With his hooded eyes and menacing manner, the former Tory minister Norman Tebbit is the Dracula of British politics. A rabid free marketeer who became a key figure in the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher, Tebbit loathed the “liberal” Britain of the 1960s and 70s, reserving a special contempt for the British Broadcasting Corporation, in his eyes a hotbed of left-wing subversives.

Who would have guessed that this abrasive Rightist would one day step forward as the BBC’s friend? Yet this was precisely what happened last week when (albeit for not entirely altruistic reasons) Tebbit emerged as the BBC’s outspoken champion in the row that has erupted between the Corporation and Tony Blair’s government. Writing in The Independent, he vigorously took the BBC’s side over the allegation by its Radio 4 correspondent Andrew Gilligan that Blair’s Director of Communications Alastair Campbell doctored British “intelligence” in order to give the impression that Iraq represented a far more imminent threat to Britain than it really did.

With undisguised glee, Tebbit noted that, despite taking the trouble to “pack” the BBC with his own New Labour appointees, the outraged Blair now finds the Corporation challenging his version of events, biting the hand that fed it. Tebbit maintains that the BBC has actually been acting as New Labour’s conscience, showing up Britain’s Prime Minister as a traitor to his Party’s traditions with his espousal of the war-mongering Christian fundamentalism of President George W. Bush. His most damaging contention, however, was that Blair’s determination to defame the BBC springs from the failure of his attempt to secure a second UN resolution in favor of military action against Iraq. It was this failure, he wrote in The Independent, that led directly to the political manipulation of the bare facts of intelligence reports, for without convincing evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, Blair ran the risk not just of forfeiting the support of his own party but of letting down Washington and undermining the credibility of his leadership. Depicting him as “less a liar than an authoritarian fantasist,” Tebbit insinuated that Blair was only too happy to let Alastair Campbell cook up a sensational dossier that claimed that Iraq could prepare to strike London with weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes.

Questioned by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee which is “investigating” the government’s rationale for declaring war, Campbell himself furiously denied being party to any such stratagem. Not long afterward, he burst without warning in the studios of Channel Four News, insisting that he had no case to answer and that it was the BBC that owed him an apology. But why was Campbell — who after all is a civil servant, not a politician — playing so conspicuous a part in speaking up not just for himself but the government as well?

Norman Tebbit has no doubt that the British government’s chief spin doctor and the prime minister alike are seeking to cover up their guilt at having deceived the British Parliament, and in turn the British public, over the seriousness of the threat posed by Iraq. He maintains that by remorselessly vilifying Andrew Gilligan for alleging that raw intelligence was deliberately embellished they are following the dictum of the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: “Never admit to a lie – simply keep repeating it.” What made his article especially telling was Tebbit’s confession that when, in 1986, he himself fulminated against the BBC (over its coverage of the Thatcher Government’s acquiesence in the US bombing of Libya), he felt some unease about the matter: If he was particularly vitriolic in criticizing the BBC at that time, it was, he now discloses, because he feared that it was right and he was wrong. Tebbit’s sly suggestion is that the current British government’s intemperate accusations against the BBC have similar psychological roots.

The great irony in all this is that it is no thanks to Tebbit that the BBC still survives in remotely recognizable form as a public-service broadcasting organization. Indeed, it is remarkable that there is still a BBC left to defend after the all but naked political interference to which the BBC was subjected, not least by Tebbit himself, during the 1980s. The harm done to the Corporation by Tebbit and his fellow free marketeers was real and lasting. It is because of years of bullying by Tory ministers that the BBC has adopted an increasingly commercialized approach. Yet when it comes to news coverage and political reporting, the BBC has kept, and deservedly kept, an impressively high reputation for balance and fair-mindedness. Not that it is above reproach — it must be said that both Andrew Gilligan and his editors at the BBC are guilty of impetuosity if nothing else for calumniating Campbell (and Blair) on the basis of a single uncorroborated source. But Norman Tebbit is far from alone in believing that the BBC, with all its failings, can hardly be accused of willful distortion, of flagrant betrayal of its public-service mandate. How otherwise to explain why it enjoys a world-wide audience of more than 160 million — or why during the crisis over Iraq many Americans have turned to it for reliable information?

Nobody stands to benefit more from the smearing of the BBC than Tony Blair’s Machiavellian “friend” and patron Rupert Murdoch. The Blair government has been preparing legislation which would enable Murdoch to fulfill this ambition to buy terrestrial Channel 5 — though for the moment the legislation is being effectively resisted by establishment figures who are anxious to stop Murdoch from achieving the total monopoly of the British media that he so blatantly craves.

Having gone to war against Iraq on the seemingly spurious pretext that Saddam Hussein could prepare to wreak havoc on Britain within the space of an hour, Tony Blair faces a mounting crisis of public confidence. From this point of view, his government’s overblown row with the BBC over one disputable allegation looks like a diversionary tactic. But the controversy also affords a convenient opportunity for Blair to further Murdoch’s cause by casting fresh doubts on the BBC’s trustworthiness. Certainly, Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers will be redoubling their efforts to discredit the whole concept of public-service broadcasting, with endless jibes that the BBC’s license fee has lost all legitimacy. In many ways, the BBC has proved to be a remarkably resilient institution: Bastions of intelligent discussion and eclectic cultural recreation, its radio stations 3 and 4 are justifications of the license fee in their own right. Once again, however, the embattled Corporation needs all the defenders it can get — even if they include Dracula himself.

Arab News Opinion 8 July 2003