doesn’t forgive and she doesn’t forget. Just as soon as the war is over she will revert to type. It will be like Lyse Doucet and Matt Frei never existed.
As part of her campaign to single-handedly bring down the BBC, Dorries had originally tried to nominate the former Daily Mail editor Lord Dacre – a one-man war on anything even vaguely liberal – as the new chair of the media regulator, Ofcom. This proved too much of an ask for the selection panel, who refused to ratify his appointment and Dacre stormed off in a huff, even when Dorries tried to get him to apply for the job a second time. For a man who prides himself on being hard and non-PC, he’s surprisingly thin-skinned. He can dish it out, but he can’t take it.
Dacre’s replacement was never likely to share his total, pathological lack of sensibilities, but Dorries must have thought that in Michael Grade she had found a more than adequate second best. A Tory peer who seemed to share her anti-woke agenda. Someone who had complained about the BBC licence fee and had spoken out against liberal values.
Best of all, he had described the BBC’s coverage of partygate as aggressive and disrespectful. It was perfectly normal for the prime minister to go to as many parties as he wanted. He made the laws and he was entitled to break them. And if Boris Johnson chose to lie about them, then that was his prerogative. Lord Grade is in for a hell of a shock when someone tells him it was ITV and the Daily Mirror who broke most of the party stories.
Dorries, though, might soon be shedding a few more tears because, on the basis of his performance at the pre-appointment session of the culture select committee, Grade might not be the culture warrior she had hoped. Rather he appeared as, at worst, slightly out of touch with a few opinions, lightly held. If the committee wanted some other opinions, he had them too. He could be whatever anyone wanted him to be. He wasn’t that bothered. His role at Ofcom was to be independent and he could do that. And, in any case, look on the bright side: he wasn’t Paul Dacre.
That thought seemed to be uppermost in the committee’s mind. There was nothing riding on Grade’s appearance – the meeting was entirely decorative as the committee had no powers to block his appointment – so the proceedings were good-natured throughout. No one cared enough to ask any really tough questions and Grade was intent on being as polite and uncontroversial as possible. And like him or not, you have to recognise he is an old pro. Within minutes, he had most of the committee eating out of the palm of his hand.
So why had Grade chosen to apply for the job, asked the committee chair, Julian Knight. Grade paused. He had been at a loose end and had been reading the situations vacant. No one had suggested he put his name forward. Far from it. He had just realised how interested he was in the government’s online harms bill. And what social media did he use? Ah, he said. That’s what made him such a specialist in the area. Because he actually used none. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok: forget it. But his son did spend a lot of time on his phone so that probably made him an expert.
Labour’s Clive Efford moved on to Grade’s comments on the licence fee. Grade looked astonished. He had never said the BBC shouldn’t be funded by the taxpayer. He merely thought it was insensitive that the corporation was asking for more money at a time when it was reporting that people were having to choose between heating and eating. No one asked him the key question of whether he thought the BBC would still be good value if the licence fee was increased.
The only trace of feistiness came when the SNP’s John Nicolson questioned him on his anti-woke agenda. Calling his future Ofcom colleagues “woke warrior apparatchiks” was just office bants, Grade said. And he had previously only stood up for the right of a Freeview nostalgia channel to show an old programme from the 70s in which someone had blacked up. It was clearly an archive show. Hell, he’d been the person to axe the Black and White Minstrels and beauty shows when he’d been head of BBC1 back in the 1980s.
Yes, he’d stood up for Laurence Fox on Question Time. Lozza’s grandfather had been a friend of his dad’s. And he’d only said it was good to hear different voices to be supportive. Someone had to stand up for not very bright, moderately successful actors. Besides, this would all stop once he was chair of Ofcom. Every complaint would be dealt with strictly on its own merits. As for diversity, how much more diverse could his appointment be? Who else was handing out £142K for three days a week jobs to 79-year old Tory peers? It was tough work, but someone had to do it.
After that, it all went very cosy as committee members asked vague questions about other aspects of Ofcom’s remit without being very interested in the answers. It was jobs for the boys, but the boy was near enough one of them. Grade just kept things vague and genial. He’d do his best and get his head around the job when he started.
There was just time for one sting in the tale, when Labour’s Kevin Brennan asked him about his West End flop, Man of La Mancha. That clearly hurt Grade. He must have lost more than he cares to remember. For his next musical, he’d be sure to cast a star who could actually sing. That was the only lapse in judgment on his CV to which he was prepared to admit.
