Four To The Floor

There are people who, mostly because they never meet anyone who disagrees with them, believe their own political position be politically neutral and thus not political at all. They therefore assert that their broadcasting network, which gives airtime to few or no other views, is a public good that should be paid for by a compulsory levy, and for which non-payment should remain a criminal offence and not just a civil debt.

No doubt they consider their position to have been vindicated by the pitiful showing of its only ever attempt to set up a separate party, Change UK, which enjoyed lavish and wholly uncritical coverage both from that broadcasting network and from great lumps of the wider media. After all, nothing says "apolitical" like practically no votes. 

For a quarter of a century, give or take, that tendency has packed every public body, under all three parties, on the premise that its prejudices were not prejudices at all, but the opposite. Boris Johnson, however, won the last General Election, so his court and the wider Vote Leave faction are entitled to enjoy the spoils. If they can get away with making Charles Moore the Chairman of the BBC, then why not? Who should it be instead, and why? The same goes for making Paul Dacre the Chairman of Ofcom. 

And how much does Johnson really want to annoy, and further weaken, the people who hate him? If he wants that as much as he should, then he ought to consider that when an anti-austerity and pro-Brexit option that was opposed root and branch to neoconservative foreign policy was allowed on the ballot paper, then it took 40 per cent of the vote. There is no reason to assume that that position, it itself, has become any less popular than that.

Therefore, in a ratio of 5:4, with the five including the member in the Chair, appointments to any given public body should now be supporters of Johnson, and people like that. Or, as some of us would put it, people like us. If, having relied on the official media, the Government were unclear as to where to find such people, then plenty of us would have no difficulty suggesting the names of potential appointees who would be more than suitable.