Nothing warms the cockles on these long wintry nights better than a centrist meltdown. And what an epic one we’ve had in response to the BBC crisis. Everywhere you look there’s a Rory Stewart simp in a Next cardigan choking on his matcha over the ‘hard-right war’ on our ‘precious’ Beeb and the ‘populist’ hell we’ll all be dragged to if poor old ‘Auntie’ dies. It’s beautiful. Not since the vote for Brexit has the piss of the chattering classes boiled so furiously.

No sooner had Tim Davie and Deborah Turness resigned over Panorama’s outrageous doctoring of Donald Trump’s words than centrist dads across the land were wailing on the internet. You know the type: still not over Brexit, watches Have I Got News For You?, pisses himself while reading Marina Hyde. These pub-snug bores have swarmed social media to bawl over the ‘war of attrition’ against our most wondrous ‘national treasure’, the Beeb. They have no idea how insane they sound to a solid 85 per cent of the British public.

Alastair Campbell got the ball rolling. He and his sidekick, Rory Stewart, even did an ‘emergency podcast’. Honey, crank up the Nespresso – The Rest Is Politics is on. Panorama ‘made mistakes’ in its coverage of Trump’s speech at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, Campbell concedes. But it’s still true, he says, that Trump spouted lies that day and ‘people died as a result’. I don’t know – if my BS had contributed to the death of a hundred thousand Arabs, I’d probably hold back from accusing others of killing people with words.

Campbell froths about the ‘well-organised, well-funded’ war on the Beeb by ‘ferocious’ and ‘malign’ right-wingers who are hell-bent on ‘bring[ing] the BBC to heel’. Nurse! Also, is this the same Alastair Campbell whose claim to fame is that he used to bollock the Jesus out of every journalist who refused to kiss the arse of Tony Blair? Including the BBC! Seems it’s fine when ‘we’ bring the Beeb to heel. Centrist conquests of the media only, please.

All the wet-eyed Beeb grievers are convinced shady operators are plotting the BBC’s overthrow. It’s a ‘coordinated, politically motivated attack’, cries Jane Martinson at the Guardian. It’s a ruthless crusade by the ‘hard-right online ecosystem’, says Lewis Goodall, co-host of The News Agents, the pod where ex-BBC staffers go to vent the thin ‘liberal’ wank we all know is rife at BBC HQ. Imagine insisting the BBC isn’t biased even as your every utterance proves otherwise.

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The lack of accountability-taking is astonishing. Vampires are better at self-reflection than these people. To accuse Trump of coming for the BBC when it was the BBC that went for Trump takes doublethink to dizzying new heights. On the eve of the 2024 presidential election, the Beeb aired doctored footage that would have made Pravda blush, depicting one of the candidates in that election as a riot-inciting madman. Then it goes blubbing all over the internet when said candidate says ‘WTF?’. Don’t start a fight if you don’t want to get smacked – I thought everyone knew that?

The centrist fawning over the Beeb has been next-level cringe. Ed Davey, bungee-jumping leader of the Lib Dems, says the BBC is like ‘a wayward family member’ – ‘I don’t always like what it does but I will always love it’. You sad bastard. Trump and Co hate the BBC because they hate ‘truth’, he says. If you don’t mind, Ed, I think I’ll sit out lectures on truth from a man who says a woman can ‘quite clearly’ have a penis. In a ‘darkening world, we remain a shaft of light’, says the BBC’s James Landale. The narcissism! ‘I am the light’, said Christ – now overpaid suits at the Beeb say the same.

The BBC isn’t a ‘shaft of light’. And it hasn’t been for a very long time. It doctored footage of Trump, promoted the post-truth nonsense of trans and spread so much Hamas propaganda about Israel that it was forced to correct an average of two stories about Gaza every week since 7 October 2023. The BBC posed as the slayer of misinformation even as it pumped out loads of its own. Forget the ‘war on the BBC’ – I’ll reserve my concern for the women and the gay kids who suffered as a result of the trans ideology the Beeb did so much to mainstream, and the Jews who got it in the neck as a consequence of the pox of Israelophobia the Beeb helped to spread.

But carry on hissyfitting, centrists. That’s the shaft of light in a darkening world. You’re doing your bit for mirth. You’re also proving – unwittingly, natch – that the BBC really is biased. For we all know why you ‘love it’ – precisely because it does your bidding, on everything from Trump to trans to Gaza. We need a ‘strong, independent BBC to stop Trump’s America becoming Farage’s Britain’, says Ed Davey. Boom. There it is. They defend the BBC not because it isn’t biased but because it is. It’s not the passing of truth they fear – it’s the withering of their own cultural power.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.