Abusing Auntie Beeb.

The abuse allegations that I’ve written about recently have taken an interesting little turn. The ex Tory politician who was named by a ‘victim’ as having been involved in the paedophile activities at a children’s home forty years ago has protested his innocence. Meanwhile, the man who made the allegation has gone public with an unreserved apology, saying that it had been a case of mistaken identity. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on the inferences that will be drawn on both sides of the fence. There are those who want to believe that everything’s OK so they can go back to sleep, and there are those who want to see demons lurking under every pebble on the beach.

I know nothing. It isn’t my place – or anyone else’s – to adopt unsubstantiated presumptions in individual cases. What I can do is offer a reasonable general suspicion on what might be described as a side issue.

At the moment, all the fire is being directed at the BBC. Poor old Auntie Beeb is sitting helplessly in the water while every ship in the vicinity is firing 6” shells into her. She’s being damaged on all decks and taking water. There is talk of high level resignations, the sacking of an investigative partner organisation, and the cessation of its much-respected, 37-year-year old flagship news programme.

I find this implausible. Relations between the BBC and the corridors of political power have been strained ever since the David Kelly affair, when the Corporation blew the whistle on Tony Blair’s lies to Parliament over WMD. Blair got away with it; the Director General of the BBC lost his job. And now the BBC is being isolated and made the prime target again. My instinct is nagging at me, and telling me – in a general sense only, you understand – that that there’s a bad smell in the air. It reeks of the scapegoat mentality. It has me wondering whether this is all part of an attempt by the Establishment power base to take even more control of the BBC than it already has. The BBC is supposed to be impartial; it’s paid for primarily by the people of Britain through the licence fee.

As for the abuse allegations, there is obviously a muddy pool here, and we won’t know what lies at the bottom of it until the mud clears. That’s if it ever does, which I’m coming to think is increasingly unlikely.