THE OLD BOY NETWORK
Andrew Marr beyond the BBC
The veteran broadcaster Andrew Marr quit the BBC in 2021 after twenty years, claiming he needed to get his voice back. ‘I’m free to speak my mind now,’ he declared, following his departure.
According to Marr, the ‘insane’ impartiality rules imposed on BBC journalists were impacting on his private life: ‘I was self-censoring on air, and then self-censoring in front of family and friends, and even not saying what I really thought in the pub with friends.’
It sounds ironic in retrospect, given the extent of the BBC’s partiality, as revealed in Michael Prescott’s leaked internal memo. This showed that Panorama had ‘doctored’ a speech by President Trump; that BBC Arabic had given hundreds of on-air appearances to anti-Semites, including a man who once suggested Jews should be burned ‘as Hitler did’; and that BBC News’s ‘specialist LGBTQ desk’ ensured that stories that shed a critical light on the trans agenda were not covered. The revelations contained wit…