Save Ben Bradshaw
I AM OBLIGED to come to the defence of NUJ member Ben Bradshaw who, I’m sorry to say, has become the subject of derision for his radical approach to the job of UK culture secretary.
Ben Bradshaw has quite reasonably criticised the BBC, called for it to restrict its “non-core activities” and nodded his approval for proposals to top-slice its licence fee — all incidentally at odds with not just the union’s policy but his department’s in the past. He has also given the go-ahead to “product placement” — the practice of allowing the advertising of products in TV programmes, though not yet in news or current affairs.
These things, it is said, have disturbed the delicate ecology of government consideration of media policy. It is an area with overlapping responsibilities, as for a decade there has been a balance between the two ministries involved: the Department of Culture, Media And Sport, which Ben Bradshaw heads, and the industry department, currently called the Department for Business Innovation and Skills and headed by the sinister Lord Mandelson.
The DCMS had traditionally been more media-friendly, with ministers vowing support for public service broadcasting and responsible media regulation, while the BIS has always operated to a pro-business agenda that puts corporate profits before everything else.
But everyone knew that this supposed dichotomy was a charade. The business ministry has always had the upper hand. Essentially, the culture department’s function has been window-dressing, its ministers confined to the role of mouthing what people like the NUJ — and the general public when asked their opinion — want to hear.
Not any more, it seems. Ben Bradshaw has brought the DCMS into the mainstream of decision-making. And if he can last in the job until the coming election he will have served ten months, to become the longest serving culture secretary for quite a while; there were no fewer than four in the year to last June.
He is, let’s remember, the first NUJ member to hold the job — having attained cabinet rank, which is more than my friend Denis MacShane ever managed, for all his years of trying.
What do people expect from trade union members who get into government? There is a ritual they have to endure, to purge them of residual progressive or pro-union ideas. Look at the Royal Mail dispute: the first minister pushed forward to denounce the strike was Lord Young, who as Tony Young used to be the number two in the posties’ union, the CWU. Indeed he was at one time a leading light of the left within the union.
Despite the attacks on its very existence the CWU continues to shovel huge amounts of money to the Labour Party, to which Alan Johnson, a former leader of the union, owes his unstoppable rise in government; he too in his junior ministerial days was given a Post Office brief that involved gunning for his former union.
The pressure on Ben Bradshaw to do as he’s told must be intense; the process appears to have been so successful that I seriously wonder whether he has in fact been tortured. The recent picture that I reproduce here certainly gives that impression.
Before getting into Parliament in 1997 he was not just a journalist but a BBC journalist, for a time as a reporter on the Today programme. It is on that programme that he has concentrated his assaults, accusing it of pro-Tory bias among other things. It is almost like the days of Alastair Campbell, whose daily offensives on the programme were to have such devastating effects five years ago.
I am not suggesting that the twittering of Ben Bradshaw is in the same class; he is no Alastair Campbell. And the BBC is better able to disarm him. They know him too well, and in October set out rather cleverly to expose his weaknesses, by inviting him onto both Radio 4’s Any Questions and BBC1’s Question Time, in successive weeks, which is unusual.
I happened to catch both broadcasts and found them painful. Ben Bradshaw is not an impromptu performer. His skills lie not in the ready quip, but in the carefully prepared response. The Question Time audience squirmed at the panic that swept his languid features when asked a question on the arrest of the paedophile Polish film director Roman Polanski. He stuttered and flushed and said he didn’t know what to think. Clearly he had not been briefed — and who’s fault was that?
It was hardly an unpredictable question, and government spinners really should have briefed him fully. It is not their job to send ministers onto TV to say the first thing that comes into their heads, and while it may be fortunate that there doesn’t appear to be very much in Ben Bradshaw’s head, surely they had a duty to tell him what to say him on every potential question.
Perhaps they did, and he forgot, but his embarrassing performance did leave me wondering whether they had left poor Ben Bradshaw dangling in the wind on purpose.