You are in:
They Don't Like It Up 'Em
Rod Liddle is on target once again in this week's Spectator, where he has a memoir of the magazine's late BBC-baiting radio critic Michael Vestey. Like Liddle, Vestey was a former BBC man himself. Unlike the columnist, however, Vestey was very much of the right, and thus it is fair to say his skills went rather under-appreciated at the "suffocating, moronic, politically-correct, anti-liberal (leftist) BBC."
Vestey, Liddle remembers, told the truth about BBC sacred cows - including the EU - and no-one forgave him for it.
"He had this suspicion, back in the early 1990s, that the EU was heading towards a federal superstate, regardless of what the politicians might be telling us, and that monetary union and greater powers ceded to Brussels were per se a bad thing", Liddle writes, "Pretty much everyone believes this now — Vestey, and a handful of others within the BBC, were absolutely right."
At the time, however, for pretty much everyone else on the radio staff, he was
"regarded as quite outrageous, the snarling voice of the
little-Englander, petty-minded, far right. (...)
"Michael Vestey suspected that the rest of Europe did not necessarily share the BBC’s conviction that the EU was per se a good thing. He went (to Denmark for the Eurozone referendum) — and scooped the corporation when the Danes did as he suspected they would and voted a resolute ‘No’. That Danish vote was, in a way, the first indication that the progression to a federal European superstate would be met with the opposition of ordinary voters. To an extent, it changed even the way the BBC reported Europe, although not quite as much as it should have done."
Liddle claims Vestey's opinions eventually "did for him" at the BBC. He was the Spectator's radio critic for ten years, and continued to loathe the broadcaster. The Beeb reciprocated - but, Liddle claims, Vestey was one of the few critics the corporation respected.
