If you want a quiet life and a stable job, on no account apply to be secretary of state for culture, media and sport. You think it’s precarious being a premiership football manager? Try a job where there have been a dozen or so managers in 14 years. Even Jose Mourinho would baulk at that.
Sajid Javid lasted 13 months. Matt Hancock wafted in and out in six. You may have missed someone called Jeremy Wright, who managed 54 weeks. And then there was Michelle Donelan, who lasted all of 155 days before she moved onto a new phase of her life libelling blameless academics.
But now we have Lisa Nandy, and I have a feeling she will last the course—firstly because the Labour government will no longer use the role as on-the-job training for roles apparently considered more important; and, secondly, because she is already showing signs that she will be rather good.
I confess I had been rather hoping that Thangam Debbonaire would get the job, not least because she had been a professional cellist and showed every sign of being both passionate and knowledgeable—not necessarily qualities that, say, Oliver Dowden exuded when he briefly occupied the chair in 2020/21.
But Debbonaire fell victim to boundary changes and a resurgent Green vote in Bristol, so instead we have Nandy. And the omens are promising, not least with her aspiration to rise above the enervating mire of culture wars.
Nandy’s mother Luise was a TV producer at Granada TV in the days when it had a reputation as a big beast in documentaries and current affairs. Her stepfather, Ray Fitzwalter, also at Granada TV, was one of the outstanding investigative journalists of his generation. Her father, Dipak Nandy, is an academic with a deep commitment to public service broadcasting.
Whether by nature or nurture, that belief in the BBC and the role of proper reporting seems to have been passed down to Lisa Nandy. That alone makes her markedly different from several of her predecessors who appeared to loath the very idea of the BBC and took dictation from the slick lobbyists working for assorted forms of corporate media. I speak metaphorically.
In 2020, when contemplating a run at the Labour leadership, she penned an immensely sensible article for Labour List. It repays study.
Firstly, she completely grasps the central importance of the BBC and why it needed to be defended against the lazy and malign attacks on it. She floats the idea of mutualising parts of the corporation to insulate it from political influence and make it more accountable to the people—that’s us—who fund it.
This idea—first, I think, floated by her predecessor Tessa Jowell in 2013—deserves serious consideration. I love the idea that every new child born in the UK—and everyone acquiring citizenship here—should be given a share in the greatest news organisation in the world. How tawdry the Robbie Gibb years would then look.
If you think it’s a wringing wet metropolitan elite idea then google a letter to the Times in 2016 co-written by Labour MP Gareth Thomas and the hard man of Brexit, Steve Baker, in which they proposed something very similar.
“The BBC Trust is accountable to no one, really,” they wrote. “This creates a vacuum into which political interference from the government (of any colour) can leak … Mutualising the BBC would lend new legitimacy to the licence fee and bring the BBC and the audience together — an audience without which the BBC cannot flourish.”
Unworkable? But how sensible is it for a modern national broadcasting organisation to be based on a renewable Royal Charter, a constitutional pantomime horse more useful for Oxbridge colleges or worshipful companies? It is a mediaeval instrument which merely channels things through the back door of Buckingham Palace rather than through the front door of Westminster.
Nandy has also written warmly about the BBC World Service, a woefully neglected vehicle of soft power. She has proposed taxing social media companies to create a fund to support local media and investigative journalism, building on the local democracy reporter’s scheme.
In her Labour List piece, she went further, lauding “a media landscape that is plural, representative and accountable to people covering the issues that they care about – however uncomfortable for … the government.” In other words, she gets it.
She has been brave and honest about that media landscape as well. When Johnston Press, the owner of her local paper in Wigan, collapsed in 2018, she didn’t mince her words. In a parliamentary intervention she described the gross mismanagement of Johnson Press as “a story of pure greed … A handful of people have creamed off huge profits and left a debt-laden struggling company in the hands of hedge funds.” Few people who followed the story would argue with a word of that. But how many MPs were prepared to say as much?
Of course, it’s easier to say this stuff as a comparatively unknown opposition MP than it is once you have your hands on the steering wheel. It’s all very well to talk about a “plural landscape” of media ownership, though quite what that means for the small crowd of bidders for the Telegraph (now numbering nearly 20, I’m told) is anyone’s guess. The owners of the Daily Mail have pulled out of the bidding, grumbling about a new law governing the ownership of UK newspapers. Rupert Murdoch’s apparent wish to get his hands on the Spectator could run into objections over market share
Nor do we yet know enough about Nandy to gauge the depth of her knowledge about football governance, or film, or AI. What will she do about those dozy poodles at Ofcom? Can she save our provincial theatres or undo the vandalisation of a once-thriving classical music scene?
There’s an overflowing in-tray and she’s still only days into the job. There will, I’m sure, be bruising battles ahead. But for the first time in nearly 15 years, we have someone who feels genuinely interested in our country’s sport, media and culture, and who is willing to think with some originality and courage. Be grateful for not-so-small mercies.
