The Crown and the BBC: The Queen doesn’t deserve this disgraceful soap opera

The British monarchy is in a beleaguered condition. With the death of the Duke of Edinburgh it has lost its most robust exponent. All commentary on the royal family is conducted against a distracting background noise of shrill solipsistic denunciations, beamed from America by the Sussex duo. The BBC interview with the Duke of York, conducted by Emily Maitlis, was a disaster for the royal family. So, long before that, in 1995, was Martin Bashir’s BBC Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, secured by fraudulent means, which resulted in the wife of the heir to the throne and mother of the eventual heir confessing on television to adultery. 

The melancholy reality is that a once great institution, formerly widely respected at home and abroad, regarded as the embodiment of Britain, has fallen into irretrievable decline. Mired in repeated scandal and controversy, it no longer reflects the values and aspirations of the nation it aspires to represent. The inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that the time has come to abolish the BBC.

No institution with any integrity could have allowed the outrageous fraud committed by Martin Bashir to be perpetrated. Where were the checks and balances, the quality control, the editorial supervision that should have made such an imposture impossible? Worse still was the subsequent cover-up. Lord Dyson’s report described the BBC’s inquiry into the falsified bank statements used to dupe Lord Spencer as “woefully ineffective” and named the culprits, saying, “by far the most serious failures were on the part of Lord Hall (then head of News and Current Affairs) and Mrs (Anne) Sloman (then acting head of weekly current affairs)”.

The Duke of Cambridge has issued a statement on the scandal. When Prince William speaks on such a topic he commands attention and respect, unlike the ramblings of his motor-mouth younger brother. “It is my view that the deceitful way the interview was obtained substantially influenced what my mother said. The interview was a major contribution to making my parents’ relationship worse and has since hurt countless others.”

That is a reminder that, behind the media intrusion upon marital discord, two young boys were desperately hoping their parents could remain together. The mischief-making by the BBC is, on any level, unforgivable. Leaving aside the issue of fake bank statements, why was the corporation seeking to secure and broadcast a tabloid-journalism style of interview, prying into the innermost affairs of the royal family? How did that accord with the remit of its much-vaunted “public service broadcasting”? Would Lord Reith have sanctioned the broadcasting of such an interview? If that is the standard set by the BBC, they might as well have bestowed a Royal Charter on the defunct News of the World.

The Prime Minister has described himself as “obviously concerned” about the findings of the Dyson report. Justice Secretary Robert Buckland said: “My colleague the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, has rightly said that we should look at the governance structures of the BBC… And there may be issues that Lord Dyson wasn’t asked to cover that need to be looked at more widely, so it is a very serious moment for the BBC.”

But not serious enough, one fears. The corporation should have its charter removed and be broken up and sold off. However, the Conservative benches at Westminster are full of MPs who still identify with the partisan metropolitan elite institution that has done more than any other single agency to present them unfavourably to the public and influence voters’ perception of their party. It is beyond ludicrous to hear presenters complaining about feeling shackled by the “impartiality” requirements of the BBC. We knew what a sham that was as long ago as 2005, when James Naughtie asked Ed Balls, in an interview: “If we [sic] win the election, does Gordon Brown remain as chancellor?”

It seems unlikely that the Tories will lay a serious glove on the BBC. That has not prevented its elite supporters from lashing themselves into a state of alarm. This week, more than a hundred of the usual suspects – political retirees and luvvies, many of them ensconced in the House of Lords – wrote an open letter to Oliver Dowden, Culture Secretary, defending the discredited corporation and expressing concern that “the government is being advised by a panel not set up under the Cabinet Office guidelines, meeting in secret with no public record of its agenda, discussions or recommendations.”

That sounds very much like the way the BBC conducts its business, such as cover-ups when its staff has committed improprieties. The signatories of the letter included Lord Mandelson, Hugh Grant and Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, creator of the obstacle course for nations departing the European Union. It would be encouraging to think the signatories’ fears were justified, but that notion is implausible, though a fire sale of the woke BBC might raise useful revenue during post-pandemic recovery. The very least that must happen, though, is the ending of the licence fee, at a date that should be brought forward to next year.

So much for the squalid element of the controversy that is currently dominating the headlines. Far more important is the other major element, the monarchy. Just five weeks ago the country watched the harrowing spectacle of the Queen, masked and in mourning, sitting alone at the end of a pew in St George’s Chapel, Windsor during the funeral service of her husband and chief support for seventy-three years. It was an inexpressibly poignant image, which elicited deep sympathy across the country. Many of her subjects expressed a frustrated wish to help her, though they knew there was no  means by which they could give that goodwill concrete expression.

Not everyone wants to be helpful. From across the Atlantic one of her grandsons is projecting a constant stream of denunciation, which does not even spare his grandparents. The narcissist prince seems incapable of viewing anything on earth in any context other than his own grievance and elective victimhood. The Queen, at the age of ninety-five and after serving the nation unsparingly for sixty-nine years, has not deserved this, any more than the assaults of the BBC and the tabloid media on the stability of the monarchy.

There are two distinct elements almost inextricably merged in this great national institution: the monarchy as the constitutional and cultural embodiment of the nation; and the royal family. The latter has suffered many regrettable setbacks in recent years, due to the undisciplined behaviour of some of its younger members. But the monarchy itself stands, timeless and invaluable, as the ultimate icon of the nation. It was not until Victorian times that the notion arose of the royal family as a paradigm of family life; before that, a king had been regarded as the father of his people, a Christian idea more profound than soap-opera treatment of the extended family.

The monarchy is indispensable to Britain; the BBC, notoriously, is not. The monarchy occupies the key role in Britain that is fulfilled in the United States by the Constitution – which Prince Harry has also disparaged, in an apparent attempt to render himself persona non grata on two continents. The British have always criticised and often satirised their monarchy; but they have done so with the familiarity of long acquaintance and deep-seated affection. This country is unimaginable uprooted from its more than a millennium-old monarchy; republicanism is not native to Britain – we tried it once, for a mere eleven years, and found the experience uncongenial.

We owe the Queen support and sympathy in these dark days. We owe the arrogant BBC nothing. Long after Auntie has passed into the dustbin of history, the monarchy that the BBC sought by fraudulent means to undermine will endure and thrive. That is the difference between a useful and a useless institution.