Quite right!: BBC bias & Bridget ‘Philistine’s’ war on education
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Listeners on the Best of Spectator playlist can enjoy a section of the latest episode of Quite right! but for the full thing please seek out the Quite right! channel. Just search ‘Quite right!’ wherever you are listening now.
This week: a crisis at the BBC – and a crisis of standards in our schools.
Following the shock resignations of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, Michael and Maddie ask whether the corporation has finally been undone by its own bias, and discuss how it can correct the leftward lurch in its editorial line.
Then: Labour’s new education reforms come under the microscope. As Ofsted scraps single-word judgements in favour of ‘report cards’, could this ‘definitive backward step’ result in a ‘dumbing down’ that will rob the next generation of rigour and ambition? And will ‘Bridget Philistine’s’ war on education undo the positive legacy of the Conservatives on education?
And finally, in Hollywood, actress Sydney Sweeney refuses to apologise for comments made in an interview last week – she now finds herself a heroine of the anti-woke age. Are we finally past peak woke?
Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
To submit your urgent questions to Michael and Maddie, go to: spectator.co.uk/quiteright
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Subscribe to The Spectator and get 12 weeks of Britain's most incisive politics coverage, |
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| 0:14.9 | As a subscriber, you'll also be able to listen to all our other podcasts, ad free, |
| 0:20.6 | including quite right, the new podcast |
| 0:22.6 | with me, Michael Gove, and our assistant editor, Madeline Grant. Go to www.combe.combe.combe |
| 0:29.6 | dot spectator.com.combe-fowch to claim this offer now. Terms apply. |
| 0:44.4 | Welcome to Quite Right. I'm Michael Gove, editor of The Spectator. |
| 0:48.6 | And I'm Madeleine Grant, assistant editor and parliamentary sketchwriter at The Spectator. |
| 0:51.5 | And this week we'll be discussing the crisis at the BBC. |
| 0:54.8 | Yet I know journalists love talking about other journalists. So Maddie and I will be looking at what the future may hold for the BBC |
| 0:59.2 | and will also be considering changes in education. |
| 1:03.4 | And the week that Ofsted introduce a new inspection regime, |
| 1:07.5 | we'll be asking whether or not this contributes to the tragic Bridget Philistination of our |
| 1:13.7 | curriculum. And finally, we'll be discussing that viral interview with actress Sidney-Sweeney. |
| 1:19.9 | And does this spell the end of woke in Hollywood? |
| 1:41.1 | The future of the BBC is the focus of interest, not just in Whitehall and Westminster, but across the country, following the resignation of the Director General Tim Davy and the head of News and County Affairs, Deborah Turner. |
| 1:45.2 | Both of them resigned at the weekend, following the criticisms that have been directed at the corporation over essentially bias. Memo drawn up by |
| 1:52.7 | an outside advisor, Michael Prescott, which had been compiled by a BBC staffer, David Grossman, |
| 1:58.6 | drew attention to a number of areas of bias which gave rise to concern, |
| 2:04.3 | the most prominent of which was the panorama which ran or aired just before the presidential election, |
| 2:11.9 | which spliced together different bits of a speech that Donald Trump gave on January the 6th, |
... |
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