War reporting
BBC in crisis , Issue 1662 CHAMPIONING the BBC, Radio 4 Today host Nick Robinson, previously known as "Tory Boy", has become the corporation's unlikely in-house defender-in-chief.

On Monday's show, as well as in a post on X, Robinson went so far as to name BBC governor Sir Robbie Gibb – former press secretary to Theresa May – as a driving force behind those inside the BBC who want the corporation to admit it has a "left-wing bias".

Once the chairman of the National Young Conservatives, Robinson was seen as one of the rare "Tories" in the BBC's ranks. Yet those who remember the internecine wars of 1980s Conservative youth politics recall that Robinson's branch was very much closer to the politics of the centrist Social Democratic Party, compared with the government of the day.

Pro-Heath and anti-Thatcher, the group earned Robinson the nickname, at the time, of "Red Robbo." Meanwhile, the rival Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) – fiercely right wing – regarded the Young Conservatives as a feeble bunch of terrible wets. And one particularly committed FCS stalwart back in those days? None other than Robbie Gibb, a key player in the BBC's latest scandal. Thus it is that decades later, Not-Very-Red Robbo accuses Very-Blue Robbie of undermining the impartial BBC.

Grade inflation
Meanwhile, Ofcom chairman Lord Grade joined the campaign to beat up the BBC with a letter to the BBC's chairman insisting the corporation take the leaked Prescott bias memo "seriously".

Grade was a Tory peer until he was appointed to Ofcom by the then Tory culture secretary Nadine Dorries (now with Reform) in 2022. On taking up his Ofcom role, he unconvincingly claimed to be an "unaffiliated" peer, and he remains a logical recruit for any right-wing scheme to bully the Beeb. But is he an advert for "serious" judgements?

One of Grade's higher-profile recent business enterprises was Gate Ventures, a media investment firm he ran with, er, Sarah Ferguson. Grade chaired the firm, which raised money from Chinese investors for West End shows.

Fergie and Grade's role on the board was to show investors "backing at the highest level of the British establishment", according to evidence at a court case that followed the firm collapsing into administration in 2020.

Believing Fergie was a reassuring presence was a spectacular misjudgement by Grade and his fellow directors. The high court also heard Gate Ventures made "unexplained" six-figure loans to her.

Awkwardly for Grade, Fergie's many business failures, including the Gate Ventures collapse, are now being re-examined in the press following further revelations of her and her ex-husband's involvement with Jeffrey Epstein.

Snail mail
After the resignations of BBC chiefs Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, the Daily Mail was triumphant, gathering together a selection of its stories from the previous few days in a section headlined "How the Mail led the way".

But did the Mail lead the way? Er... no. In fact, it was the Telegraph that revealed the "dossier" of BBC editing controversies throughout the week, while the Mail struggled to keep up.

Indeed, the Telegraph even beat the Mail to an interview with its own star columnist on the story. Last Friday ex-prime minister Boris Johnson told the Torygraph that Davie must "explain or resign" – a quote that became the paper's front-page story. The next day, he wrote almost the same thing in his weekly Mail column – hardly leading the way.